Ordinary People and Social Media as Sources in Norwegian Newspapers

Abstract

Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience.