Platforms, Journalists and Their Digital Selves

Based on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 31 Chilean journalists from national TV, radio, print, and online media, this study explores how news professionals negotiate their identities and media use on Twitter and Instagram. The results suggest that, overall, they use Twitter and Instagram to stay informed, report the news, engage in branding activities, and interact with their audiences, expanding the scope of their work to include new professional roles and allow for the emergence of different but not mutually exclusive digital selves. Important nuances are found based on the platform used and the journalists' perceptions of which practices are valid and relevant. Specifically, three analytical approaches to digital selves were identified. While we found strong patterns of a reinterpretation of journalistic practices through the normalization of some traditional functions, which are represented by the "adapted" approach, we also found clear elements of redefinition of journalistic work represented by the "redefiner" approach. The journalists who embrace this orientation disrupt traditional norms, merging their different selves on both platforms and using their accounts to target specific audiences. We also identified an approach close to individuals who resist the idea of mixing their professional work with social media practices, remaining "skeptical" to changes.

Palabra Clave, 2021

Based on the content analysis of 1,400 Twitter and Instagram accounts, this study identified the social media profiles of 792 Chilean journalists from national media outlets to describe their visibility and activity levels and how they construct their identities. Our results show that although Chilean journalists have a solid digital presence, they use social media platforms differently, displaying various identity creation strategies and new journalistic roles. Our findings also address the media outlets' influence on Chilean journalists' profiles, level of use, and the identities emerging from their social media accounts.

In traditional news media, professional journalists are expected to follow the norms and practices created and perpetuated in the field to maintain autonomy and authority. Social media spaces lay outside these institutional boundaries, serving as public, semipublic, and private spaces for connection, interaction, publication, and amplification, as well as the commodification of the personal for users, including news professionals. This has given rise to tensions in journalism over the boundaries between the personal and the professional, and the public and the private, visa -vis the erosion of separation between editorial and commercial functions in journalism. This article proposes an analytical model to theorize journalistic identities in social media and how they interact with internal and external forces in digital spaces. Specifically, we address the identity (de)construction of journalists along a spectrum from professional to personal as it intersects with elements that impact identity, from publisher to product. This study expands the scope of journalism research to analyse the blurring of editorial and commercial decisions at the individual level, accounting for a break in the established relationship between publisher and product that has formed the basis of the news business for more than a century.

Journalism Practice, 2017

As journalists continue integrating social media into their professional work, they wrestle with ways to best represent themselves, their organizations, and their profession. Several recent studies have examined this trend in terms of branding, raising important questions about the changing ways in which journalists present themselves and how these changes may indicate shifts in their personal and professional identities. This study combines a visual content analysis of the images journalists use in their Twitter profiles with analyses of their profile text and tweets to examine how journalists present themselves online with an eye toward individual and organizational branding. Findings indicate journalists choose a branding approach and apply it consistently across their profiles, with most profiles consisting of a professional headshot while notably lacking organizational identifiers such as logos. Journalists also tend to lean toward professional rather than personal images in their profile and header photographs, indicating a possible predilection for professional identity over personal on social media.

This study takes an empirical approach to analyze how journalists perform the roles of promoter, celebrity, and joker on social media. These roles already play out in print and broadcast, but much less is known about how they are performed outside of traditional media contexts. This study addresses this gap in the literature through a content analysis of 4,100 posts by 23 Chilean journalists in 2020 on Twitter and Instagram. The analysis draws on key variables derived from the literature, including frontstage and backstage performance, personal context, platform, follower count, gender, and type of parent media organization. Results suggest that Twitter tends to serve as a space for professional performance bounded by established norms and practices, while Instagram tends to offer a space for a more fluid performance beyond the institutional boundaries of the news media. Findings indicate that professional social media contexts are more suited spaces to perform the promoter role, while personal or backstage contexts are more suited for the celebrity and joker roles. Results indicate how journalists take on specific roles on Twitter and Instagram, considering the affordances of these platforms.

This article aims to identify the hybridization that journalists have created to reconcile the pressures arising from the affirmation of the culture of participation and sharing of social media with the traditional norms and practices that are the basis of the journalistic identity. This study analyses the behavior of 1202 Italian journalists on Twitter between 1 January and 29 February 2016, focusing on the interpretation of the transparency norm, the gatekeeping function, and audience engagement. These are norms and practices that are both old and new and that allow us to understand the adaptations journalists make in order to respond to the technological transformations that have affected existing models of journalism and the degree of professionalization of journalists themselves. Through the analysis of the 23,515 tweets published by journalists of different media outlets (newspapers, wire services, TV news, and only-online media), this study has allowed to empirically test the existence of a general adoption of Twitter by Italian journalists, characterized by a 'hybrid normalization', that is, a combination of old practices with new modalities with the dual aim of sharing the culture of social media and legitimizing the professional position of journalism.

Previous research has largely explored the differences and similarities between print and digital media in terms of news cycles and specific content characteristics. However, fewer studies have addressed the extent to which the media platform accounts for differences in the performance of key journalistic roles. Based on a content analysis of 1519 stories from Chilean print and online news outlets, this study found that, while media affordances did have an influence on the way journalists performed their work, thematic beat and media audience orientation were more crucial to explaining differences in the presence of different roles across print and digital media. The findings support a position that is midway between the generalist and particularistic approaches regarding

Popular Communication, 2018

An increasing body of media research suggests journalists are struggling to balance their personal and professional identities. This is particularly evident in social media spaces, where regulations from news organizations remain murky and audience expectations for engagement continue to grow. These studies, which relied heavily on content analyses and large-scale surveys, have demonstrated fundamental shifts in the norms journalists use to guide their practice, while also suggesting that journalists may be searching for ways to periodically disengage from social media. Drawing on interviews with 39 American and Australian journalists, this study explores drivers of what we consider to be a rising identity dilemma among journalists and why social media disengagement is considered a possible solution. The findings suggest journalists are grappling with issues of personal and professional identity construction across social media platforms with organizational pressures to present a more professional appearance without room for periodic disengagement from social media.

More than a decade of research in journalism studies on social media has examined how journalists and news organizations have adopted and/or adapted to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more, surfacing tensions over professional control and normalization. This article advances a conceptual framework for analyzing forms of journalistic norms and practices on social media that takes as its starting point the nature of its platforms, specifically Twitter and Instagram, proposing five analytical dimensions to investigate journalism on social media. They are: 1) structure and design; 2) aesthetics; 3) genre conventions; 4) rhetorical practices; and 5) interaction mechanisms and intentionality. The accounts of five Chilean journalists are used to illustrate how these five dimensions work in the two platforms.

Popular Communication, 2018