Abstract

The article explores the online strategies adopted by the Italian media organizations in order to adapt to the new hybrid media system. The research has focused on the Twitter profiles and timelines of 28 Italian companies, including news agencies, newspapers, TV news and online news. The concept of tweeting habit has been considered paying attention to four different dimensions: productivity of the account, competence of use, audience engagement capacity, predisposition to interaction. The principal component and cluster analysis we carried show that media outlets follow an highly diverse spectrum of strategies mixing broadcast and conversational models and being characterized by more or less competent approaches to the platform. On this basis, we propose a typology allowing to describe the different groups of media outlets we studied as: traditional gatekeepers, «wannabe» gatekeepers, and gatewatchers. The media outlets in the latter group show a better performance when it comes to audience engagement.