Catholic Media in the Hands of Laics: Case Study of Vatican Communication Chiefs' Twitter Activities

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11230%2F22%3A10479011" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11230/22:10479011 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=3xbk_h8tzY" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=3xbk_h8tzY</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3010015" target="_blank" >10.3390/journalmedia3010015</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Catholic Media in the Hands of Laics: Case Study of Vatican Communication Chiefs' Twitter Activities

Original language description

The shape of religious media communication changed dramatically because of the opportunities given by digital media and by the process of the secularization, structural changes in religious organizations, and the challenge enabled by the huge loss of credibility in the eyes of the world. We can observe certain dynamics in the professional approach of official Catholic media, especially those based in the Vatican. Its on-line project Vatican News has provided news service since 2017, now in almost forty languages. In the spirit of continuing the reform of the Roman curia, for which the founding of Secretary for Communication (now dicastery) was the &quot;pilot&quot; area, Pope Francis appointed the first layperson to lead any office of curia in 2018, and journalist Paolo Ruffini became the prefect. A few months later, one of most famous experts on the Vatican, also a lay person, journalist Andrea Tornielli, became editorial chief of the Dicastery for Communication. Other personal changes continued soon. The goal of this article is to analyse the initiative that Ruffini and Tornielli took in their office during six months after their appointment. The quantitative content analysis of both their Twitter accounts, closely connected with the newscast produced by Vatican News, is the scientific method used in this paper. There were detected new journalistic genres in the social media space (e.g., short video, editorial, story), vast popularity of Pope Francis, and success of his own Twitter activity (he obtained even tens of thousands of followers) or, contrarily, the omission and inconsistency when introducing uneasy themes (abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, ecology or economy) to the public. There was also the surprising realization that Ruffini is more popular in the Twitter milieu than Tornielli.

Czech name

—

Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

50802 - Media and socio-cultural communication

Project

—

Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Journalism and media

ISSN

2673-5172

e-ISSN

2673-5172

Volume of the periodical

3

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

CH - SWITZERLAND

Number of pages

14

Pages from-to

198-211

UT code for WoS article

001118767100001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85168579635