How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds A critical discourse perspective on Twitter

摘要

Media scholars have called for more research to understand the consequences of news outlets becoming increasingly reliant on social media for sourcing stories, and how this is changing the nature of news and the role of the journalist. This also has high relevance for the Critical Discourse Analyst as regards processes of attributing the nature of ideology, where there is a shift away from stories derived from elite sources and official organizations. Using a sample of 26 news stories and a corpus of 40,000 tweets from a feed called #twowomentravel, which dealt with the journey of two women travelling from Ireland to the United Kingdom for an abortion, this paper uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the discourses from the feed are taken up by the journalists. Findings show an erosion of some of the basic former aspects of journalistic practice related to verification and provision of context as what is "trending" becomes a news definer. Yet those with the skills to understand how it is integrated into news production may use this to disseminate their own ideology.