Visible beyond bylines: How social media has reengineered journalistic authorship

This paper analyzes how social media platforms affect journalistic authorship. It conducts two case studies of how Facebook’s and Twitter’s “verified profile” features have impacted the status of journalists on their platforms. Through the lens of authorship theory, this study advances the understanding of power dynamics between social media platforms, journalists and news organizations.
In journalism, authorship refers to the attribution of news stories to the journalists who crafted them. This is usually achieved by including journalists’ names in bylines (Reich, 2010). Such crediting not only makes visible the human subjects behind the headlines, but holds them accountable, for example, for the authenticity of reported facts. Visibility and exposure are also key elements of journalistic authority. Authority – which is closely related to authorship – has been operationalized as journalist’s “right to be listened to” as legitimate and “credible spokespersons” of news events (Carlson, 2017; Zelizer & Allan, 2010).
Likewise, on attention-driven social media, visibility is critical for news organizations. However, unlike traditional media, social media are proprietary, rule-driven platforms. For example, the working logic of the algorithms that govern the visibility of content is strictly controlled by tech firms (Bucher, 2012). Similarly, platforms determine the design and features of the interfaces where audiences encounter news. Such configurations exemplify the intricate relationship social media platforms maintain with news organizations; cooperation and competition occur simultaneously (Bell, 2015; Kleis Nielsen & Ganter, 2017).
This paper focuses on the profile verification feature of Facebook and Twitter as a proxy to research how social media technologies affect journalistic authorship. On both platforms, journalists can apply to have their profiles verified and get publicly visible “badges” besides their user names. Designed to be an indicator of authenticity, verified profiles are reserved for “public figures”, including journalists and news organizations. That is, verified profiles are exclusive and create a hierarchy in the discourse between their bearers and ordinary users.
The research gap addressed in this study concerns the consequences of such deliberately engineered social media instruments on journalistic authorship. The two research questions are:
- RQ1: What are Twitter and Facebook’s rationale of providing journalistic authors with publicly visible verified profiles?
- RQ2: How does social media profile verification, from the point of view of authorship theory, reconfigure power dynamics between journalists and news organizations?
The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual model based on journalistic authorship that explains the ongoing power shifts between social media platforms, journalists and news organizations. In the first part, two case studies of Twitter and Facebook were conducted. They include a qualitative content analysis of profile verification instructions and an evaluation of the software features. In the second, theoretical part, the case study results are discussed and contrasted with findings from authorship theory.
The results suggest that social media platforms have deliberately enhanced journalists’ status as authors. The acquired social media visibility of some journalists has created a situation where they compete for attention against their employers, the news organizations. These findings therefore draw a more nuanced view on the power relationship between social media and journalism.