About the lecture

Journalists' relationship with social media has brought about profound changes in the way journalists work. A forthcoming book, "The Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media is Transforming Journalistic Labor," explores the relationship between journalism and social media with a focus on newsroom practice, leadership, and well-being. This talk presents work from Chapter Four, which conducts a qualitative analysis of newsroom social media policies and the values they project.  It finds that these policies are driven by corporate desire for identity and reputation management. The means to achieve this are a blanket prohibition on individual opinion, limits on interactivity and tone, and the removal of online privacy expectations for individual journalists. Inherent in these newsroom social media policies are several paradoxes that arise from newsrooms’ need to balance opportunity and risk and also from newsrooms seeking to balance editorial and social media logics in a hybrid media system. 

About the speaker

Logan Molyneux (PhD, University of Texas Austin) is an associate professor of journalism at Temple University. His research interests include digital media and mobile technology, specifically as they relate to journalistic practices and products. His work uses surveys, content analysis, textual analysis and interviews and has been published in 14 different peer-reviewed journals.