Logan Molyneux

Temple University | TU · Department of Journalism

This commentary considers the concept of “disconnection” as a way to understand practices of contemporary digital journalism while advocating for consideration of disconnection as a necessary component of sustainable journalism.

Journalists are increasingly reporting that online harassment has become a common feature of their working lives, contributing to experiences of fatigue, anxiety and disconnection from social media as well as their profession. Drawing on interviews with American newsworkers, this study finds at least three distinct forms of harassment: acute harass...

Journalistic work is shifting toward more aggregative and intertextual forms, using published sources more often within their news routines and stories. This study examines that shift through the lens of evidence. It applies the concepts of evidentiary distance and ancillary evidence — that is, evidence about evidence — to news texts to explore the...

Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times ab...

As journalism undergoes widespread changes, it finds itself in a ‘new normal’. Research seeking to understand these changes by surveying journalists faces new methodological hurdles that span different stages of the survey process. This article identifies the key contemporary challenges when it comes to sampling, instrument design, and distribution...

The field of journalism is experiencing intense diversification in form and message while trying to overcome widespread public disaffection by reinforcing professional norms. This study focuses on two forces—normalization and fragmentation—by observing them at work on social media. We analyzed content and interactions from mainstream and non-mainst...

As the field of journalism becomes increasingly unrecognizable, the messages that identify the journalist, their work, and their affiliations are of increasing importance. This study envisions journalism and social media both as gendered spaces and examines their intersection as the setting of much of journalists’ branding work. In this setting, ge...

Many journalists and industry observers lament that aggregating news underneath sensational headlines will erode credibility and turn off readers. While some scholarly work has studied journalists’ perspectives of this practice, little has been done to understand what audiences think of aggregation and clickbait. This study uses published original...

Journalists have adopted social media platforms as a primary site of digital information gathering and interaction. Journalists use social media to follow members of the public, their sources, and other journalists as they seek to discover and report on the day's news. Social media and Twitter in particular are like a new newswire for journalists a...

This study offers a new way of understanding the motivations that influence media workers’ impression management (or branding) in the social media era. Amid the growing insecurity of media work generally and the particular pressures of branding oneself and promoting one’s employer online, our research introduces a framework through which to interpr...

Amid a broader reckoning about the role of social media in public life, this article argues that the same scrutiny can be applied to the journalism studies field and its approaches to examining social media. A decade later, what hath such research wrought? In the broad study of news and its digital transformation, few topics have captivated researc...

The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US...

As journalists continue integrating social media into their professional work, they wrestle with ways to best represent themselves, their organizations, and their profession. Several recent studies have examined this trend in terms of branding, raising important questions about the changing ways in which journalists present themselves and how these...

Journalists are frequently doing some of their daily work on social media, spaces they did not create but have appropriated for journalistic purposes. Building on previous studies of how political journalists use social media, this study examines how news professionals and organizations are employing new affordances of the platform as they engage t...

Studies of informational media use have focused on individual platforms or pitted platforms against each other when investigating their connections to civic engagement. This study offers evidence, collected in a 2016 survey of US adults, of how civically engaged individuals consume various types of news content across multiple platforms. Results su...

This study investigates news consumption on mobile devices with the goal of identifying where mobile devices fit into people’s media repertoires and how consumption patterns on them are different from those on other platforms. Results suggest that mobile devices are almost always used along with other platforms for getting news, that news sessions...

In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communicati...

In a social media age, branding is an increasingly visible aspect of identity construction online. For media professionals generally and journalists especially, branding on spaces such as Twitter reveals the complicated set of forces confronting such public-facing actors as they navigate tensions between personal disclosure for authenticity and pro...

Journalists have been shown to be highly capable of making good moral decisions, but they do not always act as ethically as studies show them to be able. Using the Reasoned Action Model, this study explores the gap between moral motivation and moral behavior and tests the proposition that different social norms can help predict how journalists beha...

Researchers have explored the role of organizational and personal branding in journalism, paying particular attention to digital media and social network sites. While these studies have observed a rise in the incorporation of branding practices among journalists, they have largely avoided questions about the implications such shifts in practice may...

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming-related community construct th...

Observational studies of journalists on social media platforms suggest that journalists are beginning to develop personal brands using social media. Similar studies suggest that journalists covering specialty areas such as health are more likely to experiment with and adopt new forms of practice that break with the traditional tenets of journalism....

This study explores the use of Twitter by political reporters and commentators—an understudied population within the rapidly growing literature on digital journalism—covering the 2012 Republican and Democratic conventions. In particular, we want to know if and how the “affordances” of Twitter are shaping the traditional norms and routines of US cam...

In a multichannel era of fragmented and contested political communication, both misinformation and fact checking have taken on new significance. The rise of Twitter as a key venue for political journalists would seem to support their fact-checking activities. Through a content analysis of political journalists' Twitter discourse surrounding the 201...

A survey of U.S. newspaper reporters and editors found that journalists with smartphones are more likely to produce multimedia, including audio, video and photo content; however, many complain that smartphones keep them tethered to their work seven days a week.

Using Twitter, journalists may pass along comment from other users without, at least ostensibly, taking accountability for that message. Minimizing responsibility and editorial oversight, as is the case with retweets, allows a different view of individual journalists as gatekeepers. Through a qualitative textual analysis, this study finds that jour...

This article relies on U.S. 2-wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social med...

This article relies on U.S. 2-wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social med...

This study explores the use of Twitter by political reporters and commentators*an understudied population within the rapidly growing literature on digital journalism*covering the 2012 Republican and Democratic conventions. In particular, we want to know if and how the ‘‘affordances’’ of Twitter are shaping the traditional norms and routines of US c...