Dennis and Sampaio-Dias present research on BuzzFeed and VICE at the University of Leeds
On 17 December 2019, UoP journalism lecturers James Dennis and Susana Sampaio-Dias presented a paper at the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group annual conference at the University of Leeds. Details of their paper are provided below.
Not just swearing and loathing on the internet: Analysing BuzzFeed, VICE, and the Affective Turn in Election Reporting
Given the significant growth in youth engagement in the 2017 UK general election, it is important to examine the information sources that young people draw on when deciding how to cast their vote. In this paper, we combine human-coded content analysis and in-depth discourse analysis to analyse two news organisations, BuzzFeed and VICE, and explore how they draw on emotional forms of storytelling when reporting to younger audiences.
Drawing on 337 articles from the official campaign period, we show how BuzzFeed maintained a journalistic style that blurred the lines between information and entertainment, as humour was a constant feature. In comparison, VICE hovered between satirical features and long read pieces that pushed a more serious agenda. Unlike BuzzFeed, VICE was not concerned with balance, attacking the Conservatives with fearless partisanship. Authentic, informal, and identifiable, their coverage was unapologetically subjective.
More than simply distributing partisan coverage designed to appeal to specific audiences, BuzzFeed and VICE embrace the culture of social media. Their reporting reflects the subjective, confessional, and personalised forms of expression that characterise communication on social platforms. By drawing on the ideas, language, and behaviours of the social web, BuzzFeed and VICE offer election coverage that is uniquely tailored to a younger audience. This emotional storytelling challenges the norms of election reporting in the UK. In doing so, this study adds to the growing body of work in journalism studies that illustrates how emotional reporting can help facilitate audience engagement (Pantti, 2010; Wahl-Jorgenson, 2019).
