How social media affordances shape journalistic content production: A stimulus-based interview study on journalists’ perceptions

Social media platforms are increasingly central for delivering journalistic content. While evidence suggests that social media led to adaptations of journalistic production routines, comparatively little is known about the specific platform characteristics that shape coordinating, selecting, and editing social media content. Adopting an affordance lens, this study seeks to tackle this gap and investigates how social media journalists perceive platform properties and their influence on journalistic contenft production. To answer this question, the study relies on stimulus-based qualitative interviews with 34 social media journalists from Germany, focusing primarily on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. By combining platform walkthroughs and reconstruction interviews, the analysis provides fine-grained insights into how a set of affordances, ranging from the perceived degree of algorithmic curation over (user-induced) spatiotemporal boundaries to platforms’ communicative forms, shapes the different stages of content production. The proposed affordances are both universal and variable, forming a typology that facilitates systematic comparisons across current and future platforms.