1st Edition

Research Methods for Social Media Journalism

Edited By Jonathan Hendrickx, Michaël Opgenhaffen Copyright 2026
204 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

204 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This volume summarizes novel and diverse research methods for both quantitative and qualitative social media journalism-based research.   Focusing in turn on the production, contents, and consumption of social media journalism, the authors explore a multitude of methods, from real-life student experiment to content analysis, observations, and literature reviews. Moving beyond the use of... Read more

Introduction: Why We Edited This Volume and Why It Matters

Part 1: The Production of Social Media Journalism

1. “Let’s make a TikTok”: Unveiling the Role of Social Media Editors through Participant Observation Research

2. Advancing Mixed Digital Methods: Digital Ethnography and Digital Methods in Contemporary Media Cultures

3. “I Just WhatsApped You the Details”: Three Recommendations for Observing Social Media Journalism in Practice

4. Studying Fact-Checks on Social Media: Using a Real-Life Fact-Checking Platform to Explore the Feasibility and Practice of Direct Content Interventions

Part 2: The Contents of Social Media Journalism

5. Designing Content and Textual Analyses of Social Media Posts

6. TikTok Journalism: A Methodological Approach to Content Analysis in the Short-Video Platform

7. Clustering Journalistic TikTok Videos: An Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach to Visual Content Analysis

8. Multimodality of Social Media Research in the Field of Journalism Studies: A Qualitative Perspective

Part 3: The Consumption of Social Media Journalism

9. Can I See What You Mean By News? Methodologies for Understanding Young People’s Changing News Identification and Consumption

10. Advancing Cross- and Multi-Platform Research: Understanding Digital News Flows via Computational Methods

11. Advancing Systematic Literature Reviews as a Method for Re-evaluating Core Concepts in Social Media Journalism

12. Studying Social Media and Journalism with Publicly Available Cross-national Secondary Data

Conclusion: Advancing Scholarship on Social Media Journalism

 

Index

Biography

Jonathan Hendrickx is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Michaël Opgenhaffen is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium.