Hungarian journalists’ practices on social media platforms in light of the concept of the “networked journalist”

August 10, 2018

In her latest article, origially published in Hungarian in the 2018 summer edition of Médiakutató and available in English at the link below, former resident CMDS fellow, Judit Barta analysed how Hungarian journalists use (or don't use) social media platforms, and what influences newsrooms' engagement with emerging digital technologies. As Barta writes, the newly emerging practices of digital culture exert an effect on the changing praxis of journalism, but the manner of their adoption is not pre-determined. North-Atlantic journalists for instance are keen to use Twitter, the social micro-blog platform, to promote their work as well as to engage in dialogue with their colleagues and with their audience. In the event of breaking news, journalists on Twitter can be engaged in networked framing or collaborative production with the users, hence perform transparent news-making. The tech-savviness of Hungarian journalists vary, but they are less likely to use social media platforms to crowdsource their aggregated human resources or to discuss professional issues than journalists socialised in the liberal media model. The article is presenting the potential causes of that collective journalistic behavior pattern through an ethnographic analysis of the Hungarian online journalistic field