Tweeting #Ferguson: Mediatized fields and the new activist journalist

Abstract

As a hybrid, journo-activist space, tweeting #Ferguson quickly emerged as a way for activists and journalists to network and spread information. Using a mixed-methods approach combining digital ethnographic content analysis with social network analysis and link analysis, this study examines journalistic and activist uses of Twitter to identify changes in field relations and practices. Employing the lenses of field theory and mediatization, this study finds parity and divergence in the themes, frames, format, and discourse of journalist and activist Twitter practices. While the traditions of objective journalism and affective activism persist, notable exceptions occurred, especially following acts of police suppression. The networked communities of professional and activist Twitter users were overlapping and interactive, suggesting hybridity at the margins of the journalistic field. Given the hybridizing of journalistic and journo-activist practices, this case study examines the role of social media in efforts to report on and bolster social change.

Saving social media data: Understanding data management practices among social media researchers and their implications for archives

“…In our analysis of research that used Twitter data, we found a similar breadth of research topics, ranging from audience interactions around television shows (Boukes & Trilling, 2017;A. Williams & Gonlin, 2017) to social justice movements under hashtags such as #Ferguson (Barnard, 2018), and many political discussions around the world (Aelst, Erkel, D'heer, & Harder, 2017;Engesser, Ernst, Esser, & Büchel, 2017;Zelenkauskaite & Niezgoda, 2017;Zhang, Wells, Wang, & Rohe, 2017). Research topics were not limited to social and behavioral phenomena.…”

Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources

“…At the same time, that variety of research furnishes nuanced perspectives that enhance understanding of the evolving media system. Hybridity is often considered to be a mere convergence between structural different actors, like journalists and activists (Barnard, 2018), or journalists and programmers (Hermida and Young, 2017), convergence PRE-PRINT VERSION OF THE PAPER Delmastro, M., Splendore, S.. Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources.…”

“…At the same time, that variety of research furnishes nuanced perspectives that enhance understanding of the evolving media system. Hybridity is often considered to be a mere convergence between structural different actors, like journalists and activists (Barnard, 2018), or journalists and programmers (Hermida and Young, 2017), convergence between reporting practices, or communication formats as among fictive and factual forms of storytelling (Baym, 2017), news and entertainment (Bailey, 2018) or news and advertising/public relations (PR; Erjavec, 2005). The notion of hybridity characterizes not only the cross-media flows of news, practices or professional roles, but also differentiations between producers and users of news (Harder et al, 2016; Papacharissi, 2015).…”

“…The hybrid media system is, therefore, a stage where diverse actors struggle for their independence, while interdependence is unavoidable. As Stephen Barnard (2018) suggests, this perspective applies to a Bourdieusian approach. Barnard reminds that field theory suggests that actors operate in separate, but related social spheres.…”

Twitter, Book, Riot: Post-Digital Publishing against Race

“…Socialmovement research on and with Twitter has tended to focus on the techno-social capacity of the hashtag, Twitter's 'inline metadata' function that aggregates and organizes the multiplicity of tweets in trend patterns and 'ambient affiliations' among users (Zappavigna, 2011). See, for example, the numerous articles on the 2014 Ferguson riots, that ensued on the police killing of Michael Brown, which are based on statistical analysis of the hashtag '#Ferguson' (Barnard, 2018). It is all the more striking, then, that the publishers of Baltimore Uprising proceeded in their Twitter search, conducted during the course of the riots, by excluding trending hashtags, instead homing in on local landmarks, malls, high-school proms, store names, and idiosyncrasies of the riots.…”