Information flow and social media: Issues and crisis communication in the digital age

This research examined how the evolving internet landscape “ including Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and social media “ impacted on emergent organisational communication and journalistic working practices. The research focus was on issues and crisis communication, and how organisational staff and journalists responded to this in the digital media environment.The study presented a lightly-theorised snapshot of some aspects of knowledge in the area of issues and crisis communication and digital and social media, contextualising the research by positioning it, and the researcher, within this fluid and fast-changing field. A reflexive, autoethnographic approach was employed, and the methodology for the study was based on grounded theory, allowing for a theoretical stance to be developed from the data. Three triangulated methods of data collection included an incident case study, in-depth interviews with organisational staff, and in-depth interviews with journalists.