Abstract

This study examines the growing journalistic practice of embedding full tweets in online political news coverage. Against the background of a hybrid media system, we pursue three research goals. First, we evaluate the scope of the Twitter-in-the-news phenomenon relative to news coverage as a whole. Second, we examine the functions of embedded tweets. Third, we identify characteristics that increase the likelihood that tweets will be selected for publication in a news article. We combine computational methods with a manual content analysis and analyze political news coverage of one month outside election periods in four German online news outlets. Our results show that embedding tweets in the news is not a niche phenomenon but has been established as a routine journalistic practice to a moderate extent. In the majority of news articles, the function of tweets is to illustrate an argument or information provided in the text. Geographical proximity and – with some dependencies – the number of popularity cues increased the likelihood of a tweet to be picked up for reporting. The paper shows how transformation processes currently observed in journalism manifest themselves in reporting.

摘要

本研究考察了在在线政治新闻报道中嵌入完整推文的日益增长的新闻实践。在混合媒体系统的背景下，我们追求三个研究目标。首先，我们评估了 Twitter 出现在新闻中的现象相对于整个新闻报道的范围。其次，我们检查嵌入式推文的功能。第三，我们确定了增加推文被选为在新闻文章中发布的可能性的特征。我们将计算方法与手动内容分析相结合，并分析了四个德国在线新闻媒体在选举期以外一个月的政治新闻报道。我们的结果表明，在新闻中嵌入推文并不是一种小众现象，而是在一定程度上已成为一种常规的新闻实践。在大多数新闻文章中，推文的功能是说明文本中提供的论点或信息。地理上的接近度和——在某些依赖性的情况下——流行线索的数量增加了一条推文被挑选出来进行报道的可能性。该论文展示了目前在新闻业观察到的转型过程如何在报道中体现出来。