Professional Media and Twitter – Similarities, Differences and Interdependencies: Twitter and Media Coverage of Jeremy Corbyn´s Election Campaign 2016

In an increasingly digitalised and networked news environment, professional media actors face a variety of interdependent and simultaneous challenges, the most significant being the considerable loss of audience reach due to the competition with online news outlets , the increasing normative media-critical attitude of anti-establishment movements or “citizen journalists” and the resulting threat, which this developments could pose to the agenda-setting power of traditional journalism. This paper investigates, if the microblogging service Twitter provides potential solutions to this obstacles: Firstly, the use of Twitter as a marketing tool could help to regain lost audiences. Secondly, engaging in direct conversations with other Twitter users could not only provide a suitable research mechanism for “networked” (freelance) journalists, but also bridge the gap between the public, the blogosphere and professional journalism and therefore help to restore trust in the professional news producing process. And finally, an adequate use of Twitter therefore could help to preserve the agenda setting power of traditional media actors by extending its reach to one of the most popular social networking and political debate platforms. This paper summarizes previous research from the field of political Twitter research and media studies to define the preconditions and implementation-criteria of an effective Twitter use by media companies and journalists. In order to test the hypotheses deducted from this theoretical framework, this research analyses the Twitter and media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn´s campaign for the Labour Leadership Election from 9th till 30th September 2016 by employing a multi-level multi-method approach: While a time-series analysis compares the similarities, differences and interdependencies of 115029 Twitter messages and 42457 news media reports related to this campaign, a network-analytical evaluation of the core conversational @reply-network (5779 Tweets from 4208 Twitter users) examines the divergent roles and activities of different Twitter user groups with a special focus on media actors. Thus, this study observes, that (1) “media events” generate similar peaks in Twitter and media coverage, which however differ in their intensity, (2) the topical attention-cycles of professional news-reporters reflect a partly autoregressive process, while the selective attention of Twitter users displays instantaneity, (3) Twitter and media coverage are significantly cross-correlated, (4) neither Twitter nor media coverage influence each other, (5) already established political elites like media actors are more likely to receive @replies, (6) the same elites are less likely to send @replies and (7) this elites also are less likely able to control the flow of @replies. As most of this studies theoretical and methodological approaches are comparatively innovative, its findings not only contribute to, but also expand the existing body of research towards political Twitter use and the digitalisation strategies of established news media.