Journalism and Twitter in Iran: an exploratory study

This paper tries to identify how journalism and Twitter affect each other in Iran. Nowadays, social media become a part of the users’ everyday life and, Twitter as one of the favorite ones is considered as the most convenient media in journalism, regarding its affordances and technical potentials. Therefore, using Bourdieu’s notions, we try to assess the relationship between Iranian users and journalists in Twitter. Moreover, we measure the journalists’ credibility for users. Furthermore, we identify how journalistic practices and journalists’ capitals are affected by Twitter’s usage. In order to do the survey, we chose 217 users and 230 journalists using in purposive and snowball samplings. Results show that users rarely know journalists in Twitter but, they mainly use Twitter and Telegram as their news sources. Additionally, findings confirm that public engagement, sourcing and public note-taking are practices affecting by Twitter’s usage more than other ones. Finally, the research suggest that Twitter’s usage has not significant impact on journalists’ economic and symbolic capitals, while their cultural and social capitals are mainly increased by using of Twitter.