“Find the Joy”: A War Correspondent’s Tweets and the Rise of an Affective Age in News

Abstract

This study provides empirical support for undertheorized phenomena in contemporary digital news reporting—the foregrounding of joy-based news values and the presentation of affective, immanent atmospheres—as they manifest in U.S. National Public Radio correspondent Tim Mak’s daily Twitter threads from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multimodal textual analysis of 647 tweets over 31 threads shows how affordances of newer media platforms facilitate a shift toward affective, immanent, and engaged journalism that blends traditional news style and judgment seamlessly with personal observations, contextual curation, stream-of-consciousness detail selection, and audience interaction to produce a kind of hybrid journalism that might foreshadow a transformation not just in reporters’ interaction with audiences, but also in an undertheorized reorientation to news itself.

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