A Constant State of Flux: Social Media Journalism’s Space and Function in the Digital Newsroom

Social media journalism is rapidly establishing itself in contemporary newsrooms as a normalised journalistic practice. This is once again upending newsroom structures and workflows, although the extent to which this is occurring has not been investigated thus far. To this end, this contribution presents an interview study with 23 (social media) journalists and editors of public service, private and digital-only news media from Belgium and Denmark. We position our work within existing literature on social media journalism and newsroom integration, the latter spurred by the rise of online journalism at the turn of the century. Based on our findings, we propose a conceptual model for schematising how different social media platforms are used for repurposing or reporting purposes and how social media journalism’s degree of autonomy and integration can differ widely between individual newsrooms. Ultimately, we argue that social media journalism currently finds itself in a constant state of flux, from vantage points such as autonomy versus integration, journalism versus marketing, and divergent institutional versus audience expectations.