Multimedia-Rich, Some-to-Some Conversations

Reporters we interviewed highlighted that one of chat apps’ key functionalities is the ability to accommodate a range of conversation sizes: one-to-one, some-to-some, and many-to-many. Second, our interviewees suggested that chat apps minimize the use of a data plan, thus providing a low-cost way to report unrest. Third, on social platforms like Twitter, in-person social encounters often led to connections on chat apps, and vice-versa. For example, after making initial contact on an open platform, reporters often followed sources to other chat apps.

Chat apps are flexible in that they can accommodate a role between broadcast and private communication. Some apps are narrow in the sense that they limit how many people can participate and see specific content (these include Facebook Messenger and Telegram), while others such as WeChat are broader. Apps like WhatsApp allow for a wide range in participant numbers, from one-on-one to large groups, and are thus useful for news organizations at different levels of scale. When journalists engage in a combination of one-on-one and group conversations, chat apps became an important source of information about ongoing events.

Many of our interviewees explained that chat apps are particularly useful for background information. While it might not make it into the finished piece, the information gleaned from them was invaluable. Our research suggests that a large part of chat apps’ value is in allowing journalists to dip into different streams of information at will, picking out bits of multimedia or zeroing in on useful informants for a private one-to-one conversation. For example, youth groups leading the protests in Hong Kong treated their official media chat groups as rolling digital press conferences. This provided correspondents covering the Hong Kong unrest with a multilingual, text-searchable record of the students’ view of events and answers to press questions, with direct access to the individual posting content through chat or a phone call if a reporter wanted to follow up. This ability to swiftly zoom in and out of newsmakers’ discourse on an evolving news story, and follow up quickly with confirmation and corroborating multimedia, constitutes an important addition to the reporter’s toolbox. In previous generations, journalists in crisis situations had to rely on media sources that were one-to-many (e.g., state radio) many-to-many (e.g., protesters’ leaflets and speeches), or one-to-one (e.g., telephone calls or in-person interviews).

In summary, chat apps’ group-chat functions offer journalists a multimedia-rich set of some-to-some conversations with sources, one-to-one chats, or phone calls a few buttons away.