ECREA 2018

A Cross-National Comparison of Twitter User Interactions with Leading Political Journalists

Christian Nuernbergk and Axel Bruns

• 3 Nov. 2018 – European Communication Conference (ECREA) 2018, Lugano

Abstract

Professional journalists are now often also required by their employers to promote their stories and engage with readers via social media, in addition to merely reporting the news. But what are the audiences and audience responses they face here, and how diverse or limited are their interactions with readers? Drawing on a cross-national, longitudinal study of the Twitter interactions of the respective national parliamentary press corps in Germany, the U.K. and Australia (representing highly divergent volumes and styles of Twitter use), this paper analyses the breadth and depth of Twitter interactions between journalists and ordinary users, and examines the interaction patterns that emerge. By drawing on quantitative social media analytics, this paper thus stretches and expands traditional methodological approaches in media and communication research. For the German case, the analysis is further augmented by a survey of non-journalist interactants (n = 159). Based on logistic regression, we show that political partisans of both sides are more likely to interact with political journalists. Furthermore, a higher degree of blog use is also positively associated with frequent interactions. Overall, especially users who are motivated to provide feedback interact more often with journalists on Twitter.