Journalists in today’s digital world embrace social media to source information or to promote their stories, their views and themselves. But journalistic practice, too, can become the subject of critique and discussion on social media platforms. Our research uses a critical discourse studies approach to examine a series of discussions in the comments sections on the The Times website and its Times+ members’ webpage where readers criticise the news organisation’s decision to omit an important event from its front page. We examine these forums as interactive spaces of digitally mediatised communication, firstly, to understand who the commenters believed they were talking to, as journalists rarely become involved, and secondly, to explore how a single emotive issue empowers commenters to form an online community.
Keywords
- critical discourse studies
- user comments
- interaction
- journalism
