Abstract
This study examines social media usage by journalists through the prism of the hierarchy of influences model. Utilizing interviews with 53 digital journalists, it identifies the actors playing a role in producing news through social media. It finds that journalists, opinion leaders, audience and extra-media organizations affect news production. It calls for a revisiting of the hierarchy of the influences model to understand on what levels of influence the audience affects news production.
Keywords
A journalist logs onto Twitter to find an idea for a story. Once there, the journalist is presented with a wealth of information, some coming from general followers, some from followers with a large network and some from the accounts of organizations such as companies or nonprofits. Once the journalist settles on an idea, she can research the subject, find sources, solicit opinions, verify information and promote the finished product through social media. In many ways, social media can assist in the entirety of the news production process, from inception to promotion to determining potential follow-up pieces.
While such a generalization is anecdotal, it is not just hypothetical. Social media, relatively recently, became not only an indispensable tool for journalists but also a consistent platform for which many news processes occur. 1 Social media play a role in news work consistently. 2 But while scholars have examined how and why journalists use social media to produce news, 3 very few specifically examined how the audience, through social media, influences journalists during news production. Through the lens of the theory of hierarchy of influences theory, 4 this study then attempts to place audience influence on various levels of influence.
Literature Review
Social Media and Influence
Many of today’s newsrooms not only use technology extensively but also rely on technology to function. 5 This influx allows journalists to perform functions “simultaneously easier and harder.” 6 Technology changed the job, fundamentally, but it also changed the role of the audience. 7 Now, not only is the audience active, but members have also gained slight power over the news agenda. 8 This change in the audience’s role has led to some tension concerning journalists and autonomy. 9 The main reason for this tension comes from the advent of social media. 10
Studies of the journalism industry’s use of social media illustrates three main ways in which it affects news production. 11 The first is the audience’s relatively newfound power to judge quality through dissemination. Through social media, audiences can decide which stories they find most important and share those. 12 News organizations now focus on how often their stories receive shares on social media, going so far as to capture this with analytics. 13
Second, social media affect journalistic routines through the adoption of crowdsourcing, which is the process of obtaining sources, story ideas or general information about a topic. 14 Typically, a journalist might use crowdsourcing to more quickly and efficiently ascertain how the public feels about a situation. 15
Finally, the audience can enter the journalist’s network by using social media’s various feedback mechanisms. 16 Research shows that the more “likes” a story receives on Facebook or if a story topic trends on Twitter, journalistic organizations are far more likely to follow-up on the story; thus, “audiences have become important influences in tailoring content.” 17
Journalists integrate social media into their news work routines in different ways, but they have become a vital tool. 18 Journalists frequently use Twitter and Facebook as a means of promoting their work, thus hoping for more “likes” and affecting the potential for trending; journalists also use social media to build their personal brand. 19 The process journalists go through when they adopt new technology, such as social media, and incorporate it into their routines is called normalization. 20 But normalization revolves around the preconception that these technologies are used to augment old routines. However, social media do, in some cases, also force journalists to abandon old routines and start new ones. 21 And once again, this change has affected journalists, as they believe new routines lessen autonomy. 22 Journalists have always valued autonomy, 23 and social media allow for more open participation and, thus, creates more of a struggle between a logic of open participation and professional control. 24 Social media, in essence, became something journalists use to help report and tell stories, and also something that shapes how journalists do their jobs.
Hierarchy of Influences
To study news production in a holistic manner, through understanding all levels influencing these processes, Shoemaker and Reese suggested a hierarchy of the influences model. 25 This allows the researchers to separate the journalistic world into levels of analyses. The theory permits researchers the ability to examine journalistic work within the appropriate organizational and social context; this permits researchers to identify influences on news production while noting constraints on the actual act of constructing news. 26 In this study, the hierarchy of influences theory allows for an examination of how social media affect news production on multiple levels of analysis. In media sociology research, the theoretical context provided by the hierarchy of influences is one of, if not the, most influential frameworks in relatively recent times; it allows researchers the opportunity to examine influences on journalism news work in context, understanding all levels of influence. 27
Scholars utilizing the framework study influences on news production on five levels of analysis: the individual, the communication routines, the organizational, the social institutional and social system levels. 28 The individual level of analysis refers to the personal characteristics of the individuals involved in the news work. The routines level refers to practices and procedures across all organizations in the industry that guide individual communication workers. The organizational level refers to factors that originate from the organization, such as newsroom policies. The social institutional level refers to forces from organizations outside the news, such as governments and advertisers. Finally, the social system level refers to cultural, ideological and national systems where journalists and organizations operate. This particular study will examine if and how social media affect news production at these five levels. Therefore,
Who are the actors using social media to affect news production?
How do actors, both journalists and audience, within social media contribute to journalistic processes?
Method
In-Depth Interviews
By utilizing in-depth interviews, researchers can gather a wealth of details that explain complicated processes, patterns and behaviors. 29 The researcher aims to accomplish three goals when interviewing subjects: interpretation, summary and integration. 30 For this particular study, the researcher piloted in-depth phone interviews with 53 working digital journalists to understand how they utilized social media and how it affected news processes. All informants were required to work as digital journalists only; in their full-time position as reporters, they could not publish material on anything other than a digital platform. The 53 informants represented 49 organizations based in the United States, from large legacy outlets such as the New York Times, to digitally native companies such as Buzzfeed, and nonprofits such as the Texas Tribune. The journalists’ experience in journalism ranged from six months to 34 years. The average interview length was 43.5 minutes. Journalists were recruited through a list of more than 300 full-time digital journalists from a large, recognized journalistic organization and, after acceptance, prescreened to make sure they fit desired characteristics (i.e., full-time, digital-only work).
The protocol for the interviews comprised broad, open-ended questions to encourage detailed answers. 31 For this study, journalists were asked a series of questions concerning how they utilize social media in their work. Per guidelines of his Institutional Review Board, the researcher guaranteed informants anonymity and confidentiality. The audio interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis.
Findings
Actors affecting news production
The first research question posed by this study asked what actors within the social media network affect news production. The data illustrate four main categories of actors: journalists, opinion leaders, audience and extra-media organizations.
Journalists
Typically, journalists sit at the nexus of news production processes. Within social media, journalists typically influence news production before, during and after a story. Of the subjects interviewed, each person discussed using social media while researching specific story ideas or generally searching for a story topic. One journalist said, “In between when I finish a story and I begin the actual process of crafting a story, I cannot tell you how much I’m on social media gathering ideas or sources or just little strands of information.” Subjects consistently expressed this sentiment. They talked about spending hours a day on Twitter or Facebook searching for story ideas. A different subject explained how this process can lead to multiple story ideas. A veteran of seven different newsrooms, this 51-year-old digital journalist for a large legacy media organization also noted how much more involved others are in news production processes, thus illustrating the power of the network:
(Back when I started as a journalist), I’d always be on the lookout for new story ideas, but that meant being in the community . . . Now, though, just last week I went on Twitter and, to a lesser degree, Facebook trying to find sources to bolster this story I was working on. I was able to find people that gave me great insight that helped shape my reporting.
When a news organization commits to a story idea, journalists also take to social media during reporting. Social media, said one journalist, make gathering sources both easier and more democratic. “I can find sources in about a 10th of the time than if I went looking for someone new in some other way,” she said. “And I’m also not reliant on the same sources for every story. I can bring a host of voices into the news daily.” Other journalists interviewed discussed sharing early drafts of stories on social media, thus allowing plugged-in users to provide opinion and insight. Many other subjects discussed posing pointed questions to followers, questions aimed at gathering advice. “Almost, or maybe for 90 percent of the stories I write,” said one journalist, “at some point in the middle, I’ll just tweet out a little ol’ question just kind of asking people about the next step. It helps me, and it keeps my army of friends part of everything.”
Journalists said they often examine social media content to see what people are saying about a published story. This allows the ability to notice a mistake, but, more likely, a facet of the story ignored that maybe it should not have been. Almost all journalists interviewed discussed using their network of social media followers as a temperature barometer following the publication of a piece, noting that you can tell how the community reacts as a whole by looking at social media posts and comments. And these posts and comments make a significant impact on how the journalist proceeds.
Opinion leaders
Interviewed journalists discussed social media users in two different ways, as merely nameless audience members who occasionally contribute to news production processes but also as audience members with large social networks and influence over the public. For this study’s purposes, the latter are audience members, but they are also slightly different according to interviewees, and therefore will be called opinion leaders—a relevant term familiar from the 1944 two-step flow of the communication model by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet. To this study’s journalists, opinion leaders are audience members with large followings pertaining to specific subjects. These opinion leaders could work for large organizations related to a specific field, they could be “influencers” of the public or they could simply be well known within the area the journalist works. One person interviewed echoed the thoughts of dozens of others when she distinguished between the two groups, opinion leaders and the audience, in general:
I’m always looking for information from people. And I’ll get it from many, many different venues. I mean people when I say that. However, and this is a large however, a drawn-out however, some people matter the most. Sometimes they have a really large networks of followers, so if you can get them to talk about something, you’re golden. It’ll be a hit.
These opinion leaders wield influence over journalists. Many subjects discussed how if an opinion leader references a potential story, they will always work toward producing that story. Many subjects also noted that when they finish a particular piece, they will often tweet the story at an opinion leader, hoping to receive an opinion or, at least, a retweet.
Beyond trying to get opinion leaders’ attention, some journalists interviewed discussed creating routines revolving around reading the feeds of opinion leaders. “If someone like that mentions something, I want to be the first to notice and run with the idea,” said one journalist. “If I can do that, I know that person is going to help out with promotion and, in my experience, even recruitment of special sources.” And while that journalist did not specifically mention using an opinion leader as a source, but rather as someone who could recruit sources, numerous journalists discussed seeking out opinion leaders to use in stories. One subject even explicitly discussed how opinion leaders raise credibility, which others said more implicitly. One journalist, with more than 20 years’ experience, said of opinion leaders, “If that person retweets what you’ve done, you’re almost getting their seal of approval. That makes their followers deem you worthy or immediately think you do a good job.”
Audience
Within social media, the general audience affects news production in numerous ways. First, many journalists noted that they try “to get a vast, overall view of what the community is discussing on social media,” as one journalist explained it. Basically, each and every journalist interviewed discussed social media as a place where they can go to understand the motivations and thoughts of the people following them. Audience members can post comments. They can direct message or tweet at a journalist. When a journalist posts a question to their audience, the members can shape how or, in some cases, if a story will be told.
Extra-media organizations
The final actors with influence over news production processes on social media are extra-media organizations. These are advertisers, nonprofit organizations, the social media platforms themselves—any formed organization not part of a journalism organization or a general audience. For example, one journalist interviewed talked about how companies affect news production. “Sometimes,” he said, “the Facebook will be all abuzz or whatever about Pepsi putting out a soda with real sugar. If there is that much attention, I’m going to write about it.” Another journalist discussed how local organizations on social media can affect local news considerably.
I was covering insurance and the Affordable Care Act a couple years ago and some insurance company located here, that will rename nameless and you can easily figure out, put out this press release about how much money they were going to lose because of the ACA. The release was full of inaccuracies and, honestly, lies. But it got traction. And all the right-wing people, for lack of a better word, were liking it and sharing it. I had to write about it and I had to talk about the insurance company in particular.
In other cases, journalists discussed grassroots organizations that utilize social media well. For example, one journalist speaking generally said,
There are so many little nonprofits or small organizations out there that really know Facebook and Twitter. They know how to get my attention or get the website’s attention and they get us to write about them and their issues.
The Journalistic Process
The second research question asked how do actors within social media contribute to journalistic processes. All actors within the social media network identified in RQ1 contribute to journalistic processes in three ways: as content producers, sources and unofficial public relations (PR) agents.
Content producers
The most obvious example of content producers is a journalist. All journalists interviewed talked about how they not only produce content for their news organizations but also help populate various social media platforms with information. The journalists write or produce stories, tweet, publish Facebook posts and produce various content across media for their organizations. But not only journalists act as content producers. Opinion leaders, according to journalists interviewed, also produce content in a variety of ways. One journalist, echoing what slightly more than a dozen others said, explained, “We run editorials, or better yet, op-eds consistently and those are the types of people we seek out to write them.” Other journalists interviewed discussed how their organizations reach out to opinion leaders on social media and ask them to contribute both op-eds and legitimate journalistic articles about topics they choose.
Other journalists interviewed also discussed consistently searching social media for potential contributors. One even mentioned how her organization and, in her opinion, many others have hired people with large social media presences.
I’m not kidding when I say I have superiors who will go on social media and look for people to hire based on follower numbers. They don’t need journalism experience, just a large amount of followers and a care about news.
The audience acts as content producers also. Per this study’s subjects, many digital journalistic organizations will simply embed tweets from social media followers and use them in the same way they would a quote from a source. One journalist talked about how his organization features an open content management system that allows everyone to see what journalists are working on at that very moment and then lets the audience comment through social media. This allows the audience to have input. The audience can also force a journalist to produce certain content by discussing it enough or noting an error through social media. “They might not literally write a story,” one journalist said, “but I’ve been literally forced to write something because enough people talked about a subject or an old story.”
Finally, extra-media organizations act as content producers in primarily two ways. First, and most obvious, extra-media organizations publish press releases on social media that get picked up and published verbatim on numerous websites represented in this study. “We label them a press release,” explained one journalist, “but we’re still practicing the old rip and run technique I did a lot of 20 years ago.” The other manner extra-media organizations work as content producers comes through partnerships with social media opinion leaders. These extra-media organizations, according to journalists, will reach out to opinion leaders in their area to try and catalyze a movement of sorts. Explained one journalist,
What often happens is, and this is a fake example, the NRA will find all the big gun nuts on Facebook and then make a post about some issue to do with guns and tag everyone. This essentially gets the Facebook algorithm all aflutter. They’ll also tag us in the post and then more and more people will comment. It forces us, in a way to write about the subject. Often we’ll use those same sources if they’re local.
Numerous other journalists presented similar situations where organizations will utilize social media to create a coalition to push an issue; when it works, the attention the extra-media organization generates forces journalistic organizations to report on it.
Sources
For opinion leaders, audience members and extra-media organizations, their role as a source in the news production processes taking place via social media is not altered significantly. In digital newsrooms utilizing social media heavily, opinion leaders tend to be experts who are often sources concerning stories in their areas. The audience are the regular people journalists tend to bring into stories. And, finally, extra-media organizations typically are sources as experts in their fields or they present story ideas through trending tweets or Facebook press releases. As one journalist noted, “Social media makes getting sources so much easier, and we can use so many more different sources, but once we find them, it’s the same generally.”
However, unlike in traditional newsrooms, on social media, journalists can also act as sources. By posting comments and questions on social media throughout the news production process, journalists are effectively leaking information and trying to drive a story, much like a source. For example, one journalist at a prominent digitally native news organization said,
I might post a little bit of information on Twitter, just a quote from me or from another source. I’m steering that story, in a way. And I’m waiting for others to jump in the conversation and, you know, add to it. They kind of become the journalist because I’m providing a seed of info or a story idea and then they run with it. It’s no different from a source messaging me a topic or idea.
PR agents
While the actors classified as extra-media organizations often explicitly act as PR agents, journalists, opinion leaders and the audience also do the same. Within social media, extra-media organizations consistently attempt to further their organizational goals through disseminating material with an appropriate PR spin to both audiences and journalists alike. But journalists, opinion leaders and the audience also act as PR agents through the sharing and retweeting of articles. This goal was shared by almost all the journalists interviewed; everyone but one talked about their desire to have as many audience members as possible and, especially, opinion leaders, share their stories. And journalists share their own stories once they are published. In fact, this is not a choice in most digital newsrooms. As one journalist explained,
I don’t have a choice. Social media? I use for a lot of different things and my bosses want me to use for a lot of different reasons. But I’m told that once a story is up on the site, I need to be promoting it.
Discussion
This study applied the hierarchy of influences theory to an examination of how journalists utilize social media in news production processes. No longer does the newsroom always serve the same historical purpose in journalism, as a hub for all decisions and processes; instead, digital news organizations are slowly doing away with the traditional newsroom, and most news production processes happen online. 32 And social media bring the audience into these processes in more ways than just as a source or content producer. 33
The research questions implicitly embedded the hierarchy of influence model introduced by Shoemaker and Reese. 34 This model explains the five levels of influence on news production: the individual journalists, communication routines, organizational, the social institutional and social system levels. When discussing social media, the scholars explicitly argued that it is a tool journalists are beginning to incorporate into their routines. They also more implicitly discuss the audience and posit that the audience can affect news production on the routine level and the social institutional level. Scholars, using hierarchy of influence theory, have argued that the audience affects news production primarily as an extra-media influence; they contend essentially the same thing with technology. 35 The present study illustrates why a redefining of audience influence should happen because of the way social media became such an integral part of news production processes in digital newsrooms.
What this study illustrates is how social media are infringing on journalists’ conceptions of professional control, something held dear in the profession. 36 For example, in one anecdote related above, a journalist said, “I’ve been literally forced to write something.” The specific wording of this phrase reveals a reluctance to hand over control to the audience, a hesitancy to cover certain topics suggested by nonjournalists or nonproducers of news. So, as the audience and social media platforms continue to harness agency in the news production network, this will continue to erode journalists’ sense of professional control, which could significantly affect the conceptions of professional norms.
The digital journalists interviewed for this study come from organizations across the United States that vary in size, market model and mission. Some work for legacy media but in online only, while many other journalists work for digitally native news organizations. Every subject expressed how institutionalized their daily usage of social media was. We can see social media’s impact on news production on at least four of the five levels explained by Shoemaker and Reese.
On the individual level, journalists make choices about how to specifically use social media during news production, who in their networks are opinion leaders and how to specifically engage with people and organizations on social media. On the communication routines level, as noted by previous studies, utilizing social media is now an integral part of almost all journalists’ daily work life. Using social media in some way is, inarguably, now a common news routine. 37 On the organizational level, it is bosses, both editors and publishers alike, who are directing journalists to social media. As many subjects noted, they are being told that they must, for example, promote their published stories through social media, along with other organizational mandates on how to use social media. On the social institutional level, the clear majority of journalists interviewed highlighted social media as the way outside people, both audience members and organizations, affect news production. Journalists will make decisions based on how to achieve shares and retweets from opinion leaders and audience members, and will also be contacted with story ideas—or just conceive story ideas—through using various social media platforms. Finally, on the social system level, it can be argued that social media have become such a staple in the United States that while a journalist will, for example, tend to avoid email interviews, many have no qualms doing them over social media. This is a cultural effect of the U.S. acceptance of social media.
This study illustrates that social media are not just tools connecting journalists to the audience, but rather they are a network of actors affecting news production on all levels of influence. In many ways, while sources have traditionally held considerable agency over news production processes, according to the hierarchy of influences, social media makes it far easier for journalists to connect with sources. This means it is far easier for sources to affect news production in ways that, on the surface, journalists of decades ago might consider unethical. Social media’s impact, though, was not called unethical by any journalist in this study.
While journalists still maintain the most agency in terms of news production, as they still make many decisions about story selection, sources and information used, nonprofessional actors have attained far more impact and power over news production processes than they had even a decade ago. Not only can social media be theorized as their own network, where actors produce news, but the hierarchy of the influence model could and should think about revisiting the levels in which the audience affects news production through social media.
While 53 long-form interviews with digital journalists from 49 different news organizations provides a significant amount of data, this study is still not generalizable across news organizations. First, the sample of journalists are only United States–based digital journalists, meaning they are from a specific part of the world and, as digital journalists, could be less resistant to utilizing technology; thus, they might incorporate social media more than journalists who predominantly do not work in the digital medium.
Second, the United States has thousands of news organizations, and apparently, most are not members of the organization from which this study’s sample was drawn (so 53 is a small sample of the likely total), nor can members of any voluntary professional or industry organization be assumed to be average or typical. Third, online (or any other) journalists willing and able to devote an average of nearly 45 minutes to being interviewed for an academic study cannot be assumed to be typical or representative of all such journalists.
Future research should further examine how journalists publishing in traditional media such as print or broadcast incorporate social media into news production processes. While many studies have inspected that very subject, less than a handful have done it through the prism of the hierarchy of the influences model. Most importantly, future research should utilize different methods to tackle the same question as this study.
Footnotes
Editors’ Note
This article was accepted for publication under the editorship of Sandra H. Utt and Elinor Kelley Grusin.