Moving Politics Online: How Australian Mainstream Media Portray Social Media as Political Tools

(by Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns) Difficult as it may be to believe, we’re still almost three months out from the likely date of the next Australian federal election; campaigning during this time will become even more frenzied than it has been to date. A sea of speculation, controversy, and crisis surrounds the polls, and …

Social Media in the Media III: Uses

In previous posts I outlined the details of a preliminary study we conducted on how social media are used as political tools and how this activity is portrayed in traditional media outlets. I provide an overview of the study and insights into the way in which newspaper articles compare and contrast new and traditional media …

Social Media in the Media II: User Groups

In a previous post I introduced work we have been doing here at the CCI to contribute to an understanding of the way in which social media are portrayed as political tools in traditional media outlets. In this post I provided a broad overview of a preliminary qualitative study of 56 articles from Australian newspapers …

Social Media in the Media I: Comparing Social and Traditional Media

One of the research projects some of us here at the CCI are currently involved in, in cooperation with researchers from California State University, Uppsala University, and the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, aims to apply a cross-media and cross-national approach to exploring The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns. As part …

An honest mistake: how to recover from a mistweet

In a previous blog post, I discussed the re-awakening of the @pontifex Twitter account, which had been sede vacante after Pope Benedict XVI stepped down and a new Pope had not yet been elected. Only minutes after Jorge Mario Bergolio stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to present himself as the new …

HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM: Pope Francis’s first @pontifex tweet and public reactions

The new Pope’s first tweet was published shortly after Jorge Mario Bergolio stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to make his first public appearance, taking on (one of) his new role(s) as celebrity figurehead of the Catholic Church. ‘HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM’, it symbolically yelled in all capital letters. The message was retweeted …