Journalists’ Ideological Branding: Bridging Professional and Personal Branding on Twitter

Abstract

Previous scholarship has identified three levels of journalists’ brand identity: individual, organizational, and institutional. Based on an exploration of Israeli journalists on the Hebrew-speaking Twittersphere during three consecutive election campaigns (2019–2021), this paper wishes to offer an additional level: Ideological Branding. Such branding is based on journalists’ ideological, political, social, economic, and religious viewpoints as well as their biography and networks of friends. It functions as a bridge that connects and integrates the professional and personal levels. The study employed a mixed-method approach, including in-depth interviews and quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 10 prominent Israeli journalists’ Twitter profiles and political tweets (N = 2,758). The findings reveal that journalists, in general, and conservative ones in particular, are normalizing their political messages as legitimate journalistic narratives within mainstream media by effectively leveraging their ideological standpoint on Twitter to ignite online viral activity, thereby enhancing their brand recognition, career prospects, and celebrity status.