12 mars 2016

New paper in Digital Journalism shows a decline in journalists’ valuation of social media affordances

A new article on social media in journalism, Appropriating social media. The changing uses of social media among journalists across time, co-authored with Monika Djerf-Pierre and Marina Ghersetti, is now published online in Digital Journalism. The article is based on the material we presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff last September.
     The study draws on panel survey data from 2012 and 2014, and for the first time we can now show how individual journalists have changed their use of social media over time: while there is a slight increase in the overall use of social media among journalists, some of the previous ”enthusiasts” in fact decrease their use of social media – or give up social media all together. The findings also suggests a decline in the valuation of social media affordances for different professional tasks. As the abstract says:
”The hype over social media and the rapid expansion of social networking and micro-blogging in recent years can easily lead us to believe that all journalists are online, chatting and tweet- ing, all the time. Previous research, however, indicates that the spread of social media differs between groups of journalists and that social media usage is related to the journalist’s age, gender, type of work and workplace. This paper advances our understanding of how journalists appropriate social media in their professional lives by examining the changes in social media use across time. We examine if and how the perceived usefulness of social media for various professional purposes changes over time, and if different categories of journalists change their usage in different ways. The theoretical perspective draws from theories on the appropriation and adoption of technologies. The empirical material consists of Web survey data collected in 2012 and 2014, targeting representative samples of Swedish journalists. Our findings show that the use of social media increased slightly between the two surveys but the expansion was levelling off in 2014. Some early adopters were abandoning social media, and there was a noticeable decline in the journalists’ valuation of social media affordances.”
If you want to read more than the abstract (above), please contact me and I'll send you a link to an ”author's copy”.

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