Old wine in new bottles? Use of twitter by established UK news media during the 2014-15 west African ebola outbreak

Abstract

This chapter examines how established media - that is, print, TV and radio sources which pre-existed the popularisation of social media -use social media to disseminate content. Specifically it examines the manner in which three UK media sources - BBC News, The Guardian and the Daily Mail - used Twitter during the 2014-2015 Ebola crisis. It asks five key questions concerning: The balance between factual reporting and opinion or comment; the degree to which it shifted attention to specific events within the context of the outbreak; whether the dialogical potential of social media was exploited; the degree to which social media acted as a signpost to more detailed information elsewhere, or existed as independent content; and the degree of media reflexivity. It concludes that established media used this new technology within their existing paradigms for reporting rather than exploiting some of its more innovative characteristics.