Retweeting with Commentary
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RETWEETING WITH COMMENTARY THE SPREAD AND RECEPTION OF NEWS THROUGH PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES ON TWITTER 29th June 2018 Supervisor: Stefania Milan CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 2: Literature review .............................................................................................................................. 7 i. Journalism dynamics ...................................................................................................................................... 7 Key qualities of change ............................................................................................................................... 7 The methods behind the changes .......................................................................................................... 12 ii. Participatory practices ................................................................................................................................. 15 What is participatory culture? ................................................................................................................ 15 Centering the conversation ..................................................................................................................... 17 Political participation ............................................................................................................................... 18 iii. A platform studies view: the affordances of twitter ................................................................................ 21 Twitter and journalism ............................................................................................................................ 21 Twitter actions .......................................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 3: Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 31 Choice of case ............................................................................................................................................ 31 Studying twitter ........................................................................................................................................ 31 DMI-TCAT method ................................................................................................................................. 33 First encounters........................................................................................................................................ 36 Chapter 4: Findings .......................................................................................................................................... 38 Primary categories ................................................................................................................................... 38 Secondary categories ............................................................................................................................... 39 Discussion .......................................................................................................................................................... 41 Quote tweets versus other engagements .............................................................................................. 41 Quote tweets by category ........................................................................................................................ 43 Positive and negative sharing ................................................................................................................. 45 Implications .............................................................................................................................................. 47 Chapter 5: Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 50 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................................... 52 Appendix ............................................................................................................................................................ 59 2 ABSTRACT The professional distribution of news is an age-old practice, and social media is vastly newer. Yet, the impact the latter has made on journalism is substantial. In the first part of this thesis I present the literary background of the changes that social media has brought to journalistic practice. The core aspects I identify of these changes are the increased speed with which information can travel on the internet, the plurality of voices contributing to news content, and the interactivity that can occur between journalists and their audiences thanks to the prevalence of news production and intake on social media. The latter two of these changes are helped by a growing culture for participatory practices on social media by news audiences. An increase in participation, I argue, has evolved with the journalist-audience relationship and become a cornerstone of the way that the public engages with news. The nature of these changes to relationships between news providers and receivers beg an inquiry into the particular aspects and possible effects of this new method of news engagement. On Twitter, news outlets and audiences share a space, and so share communicative methods and practices. In particular, the practice of quote tweeting demonstrates a blend between user engagement with news and a new centralising of the audience’s reaction and political commentary on news content. In the latter half of this thesis, I show that this is the case through an empirical study on quote tweets in relation to a selection of news outlet tweets of news articles. Through this study I find that quote tweeting indeed demonstrates a more two-sided and conversational approach to news engagement than before the rise and common use of social media platforms such as Twitter. KEYWORDS: Journalism; participatory culture; Twitter; produsage; Grenfell; audience engagement. 3 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Twitter is a place of many opinions. Spending time on the website can occasionally feel like sitting in a loud café, half-listening to those around you and half-shouting into the void. During major news events, the topic of conversation in the Twitter café seems to become uniform. When a fire broke out in Grenfell tower on 14th June 2017, I was scrolling through Twitter. Suddenly the tone changed, and a huge proportion of my timeline materialised around one event. When news outlets report on events they aim to report on factual happenings, and they do so on Twitter as well as in newspapers. When I found out about this fire, however, it was via someone I followed crying out that the fire was a concrete image of inequality in the UK, and via someone else criticising the policies of the government. Some shared the news by expressing their sadness, and some centred the story around the Muslims living in and around the tower. Getting news through a major news organisation usually means seeing the facts first and the opinions later. On Twitter, however, I only came to know the story through individual Twitter users’ own opinions and personal agendas. Twitter is a microblogging website, so it is only understandable that much of the content is personal utterings of the users (Rogers 2013, 1). The combination of this with its merit as a news source (Gruber et al. 168; Hermida et al.; Rosenstiel et al.; Newman; Stassen; Vis; Wasike) means that many news events will be framed through the eyes of individual users. Particularly interesting to this phenomenon is the practice of quote tweeting, introduced as a native function fairly recently (Twitter 2015), where users may retweet a tweet but with the addition of their own comment, which appears above and more prominently than, but still along with, the quoted tweet. In my personal use of Twitter, quote tweets seem to me like a perfect example of the way that tweets can be viewed as part of a user’s own personal angle. The user can display a tweet as attached yet subsidiary to their own tweet, adding commentary, criticism or other engagement forms. This method of interaction is distinct from other methods, such as the retweet, reply, mention and favourite, and so the practices surrounding it and the ways it is employed warrant some study. Following this, and the use of Twitter for news, I gather there are interesting implications in the way that quote tweets are used to interact with news tweets. News organisations, and by extension their tweets, aim towards objectivity (Wien). Twitter users have no such aim, but they are often the voices through which people are directed to news tweets and events, and so carry the news along with the journalist to some extent. This observation led me to the following research question: What do quote tweet practices say about news engagement and audience-journalist relationships on Twitter? 4 Social media is a relatively recent phenomenon when put next to the profession of journalism. The number of decades