Social Media Guidelines and the News Paradigm: Do Internet Regulations Comprise Journalistic Norms in Different Media Systems?

Social network use continues to increase in the majority of regions around the world, with a global increase of 17.6% in 2012, and another projected 12.6% in 2014 (digital.org, 2014). Social media have also been incorporated into daily routines of American journalists, with 53.8% reporting that they use microblogs like Twitter on a regular basis to both gather and disseminate information (Willnat & Weaver, 2014). The aim of this study is to investigate how social media, more specifically, social media guidelines, implemented at the organizational level intercede with journalism practices and if these guidelines challenge the news paradigm. While using social media have been a “loop-hole” of sorts to disseminating political information in countries that have strong censorship (the Arab Spring being a premiere example, Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011; Lotan, Graeff, Ananny, Gaffney, & Pearce, 2011), journalists working for mainstream media sources are usually not given carte blanche to use these platforms. However, we argue that these guidelines should not be merely considered an extension of newsroom policies since social media are used for both personal and professional purposes. Using Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) classification of media systems, we will analyze social media guidelines in the liberal and democratic corporatist model. With these considerations, we seek to understand how social media guidelines implemented in the U.S.A. and Germany complement or disrupt existing reporting styles and media systems under the umbrella of the news paradigm.