Original scientific paper
Influence of Social Networks on National Television News Programmes
Dajana Šošić
; Croatian Radio-television (HRT), Zagreb, Croatia
Pero Maldini
orcid.org/0000-0001-8036-619X
; University of Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Abstract
This paper deals with the influence of social media on the creation of news in Croatian national television news programmes.
It examines how posts published in social media influence news on public and commercial televisions, primarily
concerning the creation of relevant political messages in national television central news programmes (HTV, RTL,
Nova TV). At the same time, the paper attempts to determine which social media news are used the most, and which
televisions lead in conveying the same. The research was based on several assumptions, presented through three hypotheses.
The first is that commercial televisions use social media as a source of information to a greater extent than the
public television. The second is that most posts from the social media that are presented in public and commercial television
news refer to political messages. The third is that journalists usually do not check the authenticity of posts and messages
in social media by consulting additional sources. Taking into consideration uniqueness of television as a visual
medium, this paper was trying to test in which manner presenting posts from social media impacts the changes within
television as a medium. By using two empirical research methods (quantitative method based on surveys and content
analysis) and by comprising a representative sample (of both the respondents and characteristic content segments). The
results obtained basically refuted both the first and the third hypotheses, while the second one was supported in full. The
results – along with the confirmation of the importance of social media as a source of information – displayed the structure
of using the shared information, especially the information with political content, crucial to forming public opinion. At
the same time, they also showed the direction of change of the television medium in the media convergence environment.
Keywords
television, social media, messages, source of news, transition, political communication
Hrčak ID:
239572
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2019.
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