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The powers that tweet: social
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Citation: HLADIK, R. and STETKA, V., 2015. The powers that tweet: social
media as news sources in the Czech Republic. Journalism Studies, 18(2), pp.
154-174.
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• This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor
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DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2015.1046995
THE POWERS THAT TWEET
Social media as news sources in the Czech Republic
Abstract: This article examines the impact of social media on Czech news media content.
The study relies on a content analysis of a six-month sample of news articles collected in
2013 and focuses on social networking sites (SNSs), namely Facebook and Twitter, in their
capacity as acknowledged sources in the agenda of traditional news media in the Czech
Republic. The results include information on the differences between tabloid and quality
press, the topics and actors that are likely to be associated with social media in their capacity
as sources, the links between social media sources and the geographical focus of the news,
and the type of social media content that the news media are inclined to use. The main
features of the utilization of SNSs as news sources in the Czech Republic can be
characterized by low intensity, a preference for domestic affairs, and a bias toward
tabloidization. In several examined categories, we found evidence of consistently disparate
uses of Facebook and Twitter that caution against generalizations about the role of social
media in journalism and signal the requirement for a more nuanced approach to individual
platforms. The article concludes that Czech news media do not fully exploit the democratic
potential of SNSs and favor elite sources.
Keywords: social media; social networks; Facebook; Twitter; news sources; journalism;
Czech Republic
Introduction
In February 2013, the US president, Barack Obama, took a golfing trip to
Florida. Although it concerned one of the most powerful persons on the
planet, this event would hardly constitute a news highlight. Still, the trip
caused quite a commotion across newsrooms covering the White House.
When the press was denied a traditional 18th
-hole briefing and a photo
opportunity with the president, it became the proverbial straw that broke the
back of journalists’ patience. The White House Correspondents Association
issued a statement criticizing the lack of access to the President. The
President, on the other hand, claimed to run the most transparent
administration to date. As two political journalists noted, at the heart of the
conflict was the phenomenon of social media:
The mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping
coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones
(social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity
Radim Hladík
radim.hladik@fulbrightmail.org
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University in Prague
Václav Štětka
stetka@fsv.cuni.cz
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University in Prague
strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
(Vandehei and Allen 2013)
The seemingly negligible incident between the US president and the
White House press corps illustrates an increasingly tangible tendency for
social media to challenge the long-established connection between the press
and society’s political and cultural elites, in which the journalists used to play
the role of mediators in the communication process between the elites – the
main sources of news – and the citizens. In classical scholarly works,
journalists were presumed to hold onto the shorter end of the stick in their
relationship with sources (Gans 1979), but as gatekeepers (Shoemaker and
Vos 2009) they still had an important commodity – media access – to offer.
Nowadays, proliferation of social networking sites (SNSs) allows to circumvent
other media. SNSs are becoming an ever more popular channel for direct
communication that politicians, as well as other elite members of society, are
exploiting to effectively circulate their messages, build fan bases, organize
supporters or mobilize voters. (DiGrazia et al. 2013; Williams and Gulati 2013)
They can achieve all of this without a need to seek the attention of
newsmakers and negotiate publicity for their actions. The hitherto existing
mass media, while clearly losing exclusivity of news dissemination, are
apparently eager to treat unilateral statements distributed via SNSs as a news
sources in their own right. Facing the budget cuts, which are currently
squeezing out resources for news production, and coping with the usually
circumscribed access to the elites (particularly politicians and celebrities),
many journalists willingly circulate further the easily available, ready-made
content provided on the social media. From another perspective, the same
principle of high accessibility and the increasing ubiquity of social media
potentially leads to broadening of the spectrum of actors who can participate
on information dissemination and enter the news-making process as sources
(Broersma and Graham 2013; Paulussen and Harder 2014; Leuven et al.
2015).
Although one can often hear of social media making the news –
typically, this is highlighted in instances that are either scandalous or turn out
to be unsubstantiated – scholarly reflections grounded in empirical analyses
of this emerging news source are scarce. Besides the lack in the overall
quantity, the few existing studies have a fairly restricted geographical scope.
The majority of authors limit their studies to a few Western European
countries and the U.S. (Broesma and Graham 2012, 2013; Leuven et al.
2015; Ekman and Widholm 2015; Paulussen and Harder 2014). In this article,
we attempt to contribute to the scope of existing scholarship by scrutinizing
data on the usage of social media as news sources in the Czech Republic.
This Central European country, unlike most its Western counterparts, has far
less established tradition of professional and independent journalism.
Therefore, the introduction of social media into news production can present
specific problems distinct from those encountered in more mature media
systems. We chose to investigate, by means of quantitative content analysis,
to what extent and in what capacity are the three most widespread social
network sites in the Czech Republic, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,
employed as news sources in the major print and electronic media in the
country. Besides adding a new country case study to the existing research,
we also expand the scope of previous enquiries. We take a closer look at the
so far neglected aspects of the role of SNSs as news sources, namely the
discrepancies between different social media and variations in providing
traditional news media with either textual or (audio)visual content.
Social media: a routine or an exceptional source?
A substantial number of studies has been published that deal with the
changes in journalism in the wake of introduction of the new media
technologies in general, especially the blog form (Johnson and Kaye 1998 ;
Sundar and Nass 2006 ; Gil De Zúñiga, Puig-I-Abril and Hernando Rojas
2009; Phillips 2010a; Meraz 2011). One should not, however, confound this
antedated concern with the more recent, narrower and so far rather neglected
problem of social networking sites. The usage of social media in the role of
news sources for traditional media can be conceptualized as one of the
indicators of “hybrid news system” (Chadwick 2011, 8), which can be
characterized precisely by the circulation of sources between traditional and
new media (see also Chadwick 2013). When social media are at their best, it
is in cases that exemplify the notion of “ambient journalism” (Hermida 2010).
Social media themselves become a specific environment for production and
dissemination of information, which gains importance especially in exceptional
circumstances, such as social upheavals (Vis 2013) or natural disasters
(Bruns 2014). However, the agenda-setting influence of social media on
traditional media does not appear to be a fait accompli. Often, the
directionality of the main flow of agenda is, in fact, reversed. Groshek and
Clough Groshek maintain “that there are still fairly clear intermedia agendasetting
effects of traditional media on social networking sites, but that
influence is not uniform across topics or the social media channels.” (Groshek
and Clough Groshek 2013, 21; see also Sayre et al. 2010) Even during
occurrences in which the role of social media was deemed to be of immense
importance, as were the events of the so-called Arab Spring, a closer look
showed that routine sources prevailed in reporting (Knight 2012, 68; Bashri et
al. 2012)
The potential of new media to set the agenda thus appears to be
circumscribed by the conservative forces in journalism, be it workplace
routines or the values of editors, i.e. the aspects of journalism as a profession.
A survey on use of social media as sources among business journalists
indicated that the actual practice of information gathering in social media lags
behind their declared acceptability as a possible source in business
journalism. (Lariscy et al. 2009, 316) Discrepancies also occur inside the
same newsrooms with regards to the acceptance of social networks by
individual journalists (Hedman and Djerf-Pierre 2013) that often ran across
generation lines. Even if journalists adopt social media platforms in their daily
work, they may remain less willing to accept their credibility when it comes to
newsgathering. (Lysak et al. 2012) The lack of a unified policy towards the
use social media as sources may contribute to the ambiguous impressions
derived from empirical studies.
While the aforementioned studies deal with more general observations
on the changes in intermedia agenda-setting and journalistic routines in the
wake of rise of the social media, our focus in this study will be narrowed down
to the specific question of social media as sources in the content of news. In
the context of an election campaign, SNSs can become a new kind of “beat”,
as Broersma and Graham argued in their analysis of Twitter as a source in
British and Dutch election campaigns. According to them, “tweets do trigger
news stories and are being used to add flavor to background stories or
analyses of the campaign” (Broersma and Graham 2012, 417). Social media
empower politicians in their agenda building competence, inasmuch as the
absolute majority (over 90 % in both media systems) of their tweets are
quoted in full (Broersma and Graham 2012). When considering specifically
political sources, social media profiles seem to provide a powerful
communication tool (which can, occasionally, backfire through scandalous
posts), but they also buttress the trend to personalize the political (Ekman and
Widholm 2015). These observations concerning the influence on journalism
exerted by political sources via social media have not been confirmed
universally. When the communicative situation remains locally confined, then,
according to Skogerbø and Krumsvik (2015: 363), “for local politicians social
media are less important as tools for setting the agenda in the local media.”
In an enlarged study of the use of Twitter as a news source, which was
not limited to the campaign coverage, Broersma and Graham offer further
insights into the routine utilization of social media as sources in print media.
Their use has been increasing over time, but its intensity and categorization
has diverging ranges. For example, popular press favors social media as
sources when reporting soft news (74 %), whereas quality papers tend to
balance the categorization (43 % soft news compared to 39 % hard news).
(Broersma and Graham 2013, 454–455) There are also considerable
differences in national journalistic cultures when it comes to sourcing social
media: over 20 % of tweets used as a source in Dutch papers belong to
politicians, in contrast to mere 6 % in British journals. On the other hand, 36 %
of tweets in British press were attributed to celebrities, compared to 12 % in
Dutch papers (Broersma and Graham, 2012: 458). In other uses for social
media, however, national media systems manifested similar patterns, e.g. in
their preference to use Twitter as a source only to illustrate a story (69 % in
British, 64 % in Dutch papers), rather than as a trigger of news (Broersma and
Graham 2012, 456).
Paulussen and Harder (2014) used similar research design to examine
a smaller sample of two Flemish quality papers and included Facebook and
YouTube in addition to Twitter. Their results converge with some of the trends
identified by Broersma and Graham, namely the predominance of social
media references in soft news (55 %). Paulussen and Harder conclude that
social media erode the journalists’ preference for governmental or political
sources and provide more space for other actors, such as ordinary citizens,
celebrities and athletes, but they concede that with the average of five articles
per day, social media are far from becoming a major news source. Leuven et
al. (2015) also argue that “optimism needs to be toned down”, although they
identify a trend of expanding diversity in sourcing practices thanks to social
media sources. Their study of foreign news coverage of the Arab Spring
showed that the role of social media was heightened in the case of Syria,
which the authors interpret as a further indicator of journalists’ reliance on
social media only in those instances when access to official sources becomes
obstructed.
There is a growing and shared understanding that sources, by means
of SNSs, are afforded better control over news content. This does not,
however, automatically translate into more democratic news. While some
studies allude to increasing diversity of news sources, others argue that this is
conditional and contextually bound occurrence. Overall, results of the
aforementioned empirical studies, be they focused on journalists’ attitudes,
newsroom practices or sourcing of news, indicate that news journalism as a
profession is not subject to a monolithic process of penetration by the uses of
social media.
Czech Republic as a context for research on social media and
journalism
Different stances towards social media reported in newsroom
ethnographies as well as variations in national data in quantitative research
(cf. Tiffen et al. 2014) show that the (potentially) transformative effects of
social media on professional routines are distributed unevenly across
newsrooms, news organizations and national journalistic cultures. Such
results make a compelling case for further research into the penetration of
social media as news sources in traditional media, with particular attention
paid to possible variations in topical, national and technological contexts.
Although Central and Eastern European countries have abandoned
state-socialist regimes more than two decades ago, their tradition of
professional journalism still cannot compare to that of Western democracies.1
We cannot discard the ongoing globalization of news production,
spearheaded by transnational press corporations and news agencies (BoydBarrett
2000), that tends to level out local differences and import business
models for journalism. Nevertheless, the implementation of new media
technologies and, as of late, social network services into journalism takes
place in a political and cultural milieu that still does not align perfectly with the
experience of Western journalists. For example, in Russia, Bodrunova and
Litvinenko argue, that in Russia the hybridization of media system happens
under the condition of “low parallelism between traditional and online media”,
meaning that many traditional media do not have a (significant) online outlet
and vice versa. They see this “as typical for transitional democracies where
traditional media don’t enjoy high credibility, or also for democracies where
there exist a wide range of actors that don’t have access to traditional media”
(Bodrunova and Litvinenko 2013: 42).
Properly comparative studies that would take the differences between
these geopolitical regions into account are almost non-existent, with the
notable exception of the “Journalism in Change” research project, which has,
in 2012, administered a cross-national survey in three countries: Sweden,
Russia and Poland. (Anikina,Dobek-Ostrowska, and Nygren 2013) As was
expected by the researchers, the journalistic cultures of the three nations
exhibited many differences. With regards to the use of social media, they
found out that it was actually in Russia where journalists are employing them
the most extensively. In the review of their data, the researchers conclude:
It seems like the Russian journalists use social media as a way to
compensate for high political (and commercial) pressure in their daily
work. This gives them a new space for expression and for journalistic
work outside the old frames. In Sweden and Poland, social media are
more incorporated in the regular work in the newsroom and have not
changed the processes in a radical way. (Nygren, Dobek-Ostrowska,
and Anikina 2013)
The specific context for the uses of social media in Czech journalism is
partially framed by the overall situation of Internet technologies in the country.
In 2014, the Internet penetration with 78 % of households online put the
Czech Republic, a country of 10.5 million, slightly below the EU28 average of
81 %. These figures demonstrate gradual catching-up on the part of the
Czech Republic, which has reduced the gap from 9 % in 2006 to mere 3 %
nowadays (Czech Statistical Office 2015: 25). Although in terms of the general
Internet infrastructure the Czech Republic has been, until very recently,
perceived as an underperformer, social media have quickly become a popular
online service. In 2013, a representative survey on Czech adult population
(Štětka and Mazák 2014) reported an increase in the number of Internet users
(68.6 % of adults), more than half of which (65.8 %) claim to use social
networking sites. Facebook leads the statistics with 65.8 % of Internet users,
followed by YouTube (44.8 %) and Twitter (19.7 %).2
Social media can thus
be said to be a common, widespread phenomenon in the contemporary
Czech Republic, which also means that the consumers of news can be
expected to be well acquainted with them, either through first- or second-hand
experience.
Although there are no official data on the SNS adoption by the Czech
journalists, we can get a reasonable estimate based on a commercial survey
conducted among Czech media professionals in 2012 (Mediář 2012), in which
72 % of the respondents declared having a Facebook account. Other services
were less represented, with 23 % for LinkedIn and 14 % for Twitter accounts.
When asked about the use of social media for their work, the inquired
journalists were more reluctant to admit to it: only 4 % would use social media
as a primary source, but in other work-related tasks, 46 % claimed to make
use of Facebook and 12 % of Twitter.
Although no qualitative studies on journalists and SNSs in the Czech
Republic are available to date, we get a sense of their attitudes from a
discussion with 11 prominent Czech journalists organized by a weekly
magazine Respekt (Respekt 2014). The majority of the discussants agreed
that their privacy on social networks is limited and that they tend to be careful
with their statements. For example, one journalist expressed an ambiguity
surrounding the blurred line between public and private life on social networks
and made an explicit distinction between different services:
I’m not clear about the whole thing. I set up a Facebook account as an
electronic list of my friends and acquaintances. […] I don’t update my
status on the “wall” frequently, but when I do, my updates are sundered
– sometimes they are addressed to my friends, sometimes they are of
a more journalistic nature. It is time to go onto Twitter, which I see more
clearly as a journalistic tool.
The journalist’s statement encapsulates the ambiguity that many news
producers share concerning social media: they do not immediately perceive
them as integral part of their professional communication, but they are, at the
same time, well aware of their influence on the trade. This ambiguity seems to
increase along with the prestige of individual journalists (Lasorsa et al. 2012)
and may translate into the way in which journalists approach social media as
news sources. The quote also illustrates different stances a journalist can take
towards specific social media platforms. This aspect has been a blind spot for
many scholars who either lump different social media together or use one
specimen to make claims about the entire kind.
Methodology and data
In our research, we attempted to investigate the ways in which social
media are implemented as sources in the actual news content in the Czech
Republic. Because similar research is generally lacking, especially in Central
and Eastern Europe, our study has inevitably only exploratory character. The
research was designed so as to allow for full-text search of key terms
(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)3
in the database archiving the content of all
national news media. In designing the sample, we purposefully avoided
election campaign period, which, as the literature suggests, may temporarily
skew the results in favor of social media. Such approach, in our opinion,
should provide a more balanced and accurate picture of the importance of
social media in contemporary journalism in the Czech Republic. The time
frame for the sample selection was thus constituted through systematic
random sampling and included every 2nd
week from April to September 2013
(in this way, the sample skipped any election period, while the randomization
allowed to account for any other exceptional circumstances).
We strived to include most of the nationally distributed news outlets
and achieve a good cross-section of the Czech mediascape. Altogether, ten
media outlets were selected. To cover the press, we chose the best-selling
tabloid (Blesk); two dailies on the right and left end of the political spectrum
(MF Dnes and Právo, respectively) and a financial daily considered to
represent quality press (Hospodářské noviny). The TV stations represented
comprised of one public service television (Česká televize) and two widely
popular commercial stations (TV Nova and TV Prima): Finally, to stand for
radio market, we included one public service radio (Český rozhlas) and two
commercial radio broadcasters (Radio Impuls and Frekvence 1). In case of
the print media, the unit of analysis was defined as a news article. For the
electronic media, the unit was a news report. Op-ed pieces were not included
in the sample. For the purposes of coding, we excluded news that mentioned
any of the social media only in a way that was deemed not significant in the
context of the actual news story, e.g. as a mere link that invited the public to
share online their opinion about a cause. Also, only general news were
considered, while those appearing in specific thematic sections, such as
“Technology”, were excluded.
The final sample, after cleaning, was composed of 461 news articles or
transcribed broadcasting reports in which the SNSs were identified as news
sources. We distinguished between sources that were essential to the news
and those where SNSs were used as mere illustrations or additional
commentary by coding the variable “importance of SNS source”
(primary/secondary). Whereas the hitherto research tends to focus on printed
media and text, we wanted to account for the multimedia dimension of social
networking sites by the including the category “format of information”
(textual/visual). Some of the coded categories are standard, such as “news
geography” (domestic/foreign) or “news topic” (politics, economy, sport etc.).
We accounted for the “actor of SNS quote” (politician, celebrity, vox populi
etc.) and included the variable “manner of sourcing” (full quote/paraphrase),
which previous literature uses as an indicator of the source’s power over news
content. Two trained coders accomplished the coding at satisfactory level
(Cohen’s Kappa >0.761) of the reliability test for each category. We analyzed
the data by means of quantitative content analysis in order to tackle the
following research questions:
• What is the importance of different SNSs as sources in
mainstream Czech news content? (RQ1)
• Do the Czech news media use SNSs primarily as a source of
textual or visual content? (RQ2)
• How do news agencies influence the salience of SNS sources in
mainstream Czech news content? (RQ3)
• How do the uses of SNSs as news sources vary with respect to
the type of media (RQ4a), geographical focus of the news
(RQ4b) and thematic orientation of the news (RQ4c)?
• What actors are used as sources via their SNS profile (RQ5a)
and to what extent do they retain control over news content
through full quotes instead of paraphrases (RQ5b)?
Results and discussion
The frequency distribution of articles using any of the three social
network sites as news sources across the ten news media outlets in the
sample (Figure 1) indicates that social media only scarcely become news
sources in the Czech news. This can be illustrated with the example of the
two nationally (i.e. without regional variations) circulated newspapers, Blesk
and Hospodářské noviny, for which it was technically possible to count the
total volume of news articles. It amounted to 4675 and 4269 items
respectively for the entire period under investigation (13 weeks). This
translates into 59 (Blesk) and 55 (Hospodářské noviny) average daily number
of news articles. That means, however, that the daily average for articles that
use SNSs in the capacity of news sources only amounts to 2.32 for Blesk and
to mere 0.23 for Hospodářské noviny. In other media outlets, especially in
electronic media, such news are even more marginal compared to the entire
output.4
Figure 1: Number of news items using SNSs as news sources across the Czech
mainstream news media
N=461
With the total of 181 articles (39.3 % of the sample), the tabloid Blesk
uses SNSs as news sources most intensely of all the Czech news outlets,
followed by the broadsheets MF Dnes (115 articles, 24.9 %) and Právo (97
articles, 21 %). Other news media refer to social media as sources only very
rarely. Over the entire analyzed period, the financial daily Hospodářské noviny
printed only 18 articles in which the social media served as a news source, in
other words, only about one article per week. Česká televize and TV Nova
produced similarly low numbers. If SNSs become a news source, the public
service TV and the quality press generally prefer Twitter, while the tabloid and
popular press favor Facebook as a source (62 % and 70 % of articles sourced
by SNSs in Blesk and MF Dnes, respectively, used Facebook).
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
When the perspective shifts from individual outlets to differences
between particular SNSs (Cramer’s V=0.241, N=447, p<0.001),5
we can see
(Table 2) that Facebook was by far the most cited SNS. This can be
presumably related to its principal position among Czech Internet users, as
explained above. Twitter became a news source in a third of the cases, but
given its general lower representation in our population, it can actually be said
to be more likely than Facebook to become a news source. YouTube, on the
other hand, is almost absent as a news source.
Tab. 1 Individual SNS platforms as sources in different news outlets
News outlet
Total
Press TV stations Radio stations
SNS
Blesk
MFDnes
Hospodářské
noviny
Právo
Českátelevize
TVNova
Prima
Českýrozhlas
Impuls
Frekvence1
Facebook 111 78 5 48 5 8 3 6 1 0 265
63.4
%
69.6% 31.3% 51.1% 27.8% 47.1%
100.0
%
75.0% 33.3% 0.0% 59.3%
Twitter 43 31 11 44 10 8 0 2 2 1 152
24.6
%
27.7% 68.8% 46.8% 55.6% 47.1% 0.0% 25.0% 66.7%
100.0
%
34.0%
YouTube 21 3 0 2 3 1 0 0 0 0 30
12.0
%
2.7% 0.0% 2.1% 16.7% 5.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 6.7%
Total 175 112 16 94 18 17 3 8 3 1 447
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
100.0
%
A difference between the two major social media networks, Facebook
and Twitter, appears recurrently in the data. In the analysis, we distinguished
triggers of news (the type of source without which the news could not exist)6
from secondary sources (the source illustrates or supports news triggered by
another source). When SNSs become a news source, the relatively less
represented Twitter matches Facebook in absolute numbers as a trigger of
news. Twitter is therefore more likely to become a primary source (28 % of all
articles that use Twitter as a source) in comparison to Facebook (16.7 %).7
Overall, the most common usage of social media as news sources relegates
to the position of secondary sources – 80 % of all items that include SNSs as
sources.
Social media offer space for sharing information in various formats,
which is one feature of interest with regards to the usage of SNSs in the news
that has, so far, been overseen in the literature. Therefore, our analysis paid
attention to what type of social media content is more likely to get sourced by
news media: textual, visual or both. We found a strong relationship between
the format of the information and how likely it is to get picked up by different
news media as a news source (Cramer’s V=0.437, N=446, p<0.001; radio
stations were excluded from this subsample). Overall, text published via SNSs
is the most common format of information that news media use as a source
(63 %), followed by pictures (29 %) and combination of the two (8 %).
However, the tabloid Blesk differs greatly in its preferences for information
formats available on SNSs from other newspapers and television stations. In
60 % of instances, Blesk actually used visual SNS content as a source and
conveyed purely textual information only in 29 % of cases. All other media, in
contrast, showed strong preference for textual sources via SNSs, ranging
from 82 and 83 % (TV Nova and Czech Television, respectively), up to 100 %
(the quality daily Hospodářské noviny) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Social media as sources of textual or visual information in print
media
N=381
Following a previous study on reporting foreign news (Leuven et al.
2015), our analysis emphasized the geographic affiliation of the news by
discriminating between domestic and foreign news categories. Initially, we
investigated whether the common practice of utilizing press agency services
could influence the presence of references to SNSs as sources in the Czech
news on the assumption that editorial offices are more dependent on news
agencies when reporting foreign events, but we found no significant
relationship in this regard (p=0.149 Although SNSs mentions in domestic
coverage make up nearly two-thirds of the sample (64 %), the references are
almost evenly distributed between editorial and press agency texts in both
geographical categories: 83 % of domestic news and 78 % of foreign news
with SNSs sources claim editorial authorship. We considered it important to
explore this relationship, because Czech news media in general lack wide
networks of foreign correspondents. Significant reliance on press agencies for
foreign news could indicate that SNS sources are imported into Czech news
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
MFD Právo Blesk HN
Textual source
Visual source
content via international news agencies, rather than reflect sourcing
preferences of Czech journalists.
The geographic category made a difference (Cramer’s V=0.200,
p=0.005) when specific news topics were considered, particularly in the case
of politics. Although SNS sources in foreign context comprise only one-third
(36 %) of the news, in political issues they are almost on par with domestic
news (46 % foreign and 54 % domestic news). This suggests that SNSs are
relatively more important source for foreign hard news. A similar change in
proportions can be observed when the sources are attributed to particular
actors (Cramer’s V=0.222, N=306, p=0.005). While this subsample has 3:2
ratio of domestic to foreign news, some elite actors, namely foreign politicians
and celebrities, are slightly more likely to be sourced via SNSs (46 % and 44
% respectively), whereas the “vox populi” on SNSs is predominantly relegated
to domestic coverage (74 %).
The differences between individual news outlets alongside the qualitytabloid
spectrum can be detected through the way they use SNS as sources
(Cramer’s V=0.261, N=454, p<0.001). The quality media (Hospodářské noviny
and Czech Television) were more likely to use SNSs as sources in foreign
news (67 % and 56 %, respectively). In the middle of the spectrum, the
popular daily Právo was more even (48.5 % domestic, 51.5 % foreign news)
in the distribution of SNS-based news according to geography, whereas MF
Dnes leaned heavily towards domestic coverage (73 %). In the tabloid Blesk
the domestic news were clearly prevalent in (72.4 %). Due to Blesk and MF
Dnes’ predominance in the sample, domestic news were generally prevalent.
In other words, the more frequently a specific news outlet admitted SNSs as
sources, the more the agenda of such news items shifted to domestic issues.
Turning to the perspective of differences between SNSs, we found a
strong positive association (N=447, Cramer’s V=0.467, p < 0.001) between
the usage of a particular SNS as a source and the geographical focus of the
news (see Figure 3), where the number of foreign news articles using Twitter
as a news source is more than two times higher (64.5 %) in comparison to the
usage of Facebook (28.7 %). In domestic coverage, the relationship of the two
networks is reverse, with Facebook accounting for 75.9 % and Twitter for only
18.6 %. YouTube remains very much overlooked in news independently of
their geographical scope (8.9 % in foreign versus 5.5 % in domestic news).
This geographical imbalance could be partially explained by the different
degrees of penetration of the two major SNSs in the Czech general
population, but the reliance on Twitter in foreign news coverage suggests that
Czech journalists are well acquainted with its function of a news source.
Figure 3: Different social media as news sources according to geographical
focus of the news
N=447
If these findings are interpreted in light of our other results, they
suggest a possible existence of two competing trends: on the one hand, when
it concerns domestic affairs, the usage of SNSs as sources is associated with
tabloid and popular press; on the other hand, in foreign coverage, it is the
quality and public press that turns to SNSs for sourcing its news. These
trends are further reflected in the distribution of hard and soft news between
the two geographic categories (Cramer’s V=0.116, N=461, p=0.044). Soft
news drawing from SNSs sources are predominantly of domestic provenience
(68 %), whereas for hard news the geographic bias is less prominent, with 58
% of them focusing on domestic and 42 % on foreign affairs.
The topics that can be classified as “soft news” (67 %) are prevalent in
news based on SNS sources, whereas “hard news” account for only 19 % (14
% could be not be assigned to either category).8
As it is apparent from the
Figure 4, sport is the most frequent (34.5 %) topic of news that reference
SNSs, followed by crime (18.2 %), politics (15.2 %) and celebrities (12.8 %).
Because higher proportion of soft news is symptomatic for tabloid press, we
interpret these results as indication that the usage of SNSs as sources tends
to facilitate tabloidization of news. While we are aware that the nature of our
data does not allow us to determine the direction of causality, we find it
plausible that SNS sources can be construed as catalysts of the process, due
to provision of ready-made content and easy accessibility to journalists. The
previously discussed mining of SNSs for visual content also points in this
direction (Cramer’s V=0.236, p<0.001): although both hard news (96 %) and
soft news (56 %) are primarily based on textual information, if a visual type of
content becomes a source, it is used predominantly to illustrate soft news (86
%).
0
50
100
150
200
250
Domestic news Foreign news
Facebook
Twitter
Figure 4: SNSs as source according to news topics
N=461
The financial daily Hospodářské noviny and the public service radio
station Český rozhlas are the only news outlets that prefer to use SNS
sources more for hard news than soft news (N=391, Cramer’s V =0.476, p<
.001). All the other news outlets use social media to provide comparatively
more soft news than hard news, albeit the actual ratio varies among individual
media organization (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: SNSs as sources in “hard” vs “soft” news
N=391
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
Blesk MFD HN Právo TV
Nova
ČT1 ČRo
Hard news
Soft news
The final analytical insights concern the likelihood of certain type of
actors to become news sources via SNSs (see Table 2). The most frequently
quoted actors are elites, particularly athletes (34 %), although “vox populi” (24
%) still surpassed other types of elites, particularly celebrities (15.5 %) and
politicians (15.2 %). Table 2 also shows that social media do not significantly
contribute to the exchange of expertise, as most actors are quoted in their
own topical domain.
Tab. 2 SNS sources distinguished by the type of actors in relation to news topics
Politics
Economic
s
Crime Culture Sport Others Total
N % N % N % N % N % N % N %
Politician
3
9
84.
8
3 6.5 0 0 2 2.2 1 2.2 2 4.4 46
10
0
Celebrity
1 2.1 0 0 0 0
4
2
87.
5
4 8.3 1 2.1 48
10
0
Athlete
2 1.9 1 0.9 1 0.9 3 2.9 98
93.
3
0 0
10
5
10
0
"Vox
Populi"
6 8.1 3 4.1
3
5
47.
3
1 1.4 7 9.5
2
2
29.
7
74
10
0
Others
1
6
48.
5
2 6.1 2 6.1 4
12.
1
4
12.
1
5
15.
2
33
10
0
Total
6
4
20.
9
9 2.9
3
8
12.
4
5
1
16.
7
11
4
37.
3
3
0
9.8
30
6
10
0
Further analysis of our data suggests that the particular social network
does not seem to make a difference, except for “vox populi”, i.e. non-elite
actors, who are almost exclusively (82 %) quoted via their Facebook profiles.
An important insight stems from cross-tabulation of the type of actors with
news topics. While the overall numbers suggest that the probability for an
ordinary citizen to become a news source is augmented through SNSs, further
discernment by topics of news reveals that this is mostly the case in the
category of crime (47.3 %), whereas in the “hard” categories of politics and
economics are relatively minor instances (8.1 % and 4.1 %) respectively. The
engaged types of actors – activists, experts or spokespeople that may
represent social movements – have a negligible chance to become news
sources.
Our data suggests that the way news media deal with the SNS quotes
provides their authors with a considerable degree of control over the content
of the news, judging from the fact that more than two-thirds of SNS sources
(N=325) included direct quotations from social media accounts, while only one
third of quotes were modified by the journalists. Unlike with other categories
that we have examined above, the differentiation between particular SNSs
does not seem to matter in this regard: Facebook generated 70 % of direct
quotations, Twitter 73 %. Although our recorded values are lower than the
astonishing 90% of full Twitter quotes identified by Broersma and Graham
(2013), they still support the view that “the public consumption of tweets may
make tweets more influential on media coverage than traditional press
releases” (Parmelee 2014, 446). The public availability of the statements on
SNSs that make the news forces journalists to be more responsible in
reporting, but the flipside is the loss of autonomy vis-à-vis their sources. The
data also showed no statistically significant difference (N=286, p=0.12)
between the types of actors quoted in the examined media. Politicians,
celebrities, athletes and ordinary citizens were all quoted directly at least in
70% of cases or more. At least in this regard, we found some support for the
democratic potential often attributed to social media.
Conclusions
Contrary to those studies that deal with breaking news and ambient
journalism, we chose to investigate news coverage spanning across a longer
time period, which appears to be a minority orientation within this research
field. It can be argued that an analysis of routine reporting has a potential to
assess the impact of social media on everyday journalistic practices more
accurately than a focus limited only to extraordinary situations. Although there
is no denying that traditional media organizations and newsrooms have been
experiencing significant transformations since the introduction of new media
and social networking sites, we cannot claim, based on our results, that the
effect on the fundamental journalistic practice of gathering news from the
source has been visibly altered in equal proportion. Our analysis
demonstrated that, at least for the time-being, the hybridization of news-cycle
remains a relatively peripheral phenomenon in the Czech Republic. Unlike in
the case of similarly reserved findings for local journalism and local elections
in Norway (Skogerbø and Krumsvik 2015), our results can be related to
nationwide context in routine settings. The news in traditional media using
SNSs as sources account for a mere fraction of the total news content in the
Czech Republic.
Besides discussing new, country-specific data, our main contributions
consists of exploring differences between different social networking sites in
their capacity as new sources. We also attended to their multimedia quality
and took into account other traditional media along with printed press. To
recapitulate, we found that social media appear as sources only in small
fraction of the overall news content and when they actually perform the role of
sources, they usually do so only in secondary capacity (RQ1). Traditional
media generally use SNSs for textual type of information, except the tabloid
press that prefers pictures and photographs (RQ2). The analysis of the data
leads us to conclude that, even if SNSs are adopted as sources from
international newswires, Czech journalists legitimize them by claiming editorial
authorship instead. Therefore, we assert that the use of SNSs as news
sources in Czech news content is not a simple translation of global
phenomenon into national context by means of international news agencies
(RQ3). Our findings also suggest that social media are associated with an
overall tendency towards tabloidization of the Czech press: they tend to
become a source for soft news more regularly than for hard news (RQ4c), and
the tabloid and commercial media use them as sources more readily than
other types of media outlets (RQ4a). Although social media facilitate global
communication, they are most commonly used as sources to report on
domestic issues with the exception of quality press (RQ4b). A discernible
difference exists among competing SNSs. Facebook – which is the major
social network in the Czech Republic and which relies on more personal and
often private profiles – dominates as a source in the popular and tabloid press
segment. On the other hand, the comparatively less popular micro-blogging
service Twitter tends to predominate as a news source for hard news and
appears more frequently in quality press and public service media. The social
media profiles that become sources belong mostly to elite members of the
society (RQ5a) and in majority of instance allow them to be quoted verbatim
(RQ5b). Non-elite actors gain more attention from the traditional media via
their SNS profiles, but are often in the position of victims or witnesses in crime
news and have little or no say in political or economic issues. Communication
produced by experts, activists or social movements and their representatives
is virtually absent from the news agenda. There is, therefore, no strong
evidence that SNSs in the Czech Republic increase “the range of voices in the
news” (Broersma and Graham 2013: 458) or that the simple numerical
increase in inclusion of citizens’ voices translates into democratization of
news agenda.
Our findings need to be weighted against the limitations presented by
the quantitative design of the study. We could not possibly account for such
qualitative aspects as the importance of the news or the use of social media
for breaking stories, which was beyond the means of quantitative analysis.
Also, the scrutiny of the content could not provide us with the understanding of
the changes in work routines introduced into journalism through social media,
whether they include new position for social media editors or workflow
adjustments. For example, while the majority of the Czech journalists who
were interviewed by the Czech weekly Respekt, expressed doubts about the
journalistic value of social media, most of the interviewees remain to be very
influential Facebook and Twitter users. Nevertheless, such doubts about the
credibility and legitimacy of SNS sources can decrease the level of
transparency (Phillips 2010b; Lasorsa 2012), which is a perennial problem in
the study of sources that cannot be tackled by means of content analysis
alone. Since researchers have indications to the effect that a digital divide
runs across newsrooms (Hedman and Djerf-Pierre 2013), we can expect that
while the overall impact of SNSs is not prominent, some subgroups of
journalists, especially the younger cohorts, might be using social media more
intensively. On the other hand, when they attempt to present themselves as
tech-savvy, journalists may overestimate the role of social media in their work,
as was suggested by surveys that revealed discrepancy between attitudes
and practices (Lariscy et al. 2009; Sheffer and Schultz 2010). A possible
corrective for the limitations of surveys and quantitative content studies could
be gained from subsequent inquiries based on ethnographic methods and indepth
interviews (cf. Jordaan 2013), which we see as a potentially fruitful path
to further analysis.
While keeping in mind the possible limits of our approach, the results
obtained in our study allow us to proceed to some conclusions. Some results
of our study are congruent with the findings obtained in Western European
countries, but the analysis leads us to believe that the traditional news media
in the Czech Republic use SNSs, despite the latter’s global character, in a
distinct way, which may reflect both the specifics of the technological
infrastructure, the market and the peculiar norms, routines and news values of
Czech journalists. The main features that frame the utilization of SNSs as
news sources in the Czech Republic can be outlined by generally low
intensity, preference for domestic affairs, bias towards tabloidization and
relative inaccessibility to non-elite actors in political issues. Czech journalists
are dealing with sources that are not exploiting the potential of SNSs to the
same extent as their counterparts in Western Europe or the USA. Following
the conclusions of Skogerbø and Krumsvik (2014), we may also argue that in
a relatively small country, such as the Czech Republic, the ties between
journalists and their elite sources are closer, more exclusive and stable than
in larger setting, thus reducing the need for communication via SNSs.
In face of the dual capacity of social networks to function as news
media in their own right and as a controlled platform for individual sources,
journalists, at least those whose work was covered in our research, would be
well advised to approach “the power of the tweet” by reinventing “the power of
the edit” as a responsibility towards fact checking and cultivating public
discourse. With the foreseeable expansion of SNSs among Czech population
and growth of citizen journalism, professional journalists should take more
advantage of the affordances of social network sites when it comes to seeking
out commentary of marginalized actors on important issues in societal life.
Endnotes:
1
While the initial issues of transition to democracy had been arguably resolved, with various
degrees of success, at least in those countries that joined the EU, post-socialism endures as
a more general condition in this region (see e.g. Hladík 2011).
2
Publicly accessible data are in similar range, with the exception of Twitter, for which
commercial analysts report more conservative estimates, e.g.. mere 157 000 users in 2013.
See an infographics published by webzine Doba webová (2013). Nevertheless, the trend
points clearly to a more rapid increase in the number of Twitter accounts.
3
The search terms were defined so as to include possible Czech conjugations. We omitted
the word “tweet”, because it is not common in the Czech language and on the rare occasion
when it appears, it is typically accompanied by an explanation that defines it as a statement
published on Twitter, a social networking site.
4
The data does not allow for a direct comparison between television and print media,
because the transcripts in the database do not capture the information displayed on TV
screens, which may include unspoken references to SNSs.
5
In 14 cases, more than one social network was cited as a source (e.g. Facebook and
YouTube). For the sake of streamlining the analysis, we decided not to include these
instances into further counts. Also, due to the generally low frequency of the use of YouTube,
we do not always use it in the presentation of the data, although it was included in the
analysis.
6
Here we expanded the operationalization of a news trigger in Broersma and Graham’s study
of Twitter (2013: 451) – who applied the category to the cases in which “the tweets
themselves were newsworthy” – to include any SNS posts.
7
This relationship is not particularly strong but still statistically significant (N = 447, Cramer’s
V = 0.141, p < .022).
8
For the purposes of this analysis, we classified as “soft news” the news items devoted to
crime, sports, celebrities and life style. The “hard news” category was composed of politics,
economics, natural catastrophes and technology/science topics. The rest of the topics were
filled under the category of “other”. We filed the debated and liminal category of “crime” under
soft news, following Van Aelst and De Swert (2009), because in our data the topic covered
predominantly the sensational and individual aspects of criminal deeds rather than their links
to public issues. A precise categorization of soft and hard news remains an object of
contestation (Reinemann et al. 2012).
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