Is it still disintermediated? The role of the influencer news-maker in the social platform era

Abstract

n the last 20 years, the Internet revolution has driven the traditional news-models featured by the journals' gatekeeping towards a brand-new disintermediated logic made by prosumers. This phenomenon has drastically reshaped the logics of the news dissemination, forcing a rethink of journalists’ role. Through a research design based on a content analysis conducted on Facebook, the aim of this paper is to identify the features of the journalists’ reinvention today we can define as influencer news-makers. To achieve our research goal, we identified five of the most influential Italian journalists on social media, and the respective publishers they work with. Analyzing about 20,000 social media posts, the main results from this study concern the emergence of two different profiles: the journalist who reinvents traditional news making practices by exploiting the logics of social media and the journalist who integrates the promotion practices of his own content in the gatekeeping process