Discovering new roles of journalists using social network analysis and twitter

The Twitter coverage of the Iranian election is not the first precedent where user generated content and social media have caught global attention (Morozov, 2009) (Zuckerman, 2009).
Based on the theory of the "Two-Step Flow of Communication" (Lazarsfeld et Al., 1948) and methods of Social Network Analysis, this paper analyzes the twitter networks of professional journalists and bloggers in the Iranian context in order to describe their new role in the social media ecosystem. On the example of the journalist Robert Mackey, we investigated how he is using social media as a potential information source. We then analyzed the information flow from his sources to his readers based on his twitter accounts and his blog. Analyzing betweenness measures and determining his position in the network consisting of 35 sources and 210 readers we were able to observe that Mackeys position in the information process about Iran shows characteristics of an information brokerage role (Burt, 1999). To verify this finding we analyzed over 100.000 tweets of his twitter readers and found that while some of his very Iran interested readers prefer to obtain information directly from the original sources most of his readers choose to use him as a source of information instead. Based on the results we were able to
show the emergence of new media ecosystems (Bowman and Willis, 2005) where professional journalists are trying to find a more authentic and conversational role with their audience. The identified
network structure shows, that social media like twitter might have the potential to change the media production and reception processes dramatically.