MPC MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER A Little Birdie Told Me: Journalistic and Individualistic Twitter Use of Local Television News Reporters LAURA BAKER Dr. Wendy Freeman September 8, 2014 The Major Research Paper is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Professional Communication Ryerson University Toronto, Ontario, Canada AUTHOR'S DECLARATION FOR ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION OF A MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this Major Research Paper and the accompanying Research Poster. This is a true copy of the MRP and the research poster, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authorize Ryerson University to lend this major research paper and/or poster to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize Ryerson University to reproduce this MRP and/or poster by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I understand that my MRP and/or my MRP research poster may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Twitter is a social networking platform that connects its users to information in the form of posts that are a maximum of 140 characters long. Twitter has become an important method for news distribution for both print and broadcast news stations. News organizations, individuals and journalists all use Twitter for different purposes, which raises questions as to how local television news reporters tweets both as journalists and as individuals. This study analyzes the tweets of the personal Twitter accounts of five local television news reporters from each of the local television news stations in Toronto (City News, CTV Toronto, Global Toronto, CP24 and CBC Toronto). Findings reveal the existence of blurring of personal (individualistic) and professional (journalistic) uses of Twitter. The tweets from the personal Twitter accounts of local television news reporters in Toronto suggest that while these reporters still take their gatekeeping roles as journalists seriously, they sometimes take advantage of Twitter as a platform that encourages public declaration and personal observations. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my mother, father and sister for their unwavering confidence in my ability to pursue my dreams. Thank you to my second reader, Dr. Jeffrey Boase, for his thoughtful and invaluable feedback on my work. Finally, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Wendy Freeman, for her dedication and guidance throughout this writing process. iv Table Of Contents Author’s Declaration ......................................................................................................................ii Abstract...........................................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................................iv List of Tables..................................................................................................................................vi Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Literature Review…….....................................................................................................................4 Research Questions........................................................................................................................18 Method...........................................................................................................................................19 Findings & Discussion...................................................................................................................39 Implications....................................................................................................................................52 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................53 References......................................................................................................................................55 Appendix A: Tweets from Local Television News Reporters.......................................................62 v List of Figures Table Description Page Table 1 Top Twitter Users From Each Local Television 20 News Station In Toronto Table 2 Total Number Of Tweets Per Reporter From March 21 31- April 20 Table 3 Journalistic Twitter Themes 22 Table 4 Journalistic Category of News Dissemination and 23 Sub-Codes Table 5 Journalistic Category of Promotion and Sub-Codes 24 Table 6 Journalistic Category of Conversation 25 Table 7 Journalistic Category of Crowdsourcing 25 Table 8 Individualistic Category and Sub-Codes 26 Table 9 Individualized Journalistic Category and Sub- 28 Codes Table 10 Categories of Journalistic, Individualistic and 29 Individualized Journalistic Uses of Twitter Table 11 Journalistic, Individualistic and Individualized 30 Journalistic Uses of Twitter Table 12 Categories of Journalistic Twitter Use 32 Table 13 News Dissemination Sub-Codes 32 Table 14 Promotion Sub-Codes 36 Table 15 Individualistic Twitter Use 43 Table 16 Reporters’ Use of Individualized Journalistic 47 Tweets vi Introduction Twitter, a microblogging platform, was created in San Francisco, California and launched in October 2006 (Honey & Herring, 2009). Twitter users can send messages, called tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. Users can designate their tweets as public, which allows their tweets to appear on Twitter’s public timeline located on the Twitter homepage (Honey & Herring, 2009). They can also direct their tweets to another individual user’s Twitter page, known as feed, or users can make their tweets private, which means that only those who have subscribed to the user’s feed, known as the user’s followers, are able to see the tweets (Honey & Herring, 2009). Tweets can be posted via Twitter.com, mobile phones, and through third party desktop applications such as Hootsuite. The majority of Twitter users send and check tweets from their mobile devices (Palser, 2009). Twitter is a social networking platform used as a news dissemination tool by both print and broadcast news organizations (Armstrong & Gao, 2010). Twitter has developed into a hybrid communication space that Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2012) characterize as “a complex and networked system of social awareness ... blurring boundaries between information, news, and entertainment” (p. 268). Twitter provides a platform where users are able to tweet a combination of information and observation, outside the boundaries of the established order of the information dissemination processes of traditional print or broadcast news (Hermida, 2012). The Project for Excellence in Journalism (2009a) reported that Twitter is an important method for news distribution. In 2007, The Oregonian became one of the first newspapers to use Twitter as a news dissemination tool. Newspaper executives expected that multiple tweets throughout the day would build a community of readers who would initially be drawn in by tweets from the news organization, which gave them glimpses of the news. Newspaper 1 executives then expected readers to seek longer articles on the news origination’s website to attain further information. (Greer & Yan, 2011). By 2010, 197 out of 198 American newspapers and TV stations had an official Twitter account (Messner et al., 2011). Various distinguished journalists in the news industry now have followings on Twitter that are almost as vast as the distribution of their newspapers or viewership of their news broadcast. For example, New York Times technology writer David Pogue went from 300,000 followers in 2009 to 1.4 million after only two years (Shultz & Sheffer, 2012). As the popularity of news reporters’ Twitter accounts continues to grow, queries are raised pertaining to their roles on Twitter as both professional journalists and as individuals. Research has shown that an individual, a journalist and a news organization may all use Twitter for various purposes due their varying personal and professional roles as Twitter users (Broersma & Graham, 2013; Java, Song, Finin, & Tsen, 2007; Lysak, Cremedas & Wolf, 2012; Schultz and Sheffer, 2010) . The majority of newsrooms, however, use Twitter as a promotional tool. News organizations predominately forward print and broadcast stories to their Twitter feeds (Schultz & Sheffer, 2010), meaning that the same news is being delivered on different platforms in an attempt to help drive Twitter traffic to newsroom websites (Lysak, Cremedas & Wolf, 2012). While the general public uses Twitter for daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and links and reporting news (Java et al., 2007), journalists use Twitter to preview published work, report the news, communicate with other journalists, reach news sources, find more story ideas and verify information (Armstrong & Gao, 2010; Broersma & Graham, 2013). However, news reporters are also professionally tweeting from their personal Twitter account, which calls into question their role as an individual as well as their role as a journalist and how these roles are enacted in their tweets. 2 To date there have been no qualitative studies into how professional and personal