Sourcing the Sources

<i>Social media today are playing a more important role as a news source than ever before. Yet, there have been no longitudinal studies on journalists’ sourcing practices in recent years that allow us to consider the mechanisms of innovation diffusion. Comparative studies of different social platforms in different media systems are just as rare. We therefore examine the use of Facebook and Twitter as journalistic sources in newspapers of three countries. A main finding is that, after a period of stagnation at the beginning of this decade, the use of social media sources has resurged massively in recent years. The patterns of this second rise of social media in journalism are almost identical in the analyzed newspapers. A comparison of the platforms has shown that Twitter is more commonly used as a news source than Facebook. Compared to Facebook, Twitter is primarily used as an elite channel. An unsupervised topic clustering approach (LDA) also revealed that the issues on which social media are sourced and the quantities of social media references are similar in The New York Times and The Guardian. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, however, journalists source social media considerably less, and in different thematic contexts.</i>

如今，社交媒体作为新闻信源的重要性较以往任何时期都更为凸显。然而，近年来尚无针对新闻从业者信源获取实践的纵向研究，可供我们探究创新扩散的内在机制；同时，针对不同媒体体系下不同社交平台的比较研究也同样稀缺。为此，本研究聚焦三个国家的报纸媒体，考察其将Facebook与Twitter作为新闻信源的使用情况。核心研究结果显示：在本世纪初经历一段停滞期后，近年来新闻业对社交媒体信源的使用已出现强势复苏。本次研究涉及的各家报纸中，新闻业社交媒体使用的第二次复苏模式几乎完全一致。平台对比结果表明，Twitter作为新闻信源的使用率显著高于Facebook。相较于Facebook，Twitter主要被用作精英导向的信源渠道。无监督主题聚类方法（Latent Dirichlet Allocation，LDA）的分析结果同样显示：《纽约时报》与《卫报》中，依托社交媒体获取信源所涉及的议题，以及社交媒体引用量均较为相似。但就《南德意志报》而言，其记者对社交媒体信源的使用量显著更低，且涉及的主题语境也存在差异。