A Constant State of Flux: Social Media Journalism’s Space and Function in the Digital Newsroom

Social media journalism is rapidly establishing itself incontemporary newsrooms as a normalised journalistic practice.This is once again upending newsroom structures and workflows,although the extent to which this is occurring has not beeninvestigated thus far. To this end, this contribution presents aninterview study with 23 (social media) journalists and editors ofpublic service, private and digital-only news media from Belgiumand Denmark. We position our work within existing literature onsocial media journalism and newsroom integration, the latterspurred by the rise of online journalism at the turn of thecentury. Based on our findings, we propose a conceptual modelfor schematising how different social media platforms are usedfor repurposing or reporting purposes and how social mediajournalism’s degree of autonomy and integration can differwidely between individual newsrooms. Ultimately, we argue thatsocial media journalism currently finds itself in a constant state offlux, from vantage points such as autonomy versus integration,journalism versus marketing, and divergent institutional versusaudience expectations.