The social foreign correspondent: reconfiguring journalistic branding research in the age of social media

Journalistic branding in the age of social media has been attracting growing academic interest. Self-branding has become an everyday routine among journalists, but the very limited scholarship on journalistic branding on social media has largely focused on national or local journalists in single democracies, ignoring foreign correspondents, who traditionally enjoy more professional autonomy but are going social under the challenges in the age of social media. This study looks at how foreign correspondents in China, with a heavily regulated and censored social media environment, use Twitter for journalistic branding, and examines the dynamics of this branding. The Twitter profiles of 129 China correspondents and 1,249 of their tweets were content analyzed, with the findings suggesting that foreign correspondents in China use Twitter primarily for broadcasting rather than networking. They also emphasize organizational identity much more than personal one. The implications of those findings and the extent to which they might be specific to China are discussed.