The Influence of Social Media in Journalistic Practices and Ethics
Supervisors: Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor Charlie Beckett
Media sociology, journalism, social media, digital media, discourse analysis, news production, participatory media, networked journalism, identity. I am looking at how journalists in mainstream newsrooms negotiate the tensions that emerge as social media increasingly enter their everyday practices. These are changes that relate to the wider disruption in the western mediascape. The journalistic identity is challenged by the crisis in journalism: the decline in revenues has led to layoffs, closures, and the restructuring of newsrooms. This uncertain professional environment threatens the journalists’ sense of security: there is the danger of unemployment or the worsening of working conditions. Technological change as a pervasive feature of late modernity is implicated in this crisis. The journalistic institutions are threatened on the financial level by the new startups that take advantage of the cheaper publishing affordances to claim their share of advertising revenues. The anxiety that comes with these changes manifests in concerns over the future of journalism. The digital technologies that seem to threaten the sustainability of legacy media, such as social media, are appropriated by these very institutions as means of opportunity. Participants in social media exercise their agency in constructing their self-identities, towards self-actualisation. These performances are recognised as having a democratising influence on the public space, as they enable participation and are characterised by openness and dialogicality. Nevertheless individual self-expression in late modernity is enveloped in a system of capitalist production. Processes of commodification, promoted though advertising are central to economic growth. As such social media embody the tension between their potential to give voice and their commodification of participation. For journalism social media bear the optimistic potential for a new journalistic paradigm that will favour transparency and collaborative relations with the public. On the other hand, the critics of social media point to their dependence on processes of marketisation and commodification that contradict journalism’s values. As social media are normalised in newsroom practice both critics and optimists concur that the values of immediacy and authenticity, while finding purchase in journalistic practice, can clash with the professional values of verification and accuracy. Journalists are then currently caught in the reflexive negotiations between these tensions, that culminates in their ambivalence towards social media.
I have worked as a journalist for more than a decade in newspapers, magazines and newssites. I was social media director and web editor for To Vima newspaper in Athens Greece. In the past I was the editor of Esquire Greece and have reported for The Independent and blogged for the Huffington Post. I hold a Master’s in Electronic Communication and Publishing from University College London, and a Bachelor’s in Linguistics from the University of Athens.