WORKING DRAFT - PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS 1 Networking or not working? A comparison of Arab Spring coverage in Belgian newspapers and TV news

This paper examines journalists‘ changing sourcing practices in the context of globalisation and developments in media technologies. It departs from Heinrich‘s concept of ―network journalism‖ that theorizes contemporary news as a product of ―a complex collaborative network of national and transnational information gatherers, producers and disseminators (...) that allows the integration of a great variety of voices‖ (2011:55-56). Especially the interactivity, connectivity, and flexibility of social media such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube invite a more diverse use of journalistic sources that might lead to a more global – instead of domesticated – outlook in international news coverage and a more balanced media access for a wider range of actors, including civil society organisations and individual citizens. We developed a quantitative content analysis to examine how extensively Belgian journalists practiced network journalism during the Arab Spring in 2011. More specifically, we analysed a total sample of 1121 news items about the street protests in Syria, Egypt and Tunisia, in four Belgian newspapers (two popular and two quality dailies) and two Belgian broadcasters (the public broadcaster VRT and the commercial channel VTM). The analysis shows that Belgian news coverage of the Arab Spring to a certain degree adapted to the new reality of ―network journalism‖, especially in the Syrian case, compared to previous research. From a comparative perspective, we found more signs of network journalism practices in quality compared to popular media, and in TV news compared to newspaper articles.