| Abstract [eng] |
The object of study in this Master‘s thesis is the impact of politicians Facebook communication on Lithuanian news portals‘ agenda and the process of creating news. In order to better investigate the problem, a specific case was chosen for this study – the Kaliningrad transit crisis ant the news stories published in the Lithuanian news portals Delfi.lt, LRT.lt and 15min.lt. The objective of this thesis is to determine how politicians’ communication on Facebook impacts the content of Lithuanian news portals. The tasks of this work are: 1) to reveal the interactions between political communication and creation of news within the hybrid media system; 2) to investigate which sources of information did news portals’ journalists used to cover the Kaliningrad transit crisis by using the descriptive quantitative analysis method; 3) to reveal how news portals used and adapted politicians’ content published on their social media accounts during the Kaliningrad transit crisis. In order to analyse the theoretical aspects of political journalism, social media and political communication, as well as the ways journalists adapt to them, scientific literature, containing information regarding the formation and main principles of the hybrid media system, as well as how do the construction of media agenda and news production principles and how they are affected by social media, was analysed. Descriptive quantitative analysis method was used in this thesis. In sum, 480 publications on the topic of Kaliningrad transit crisis were identified on the news portals Delfi.lt, LRT.lt and 15min.lt. A descriptive statistical analysis of the characteristics of the publications is presented in the thesis. Based on data analysis, the general principles of news production are described, as well as the used sources of information and ways for adapting and presenting the information in the context of the possibilities provided by digital media. Even though it is clear that the political information cycle by content, published by politicians on social media (in Lithuania – Facebook specifically), Lithuanian journalists still use other news media and traditional primary information sources in order to hold the standards of work quality and preserve validity. Politicians’ communication on social media does not affect the process of news production, too: even though all the investigated news portals have the ability to process the content in ways available on the digital environment, they barely ever use it. |
