Social media applications and the changing newsroom cultures in Africa: a case study of Lesotho

Abstract

Social media has been widely adopted into journalistic ecologies, as it provides instant and widespread access to several contents about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events (Heravi & Harrower, Twitter Journalism in Ireland: Sourcing and Trust in the Age of Social Media. Information, Communication & Society, 19(9), 1194–1213, 2016). This view is bolstered by Alejandro (Journalism in the Age of Social Media. Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, 5, 1–47, 2010) observing that what makes social media of interest to journalism is how it has become influential as a communication and news-breaking tool. Writing on the same topic, Van Dijck and Poell (Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space. Social Media+ Society, 1(2), 2056305115622482, 2015) observed that the first decade of social media gave rise to an online infrastructure that profoundly shaped the way in which societies are organised and publics are shaped. This phenomenon of social media use in journalistic workflows has been on an upward trend in the global South considering that this affordance has reconfigured the political economy of news gathering, making previously inaccessible sources to be available at a lower cost (Mabweazara, Introduction: ‘Digital technologies and the evolving African newsroom’: Towards an African digital journalism epistemology. Digital Journalism, 2(1), 2–11, 2014a; Bosch, Social media and community radio journalism in South Africa. Digital Journalism, 2(1), 29–43, 2014; Mwongela, New media technologies and hate messages: Investigating the role of social Media in Propagation of hate messages in Kenya (Doctoral dissertation, University of Nairobi, 2015). However, social media content poses several challenges for journalists; as Heravi and Harrower (2016) argue, it arrives unfiltered, full of noise and at an alarming velocity. This chapter investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic ecologies and attitudes towards various aspects of social media into journalistic practices in Lesotho’s media markets. It particularly investigates how Twitter and Facebook shape the sourcing, production and dissemination practices. Theoretically, the chapter employs the sociology of news production lens with semi-structured interviews informing the methodological approach. The interviews are conducted with editors and journalists from The Post, News Day and Lesotho Times newspapers. This qualitative study confirms seminal findings of Heravi and Harrower (2016) who established that the relationship between trust, sourcing and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism.