Dissecting Social Media Journalism: A Comparative Study Across Platforms, Outlets and Countries

Abstract

News outlets increasingly position themselves on social media platforms with platform-bound content next to their regular media offerings. At the time of writing, scholarship on studying these novel types of news content remains limited in size and scope. Drawing on recent theoretical insights from the dislocation of news journalism and social media logics, we assess a dataset of Instagram and TikTok posts of public, private and digital-native news outlets from Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom (n = 458). Contrary to previous findings, we conclude that news publishers tend to adapt their content to the specific technological affordances of social media networks and that news-related content prevails, signalling normalisation patterns for how news is produced for and diffused via both platforms.