Journalists and communicators on Twitch: media beyond social networks

Abstract

Journalists and communicators discovered Twitch in mid-2020, during the months of quarantine imposed by Covid-19, during which a large part of the population used the Internet to seek communication with the outside world that confinement prevented. Given its content, dedicated to e-sports, and the youth of its followers, this specialized social network had gone unnoticed by the general public for years. Having initially been a platform for broadcasting video games, thanks to the arrival of journalists it started to become a space for information and entertainment, with the creation of new channels aimed at a more adult audience. The aim of this paper is to analyse the presence of journalists and communicators on Twitch, how they structure their channels, the use they make of this platform compared to other similar platforms, the differences and similarities in their use of the platform compared to the streamers already present on Twitch and, finally, to evaluate whether Twitch meets the necessary conditions to become an appropriate medium for news communication. By looking at the content generated on Twitch by five journalists and communicators, we study how they adapt their channels to the common characteristics of the platform, which can be seen in the behaviours and content generated by video game creators.