In a democratic society, news media should deliberately cover diverse ideas and opinions from dif... more In a democratic society, news media should deliberately cover diverse ideas and opinions from different people. However, scholars have found that local, environmental reporters favor citing government and industry sources over environmental activists and local residents. This dominance of official sources is observed in climate change news reporting. Today, social media has been adopted in newsrooms as a reporting tool. Some argue that the hierarchy of sources is replicated in the adoption of social media. Others claim that social media seems to turn the hierarchy of sources upside down, giving more control to everyday citizens than to official sources. This paper identifies local journalists who use social media. Local reporters in the Great Lakes Region were invited to participate in a survey research in 2011. The survey results show that frequent climate change reporters and those who value the public’s interests (the mobilizers) are more likely to source social media. Based on the survey results, a content analysis was conducted to collect climate change stories from 2011 to 2012 through RSS feeds. The pilot survey and content analysis provide a comprehensive view that local climate change reporters may use social media in news discovery stage, but do not directly cite them in the news. The use of social media may encourage local reporting on distant and global events, but the increases of source diversity have not been found through sourcing social media.
In a democratic society, news media should deliberately cover diverse ideas and opinions from dif... more In a democratic society, news media should deliberately cover diverse ideas and opinions from different people. However, scholars have found that local, environmental reporters favor citing government and industry sources over environmental activists and local residents. This dominance of official sources is observed in climate change news reporting. Today, social media has been adopted in newsrooms as a reporting tool. Some argue that the hierarchy of sources is replicated in the adoption of social media. Others claim that social media seems to turn the hierarchy of sources upside down, giving more control to everyday citizens than to official sources. This paper identifies local journalists who use social media. Local reporters in the Great Lakes Region were invited to participate in a survey research in 2011. The survey results show that frequent climate change reporters and those who value the public’s interests (the mobilizers) are more likely to source social media. Based on the survey results, a content analysis was conducted to collect climate change stories from 2011 to 2012 through RSS feeds. The pilot survey and content analysis provide a comprehensive view that local climate change reporters may use social media in news discovery stage, but do not directly cite them in the news. The use of social media may encourage local reporting on distant and global events, but the increases of source diversity have not been found through sourcing social media.
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This paper identifies local journalists who use social media. Local reporters in the Great Lakes Region were invited to participate in a survey research in 2011. The survey results show that frequent climate change reporters and those who value the public’s interests (the mobilizers) are more likely to source social media. Based on the survey results, a content analysis was conducted to collect climate change stories from 2011 to 2012 through RSS feeds. The pilot survey and content analysis provide a comprehensive view that local climate change reporters may use social media in news discovery stage, but do not directly cite them in the news. The use of social media may encourage local reporting on distant and global events, but the increases of source diversity have not been found through sourcing social media.
This paper identifies local journalists who use social media. Local reporters in the Great Lakes Region were invited to participate in a survey research in 2011. The survey results show that frequent climate change reporters and those who value the public’s interests (the mobilizers) are more likely to source social media. Based on the survey results, a content analysis was conducted to collect climate change stories from 2011 to 2012 through RSS feeds. The pilot survey and content analysis provide a comprehensive view that local climate change reporters may use social media in news discovery stage, but do not directly cite them in the news. The use of social media may encourage local reporting on distant and global events, but the increases of source diversity have not been found through sourcing social media.