TV news on Instagram: Affordances, genres, journalistic cultures

TV news programmes use social media intensively to promote and distribute their content. Instagram has become integral in this field, as all major players have their own account and Instagram has become a widely used news source. This article analyzes the news coverage of TV news shows on Instagram as a designed space, asking which genres are used, how they are positioned in regard to the technical and social affordances of the platform, and what implications their form and style have for journalism culture(s). Underpinned by the concepts of platformization, digital mediality, and media affordances, the analysis will focus on the characteristic stylistic forms of Instagram news coverage, comparing the Instagram accounts of six German speaking private and public TV news stations from Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. The corpus includes 100 posts and reels from each account collected in September 2023. The analysis identifies different genre profiles of the accounts and then focuses on the question of how different common genres (like headlines, newsbites, news briefs, and reports) as well as reels are designed multimodally, including different structural parts and their patterned style.