Do journalists respond differently depending on their medium? Columbia’s Journalism School published a report comparing legacy journalist’ Twitter interactions with the Twitter interactions of digital journalists.

Who retweets whom? How digital and legacy journalists interact on Twitter

Since bloggers and citizen journalists became a fixture of the U.S. media environment, they have found themselves in conflict with traditional journalists. At first, bloggers initiated this conflict, establishing themselves in opposition to the mainstream media, which—in their depiction—was poisoning American politics. But as citizen contributors and bloggers began to break stories online and attract sizeable audiences, traditional print journalists had their own critique of them: as unprofessional, unethical, and overly dependent on the very mainstream media they criticized. In a 2013 poll of journalists, 51 percent agreed that citizen journalism is not real journalism.

Such conflict is hardly novel within journalism as a professional realm. Throughout the history of news work, the emergence of any significant new journalistic role has resulted in conflict between the old guard and practitioners of the new style. TV news was regarded as a lesser medium than print journalism; its visual emphasis made it seem less substantial than the printed word, and its journalists were, consequently, afforded less prestige by their colleagues in print. This lesser status persisted, arguably, until online journalism came along to replace TV news as journalism’s bête noire (or, perhaps, enfant terrible).

But competition is not the only way journalists interact. Media organizations have long collaborated on newsgathering and news production activities. Outlets rely on wire services’ news articles to supplement their own original reporting, or even run wire stories with little alteration. As seen in such classic studies of news production as Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News (1978), the institutional nature of journalism seems to require a certain amount of collaboration. Journalists, even while competing, have always needed each other, if only to corroborate what is important enough to be labeled news.