The adoption and use of social media as a source of information by Egyptian government journalists

What is it about?

This study explores the adoption and use of social media as a source of information by Egyptian government journalists. It applied a survey with a total of 386 journalists representing the three official newspapers of Egypt. Findings showed that 27.2% of journalists were found to not use social media, mainly males (69.7%), older than 40 years (77.7%) and mostly with a BA degree (80.4%). On the other hand, 72.8% of them who were found to use these platforms were also males (59.1%), younger than 40 years (65.9%) and mostly with a BA degree (93.2%). More than two-thirds (69.9%) were somewhat old users whose experience ranged from seven to ten years, and more than two-thirds (73.5%) have been using these platforms heavily (four to more than six hours a day). Such results confirm that a large number (95.7%) of users were found to be at least advanced users. Social media users’ home and work were the most significant places to access these platforms, which were found to be easy to use and useful. Most types of social media used were social news, media sharing and micro blogging, blogs comments and forums, social networking sites and bookmarking sites to perform tasks, such as finding information, communicating, keeping up to date, checking materials, sharing information and taking part in discussions. A large number of users tend to accept these media platforms as a source of information since they are accessible, have linked references, are updated sources, are accurate, promote current work, are convenient, secured, credible, reliable, stable, easily identified, copyrighted, build confidence and contain filtered information. However, lack of know-how to cite sources, lack of time needed to access social media, lack of credibility of the news source and lack of quality of information sources were at least significant to journalists when using social media platforms.

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