Social Media, Socio-Technical Affordances and News Sourcing in Kenya’s Evolving Print Media

Social media has fundamentally reshaped journalism, yet the affordances associated with its impact in legacy media, particularly in Global South contexts, remain underexplored. This article addresses this gap by examining the socio-technical affordances that have emerged from social media-driven disruptions to sourcing practices in Kenya’s evolving print media. Guided by the theory of affordances, which conceptualizes affordances as contextually embedded action possibilities that both enable and constrain human activity, the article draws on a qualitative multiple-case design involving two leading Kenyan newspapers, Daily Nation and The Standard. Data was generated through in-depth interviews with 22 journalists (11 from each newsroom) selected through purposive and snowball sampling. Through a multiple-level thematic analysis, the findings show that social media-driven disruptions to news sourcing can be linked to three hierarchical socio-technical affordances: discovery, engagement, and validation. These affordances expand journalists’ access to information, sources and audience feedback while simultaneously intensifying verification challenges, ethical tensions, safety risks and algorithmic dependence within Kenya’s polarized and resource-constrained news environment. The article contributes theoretically by extending the theory of affordances to news sourcing, empirically by providing context-specific evidence from Kenya, and practically by highlighting the need for institutional support mechanisms to safeguard journalistic integrity amid digital disruption.