Twitter journalism in Ireland: sourcing and trust in the age of social media^*

Abstract

Twitter has been widely adopted into journalistic workflows, as it provides instant and widespread access to a plethora of content about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events. The content on Twitter, however, poses several challenges for journalists, as it arrives unfiltered, full of noise, and at an alarming velocity. Building on the results of the first national survey of social media use in Irish newsrooms, this paper investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic workflows, journalists' attitudes towards various aspects of social media, and the content and perspectives generated by these online communities. It particularly investigates how Twitter shapes the processes of sourcing and verification in newsrooms, and assesses how notions of trust factor into the adoption of the Twitter platform and content into these processes. The paper further analyses relationships between journalist profile and adopted practices and attitudes, and seeks to understand how Twitter operates in the current journalistic landscape. While this paper draws its data from a survey of journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing, and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism as a whole. ARTICLE HISTORY

How journalists verify user-generated content during terrorist crises. Analyzing Twitter communication during the Brussels attacks

“…Surveys and interview studies have documented that sourcing and verifying UGC have become an important part of the journalistic profession (e.g., Brandtzaeg, Lüders, Spangenberg, Rath-Wiggins, & Følstad, 2015;Heravi & Harrower, 2016). However, UGC is a double-edged sword for journalists: On one hand, it gives journalists the opportunity to diversify their news reporting and offer new perspectives (Matthews, 2013;Wardle & Dubberley, 2014).…”

“…This feature is crucial because verification is "a normative practice by which journalism has sought to differentiate itself from other forms of public communication" (Zeller & Hermida, 2015, p. 111). Then again, journalists more often turn to Twitter for sourcing than verifying UGC because verification is time-consuming (Heravi & Harrower, 2016).…”

“…There is a rapidly growing literature on sourcing and verification of UGC in journalism, which indicates that the practice has reached mainstream media in the offline world (e.g., Bruno, 2011;Heravi & Harrower, 2016;Silverman, 2013). Studies mainly conducted qualitative interviews (e.g., Brandtzaeg et al, 2015;Wardle & Dubberley, 2014;Zeller & Hermida, 2015) or standardized surveys with journalists (e.g., Heravi & Harrower, 2016).…”

“…Evidence for sourcing and verification on Twitter has been found in previous studies by surveying journalists (Heravi & Harrower, 2016), analyzing news organizations' general verification, and sourcing practices of user-generated content (UGC) (Bruno, 2011) or in content analysis of tweets from a few journalists during crisis situations (Hermida, Lewis, & Zamith, 2014;Vis, 2013). Still, no study so far has analyzed journalists' sourcing and verification practices on Twitter during a crisis event in a systematic way and on a global scale.…”

Introduction to Citizen Journalism and Social Media Minitrack

“…A host of research questions arise around the role of social media in newsrooms and in the news production lifecycle [1], and particularly in the area of real time event and story detection from social sources, e.g. [3].…”