Digital-born and legacy news media on twitter during the German federal election

In this RISJ factsheet we analyse 720,799 news-related tweets from a larger dataset of 4.4 million tweets collected during the 2017 German Federal Election to examine the role of digital-born and legacy news media in online political discussions in Germany. The authors Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, Jason R. C. Nurse, Felix M.Simon, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen show in this study how news audience attention took shape on Twitter during the weeks ahead of the polling day and up to the day after of the celebration of this major political event in Europe. Their findings suggest that legacy news media – especially the main public service media organizations and the most important weeklies – figured very prominently in political discussions on Twitter. According to the authors this results speaks to the audience preference for quality journalism and video. Their results also show that that a number of new digital-born brands, including several aligned with national conservative political positions, saw far wider engagement on social media than their size would suggest. In contrast, many established media, especially regional and local newspapers, saw little engagement on Twitter. Among the main findings the authors highlight that the major public service media organisations, ARD and ZDF, alongside weekly news publications, especially Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, which featured very prominently during the German campaign. All four had wide reach and higher levels of audience engagement than other news providers. Secondly, they also found that coinciding with increased popular support for far-right parties in Germany, some news outlets with a clear national-conservative political position, including several digital-born brands and one newspaper, played an important role on Twitter. Notably, they generated much more engagement than their posting activity and generally limited audience reach would suggest. Finally, their data suggests that despite their offline reach, considerable editorial resources, and historical importance, regional newspapers generated overall very little engagement on Twitter during the German Federal election