More than a decade of research in journalism studies on social media has examined how journalists and news organizations have adopted and/or adapted to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more, surfacing tensions over professional control and normalization. This article advances a conceptual framework for analyzing forms of journalistic norms and practices on social media that takes as its starting point the nature of its platforms, specifically Twitter and Instagram, proposing five analytical dimensions to investigate journalism on social media. They are: 1) structure and design; 2) aesthetics; 3) genre conventions; 4) rhetorical practices; and 5) interaction mechanisms and intentionality. The accounts of five Chilean journalists are used to illustrate how these five dimensions work in the two platforms.

This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominent — consistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage—, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.

Comparative research across the world has shown that nation-level variables are strong predictors of professional roles in journalism. There is, however, still insufficient comparative research about three key issues: cross-national comparison of journalistic role performance, exploration of how – or whether – organizational variables account for variation in role performance across countries, and the performance of specific journalistic roles that prevail in regions with post-authoritarian political trajectories. This article tackles these three issues by comparatively measuring journalistic performance in five Latin American countries. Based on a content analysis of 9841 news items from 18 newspapers, this article reports findings from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, by analyzing the presence of the ‘interventionist’, ‘watchdog’, ‘loyal’, ‘service’, ‘infotainment’, and ‘civic’ roles. Results show that the region is far from homogeneous and that while ‘country’ is a strong predictor for most of the roles, other variables such as ‘media type’, ‘political orientation’, and ‘news topic’ are also significant predictors to varying levels.

In traditional news media, professional journalists are expected to follow the norms and practices created and perpetuated in the field to maintain autonomy and authority. Social media spaces lay outside these institutional boundaries, serving as public, semi-public, and private spaces for connection, interaction, publication, and amplification, as well as the commodification of the personal for users, including news professionals. This has given rise to tensions in journalism over the boundaries between the personal and the professional, and the public and the private, vis-à-vis the erosion of separation between editorial and commercial functions in journalism. This article proposes an analytical model to theorize journalistic identities in social media and how they interact with internal and external forces in digital spaces. Specifically, we address the identity (de)construction of journalists along a spectrum from professional to personal as it intersects with elements that impact identity, from publisher to product. This study expands the scope of journalism research to analyse the blurring of editorial and commercial decisions at the individual level, accounting for a break in the established relationship between publisher and product that has formed the basis of the news business for more than a century.

One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles in social media practice is that the profession’s conceptual boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Social media has developed as a space used by audiences to consume, share, and discuss news and information, offering novel locations for journalists to intervene at professional and personal levels and in private and public spheres. This article takes the “journalistic ego” domain as its starting point to examine how journalists perform three specific roles on social media: the promoter, the celebrity, and the joker. To investigate these roles in journalistic performance, the article situates their emergence and operationalization in a broader epistemological context, examining how journalists engage with, contest, and/or diverge from different professional norms and practices, as well as the conflict between traditional and social media-specific roles of journalists.

Based on a standardized operationalization of the watchdog, civic, interventionist, loyal-facilitator, infotainment, and service roles, this study combines survey ( N = 643) and content analysis data ( N = 19,908) to explain gaps between newspaper journalists’ role conceptions and the performance of their press organizations in nine countries from Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia. Taking an institutional approach by focusing on institutional influences on the conception–performance gap at three levels (individual, organizational, societal), our results show that these gaps are largest for the two roles most connected with the public functions of journalism, the civic, and the watchdog roles. Multilevel analyses offer significant evidence on that, across all six analyzed roles, the size of the gaps differed more clearly between journalists and between media organizations, than among countries. Although influences on an individual level (i.e., perceived autonomy) have some explanatory power, influences on the organizational level and, more specifically, ownership and codified editorial policies are the factors that best explain conception–performance gaps. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the public skepticism about the performance of journalism and the media.