Twitter im Politikjournalismus

Zusammenfassung

Weil Journalisten und Politiker in wachsendem Maße soziale Medien nutzen, verändert sich die „kommunikative Figuration“ des Politikjournalismus. Dieser Aufsatz hat das Ziel, den Stellenwert insbesondere von Twitter in der kommunikativen Praxis von Mitgliedern der Bundespressekonferenz zu erheben und deren Einschätzungen zur Eignung des Microblogging-Dienstes im Politikjournalismus zu ermitteln. Er kombiniert dazu Befunde einer standardisierten Befragung mit netzwerkanalytischen Indikatoren zu den Interaktionsbeziehungen auf Twitter. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Politikjournalisten den Dienst im Vergleich zu anderen sozialen Medien am häufigsten verwenden. Journalisten, die Twitter in der Kommunikationsarbeit von Politikern als wichtig wahrnehmen, verwenden Twitter deutlich häufiger sowohl rezipierend als auch aktiv kommunizierend. Interaktionen zwischen Politikern und den befragten Journalisten verstärken diese Unterschiede noch: So halten Befragte, die von Politikern in Tweets erwähnt werden, Twitter insgesamt in der eigenen Arbeit für wichtiger und schätzen den Dienst im Vergleich der unterschiedlichen Kommunikationskanäle von Politikern höher ein als ihre Kollegen.

Abstract

With an increase in the use of social media by journalists and politicians, the “communicative figuration” of political journalism is inevitably changing. Although prior studies have analyzed the cultures of political communication and journalist-source relations in detail, social media’s role in this relationship has remained relatively unexplored. This study aims to assess how important Twitter is for the communicative practices of political journalists and how it shapes the mutual relationship between journalists and politicians. Our study combines the results of a standardized survey with indicators obtained from a network analysis of the interactions between political journalists and Members of the German Bundestag (MdB) on Twitter. We conducted an online survey of German journalists who focus on federal politics.

In particular, we seek to answer the following research questions: (1) How important are Twitter and other social media as part of German political journalists’ media repertoires? (2) Do journalists’ assessments of Twitter as a communication channel differ when they engage in interactions with politicians via the platform? We assume that receiving mentions from politicians on Twitter contributes to a more positive assessment of the platform by the journalists surveyed. We also expect a positive relationship between the presumed influence Twitter has on relevant stakeholders and actual use of the platform among the journalists we surveyed.

Invitations to participate were emailed to 745 members of the German Federal Press Conference (BPK) in July 2016. The response rate was 21% (N = 158; entirely completed: 18%). In addition, we asked participants for their Twitter usernames and identified their network of interactions on Twitter. We retrieved tweets for all members of the German Bundestag (MdBs) and BPK members with accessible Twitter accounts. To identify a substantial amount of interactions between journalists and politicians, we tracked the last 500 tweets for each account and scanned them for the respective @mentions. In the resulting corpus of a total of 240,000 tweets there are almost 65,000 tweets with which other users engage publicly via @mentions and that originated from the accounts themselves. This in turn includes 2644 tweets in which BPK journalists address one or more MdBs via @mentions, and 1143 tweets in which MdBs mention one or more BPK journalists. 199 journalists appear in this dataset, including 107 individuals who were mentioned at least once by one or more MdBs. 32 of these twittering journalists also took part in the survey and were marked as such in their data record. The contrasting group of journalists consists of 70 respondents who use Twitter but were not mentioned by MdBs via @mentions in the network.

The social media use patterns demonstrate that Twitter is the platform most frequently used by political journalists. 72% of respondents said that they had their own profile on Twitter and that their profile is influenced by the ways in which journalists consider social media appropriate for journalistic work and for political communication. When assessing the importance of Twitter for other journalists, twittering and non-twittering journalists differ significantly. Likewise, twittering and non-twittering journalists differ in their assessment of Twitter’s importance as a communication channel for politicians. Twitter interactions between politicians and the journalists surveyed reinforce these differences: respondents who receive @mentions from politicians rate the platform as more important for their own journalistic work than those that do not. Secondly, they rate Twitter more highly than their colleagues when comparing the different communication channels politicians use.

Our study reveals that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are now part of political journalism’s media repertoire. They do not displace more traditional information gathering methods such as interviews, press conferences or background discussions, but rather, they complement the ensemble of available channels and practices. Focusing on Twitter, we could also demonstrate how mutual perceptions and expectations come into play; from the point of view of (twittering) political journalists, the micro-blogging service plays a central role in politicians’ communicative repertoires and journalists themselves use it in turn to observe sources and topics and to quickly gather information. Although relationship management seems to be less important compared to these practices, the combination of our network analysis and the survey we conducted demonstrates that some journalists actually come into direct contact with politicians when using Twitter.