Microblogging and the News: Political Elites and the Ultimate Retweet

Abstract

A particularly important question that has yet to be addressed about microblogging is the extent to which tweeting from politicians influences the traditional media's news coverage. This chapter seeks to address this oversight by tracking print, broadcast, and online news mentions of tweets from political elites during the five-and-a-half years since microblogging started. Consistent with previous research into “new media” effects and journalistic sourcing patterns, the authors find that although reporters, pundits, and bloggers are increasingly incorporating tweets into their news discussions, the group of Twitterers who are consistently quoted is small and drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of nationally recognizable political leaders. In addition to contributing to the emerging literature on Twitter, the analysis presented here suggests a new way of conceptualizing influence on the site. Rather than focusing strictly on Twitter-centric measures of message diffusion, the findings of this chapter suggest that researchers should begin to consider the ways that tweets can shape political discourse by spreading beyond the fairly narrow world of microblogging.