The Use of Social Media as Journalistic Sources by Legacy and Online Newspapers in Malaysia

Traditional journalism practices are changing due to the advancement in information and communication technologies contributed by social media. Today, social media play an important role as journalistic sources as they offer a convenient, inexpensive and effective way to gather information. Social media also provides journalists easy access to a wide range of sources, while empowering both elites and the general public to express their opinions. The journalist-source relationship is one of the fundamental concerns in journalism research. Journalist’s online sourcing approach deserves special attention because it is related to the democratising effect of the Internet, as well as the changing nature of news and the role of the journalist.. Furthermore, news sources have the power to interpret and define reality, while playing an important function in agenda-setting and framing. The current study aimed to examine the use of social media as journalistic sources by Malaysian legacy and online newspapers. This study employed content analysis as the research method and diffusion of innovation theory as the theoretical framework. The study found that the legacy newspaper The Star cited social media news sources fivefold more than the online newspaper Malaysiakini. Twitter and Facebook were most commonly adopted as news sources by both newspapers. The Star tended to quote only social media sources in its news reports, while Malaysiakini was found to mostly publish the social media posts in screenshot or verbatim format. In addition, both the newspapers mostly quoted the social media posts to provide more context to the stories. The Star and Malaysiakini mostly quoted politicians from Facebook and Twitter posts, while reporting celebrities’ or artists’ voices from Instagram posts. Majority of the news stories in The Star that quoted social media were international news while most of the stories in Malaysiakini were national news. The topics for which social media were most commonly sourced by The Star and Malaysiakini included politics, crime, media, technology, arts, culture, lifestyle and entertainment. This study contributes to the ongoing effort in documenting the impact of social media on journalists as individual media workers, as well as for journalism as an institution