Florida political reporters interact rarely online

Abstract

A content analysis of the tweets of political reporters at Florida newspapers examines the degree to which local and regional journalists interact with the public on Twitter. Twitter activity focused primarily on feedback, with journalists tweeting links, photos or hashtags as one-way communication. Findings indicate little of genuine interactivity on Twitter between journalists and citizens.

Comparing Interactivity on Twitter by Political Reporters at TV Networks, Online-Only News Websites, and Newspapers

“…The four-part model of cyber-interactivity (McMillan, 2002) that was adapted for Twitter (Otterbacher et al, 2012; Parmelee & Deeley, 2017) proved especially useful. The adapted model allows distinctions to be made between interactions that formed interconnected relationships with Twitter users and interaction that merely acknowledged users’ existence.…”

“…McMillan’s (2002) model has been adapted to measure Twitter interactivity (Otterbacher, Shapiro, & Hemphill, 2012; Parmelee & Deeley, 2017; Parmelee, Roman, Beasley, & Perkins, in press.). Figure 1 summarizes the four-part model, as it relates to interactivity between journalists and the public on Twitter.…”

“…The present study measures the different types of interactivity on Twitter through a content analysis that makes distinctions between back-and-forth exchanges and mere acknowledgments. The coding scheme is based on McMillan’s (2002) four-level model of cyber-interactivity and adapted for Twitter by Otterbacher, Shapiro, and Hemphill (2012) and Parmelee and Deeley (2017). The analysis measures how much U.S. political reporters at online-only news sites, TV networks, and national newspapers engaged in various types of interaction on Twitter with politicians, fellow journalists, and the general public.…”

Exploring Political Journalism Homophily on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of US and UK Elections in 2016 and 2017

“…The findings point to a far greater usage of the reply function in the UK and a significant degree of homophily in political journalists' reply networks in both countries. The weaker power law in both countries suggests that the political reporters replied to a far larger number of people-which is indicative of homophilybut given the overall median (1), the findings could also suggest that the majority of replies were probably the one-off comments or thank-yous noted by Parmelee and Deeley (2017).…”

“…This study, which is the first comparative analysis to specifically explore homophily within political journalists' Twitter networks during an election campaign, aims to fill the spaces in the literature on political journalists' activity noted by Broersma and Graham (2016) and Nuernbergk (2016). The analysis specifically focuses on retweets and replies as these "mutual discourse" tweets are considered the most interactive forms of engagement and are thus vital to understanding developing journalism practices on Twitter (Bruns & Burgess, 2012;Parmelee & Deeley, 2017). The over-arching research question is whether political journalists are using Twitter's potential to make a sustained effort to engage with new and diverse voices or instead using the platform to take cues from each other and generally participate in "water-cooler" conversations and migrate their legacy pack routines online (Kiernan, 2014;Molyneux & Mourão, 2019, p. 261).…”