In Practice: Case Examples by Students

Science Journalists' Personal Brands on Twitter

Laura Takki

The report investigates how Finnish science journalists brand themselves on Twitter. The analysis is based on social media and mass media logic (Matikainen & Villi, 2018) and three levels of journalists’ branding by Molyneux et al. (2018). The results are compared between employed and freelance journalists.

The data consists of the last 200 tweets from four different science journalists gathered in February 2021. The data was gathered and categorized into organic tweets, retweets and replies using Twitonomy. Later, 70 of the 200 tweets from each journalist were downloaded into Atlas.ti for closer content analysis.

Results indicate that the journalists used Twitter mainly for personal branding and represented social media logic rather than mass media logic. The freelance journalists appeared to be more versatile in their Twitter usage, whereas employees appeared more professional. The report is a limited but useful contribution to the ever-growing need for a deeper understanding of social media’s impact on journalism at large.

Abstracts of research reports from the Digital Methods course in 2020, University of Helsinki