CITING SOCIAL MEDIA AS A NEWS SOURCE IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA: AN ANALYSIS OF INDIAN NEWSPAPERS

Social media is being heavily used by mainstream media in news production. A trend is being seen by newspapers to cite the social media sources while writing the news stories. The existing literature suggests that social media is being embraced as a news source by mainstream media. This study aims to examine how Indian newspapers are citing social media sources in their news stories. Also, this explores the variety of news being sourced by social media and their geographic focus in newspapers' coverage. Thus, this study gives a first insight into Indian newspapers' sourcing practices with social media in writing news stories. A content analysis of two national newspapers, The Times of India and The Hindu, has done to analyze a sample of news stories which have explicitly mentioned the social media source. News stories are coded to draw inferences. The study reveals that mainstream media is getting most of its news sources from Twitter and also they are not hesitating to use them as a ‘primary' and ‘standalone' sources. An important thing noticed during the data collection is that mainstream media is citing only those social media sources which are verified accounts.