Browsing by Author "Rosenback, Michaela"

Developing technologies and social media platforms offer new ways of producing and receiving political content. The political elites need to follow, and update social media on a regular basis, and political messages are being blended into the world of entertainment and show business. At the same time, journalists have incorporated social media in their daily job and use social media platforms as working tools. This affects the interconnections between journalists and politicians, making their relationship increasingly complex. This study aims to scrutinise how political journalists in Finland describe the impact of social media on their job and their possibilities to communicate with politicians. The study explores journalists’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the technological development, and discusses what this rapid flow of information and new options of communication mean for the journalistic trade and professional identity. The data is based on interviews with nine well-known and distinguished political journalists working at various newsrooms in Helsinki, Finland. The interviewees represent print media, radio, television and web, and have between five and thirty five years of experience in political reporting. The interviews are analysed with the help of an applied thematic analysis (ATA) approach. The ATA approach was chosen because it is considered to be transparent, ethical and flexible. For example, the ATA approach takes factors such as resources and time into consideration, aka. limitations that can have impact on the analysis. The ATA approach does not require a painstaking, word-by-word analysis, but rather a systematic work of splitting the data into manageable pieces and identifying general themes and categories. The ATA approach helped me to analyse my data in an efficient manner. The results of the study indicates that social media indeed has changed the dynamics between journalists and politicians. In many ways the informants feel that the relationship has benefited from social media - for example they state that it is easier to stay updated, find material for a story and do research with the help of social media platforms. However, with social media the politicians have gained a new tool of control, which can help them to alienate themselves from journalists and their questions. Therefore, the informants express a worry that that the communication between journalists and politicians increasingly is based on the politicians’ premises. Thus, closeness and speed stand against the risk of politicians becoming stronger agenda setters in an environment where critical questions easily can be ignored or deleted. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that social media platforms and their logic of transparency have challenged the traditional journalistic notion of objectivity. The traditional understanding that journalists should be free of bias is being questioned in contemporary society where journalism has come to be so much more than just information. This study illustrates that journalists of today are urged to share personal viewpoints in order to attract followers, a development that is dictated by social media platforms. That, in turn, reflects the expansion of the journalistic profession. The job has become more than a job. Today it is a mind-set, lifestyle and identity for many hard working journalists.