The Twitterization of News Making: Transparency and Journalistic Professionalism

• In Event: Changing the News 140 Characters At a Time: Twitter's Impact on Journalism

Abstract

Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing them, their professional identity and relationship to the audience. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between an institutional logic and an ethic, that is, between the logic of professional control (Lewis, 2012) and the ethic of transparency. Drawing from extensive field research on competing political reporters of a press corps, involving observation, interviews, digital ethnography and content analysis of tweets, this study witnesses the adoption and establishment of Twitter in the everyday life of reporters and thereby also attempts to explain why Twitter won over so many journalists.

Author

• Matthias Revers, University of Graz