Chat App Groups Within and Across Newsrooms

Our interviews show that journalists have been using chat apps to communicate within and across newsrooms, and between reporters, as a way to organize themselves when newsgathering.

Collective chat apps groups

For a major story with numerous foreign journalists onsite, like the Hong Kong protests, there is a professional incentive to create groups of peers to stay in touch about major developments, even as individual journalists will pursue specific scoops or angles that might not be shared with potential competitors. One interviewee observed:

A lot of journalists started their own separate chat groups, especially some foreign ones who maybe don’t speak Chinese or didn’t have a really firm grasp of what was going on, so they would have a support system where they could ask questions about what was going on. I wasn’t that involved in those groups, because I knew what was going on and I didn’t really need help. I wanted to protect my own knowledge and information, but I knew that these groups existed.69

As previously stated in this report, well-organized activist groups were often inviting journalists (and still do) to join dedicated media chat groups. The groups used these digital spaces as long-running press conferences.


Source: WhatsApp

Chat apps groups for journalists within news organization

News organizations may also create more siloed groups specific to their own institutions to increase their competitiveness and overage vis-à-vis other major news organizations. For example, large organizations leveraged institutional size to cover the protest at all sites around the clock, often coordinated in real time, through WhatsApp as an alternative to email. A wire service social media reporter explained: “We took shifts. We would go to one of the main protest sites and just monitor. The editor would assign us to each one of these locations and we would just file [our content] to the WhatsApp group.”70

Journalists invoked notions of shareability speed on chat apps when covering political unrest. As a former Asia foreign correspondent told us, chat apps proved especially useful in team-based reporting:

We used that as a way to communicate with each other and with the editor, whoever was editing back in the office. It was really hard as a reporter on your own to understand what was going on in the greater context, because you were caught in the middle. All you saw was the crowd in front of you, and it was a multi-site protest, so it was really hard to know what was going on in other places without using WhatsApp.71

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