Holden Walter-Warner
The Changing Face of Journalism: How Twitter is Changing the Ways Reporters Craft and Source Articles”
Twitter has had a noticeable impact on the way news is distributed and messages are communicated to others. Less noticeable, perhaps, is Twitter's impact on the way journalists write articles and utilize sources within these stories. In this paper, articles from a major United States newspaper and online news organization are analyzed to uncover how journalists are negotiating the use of Twitter in their stories. Factors looked into include the total amount of articles with Tweets are included over the course of a week, the manner in which these Tweets are placed in the articles, and whether these Tweets are coming from established elite sources, or non-elite, public sources. Reporters and their news organizations have not yet fully embraced the usage of Twitter within their stories, as evidenced by low total usage numbers and traditional quote embedding strategies. When they do, however, elite sources continue their historic dominance of the news pages. This disputes widely-held beliefs about the democratizing power of Twitter and social media.
