Much Ado About Nothing?: The low importance of Twitter as a sourcing tool for economic journalists

Digitalisation has changed journalistic sourcing techniques and affected the way journalists approach sources. This study examines how new information channels change the relationship between journalists and their (potential) sources in this evolving environment and analyses the role of these channels. We are not only interested in the sources that make it into the news, but study the broader networks of people and institutions journalists rely on to help them monitor and gather information. We combine online Twitter network analysis with in-depth interviews to create a detailed mapping of the professional source networks of 33 economic journalists in Belgium. Our results identify that the Twitter networks of economic journalists to a large extent reflect their broader sourcing practices. Overall, the same actor groups are important in both the online and the offline source networks with the exception of the more prominent presence of other journalists and media organisations in the Twitter network of journalists. We conclude that Twitter is implemented within existing sourcing practices without fundamentally changing the news production process.