Last month, Brandon Harris, a professor of sports communication, was recognized for his work on the research paper, “Recasting Twitch: Livestreaming, Platforms, and New Frontiers in Digital Journalism,” which has been named as one of the six finalists for Digital Journalism’s Outstanding Article of the Year Award.
“I was really interested in Twitch because you constantly hear in journalism departments and classes that people don’t trust the news anymore. People aren’t reading the news anymore, or there’s just kind of a lack of engagement with journalism,” Harris said.
While many researchers argue that Americans don’t care about the news right now, Harris found that this sentiment may not be entirely true. At one point, a political Twitch streamer had 3,200 people watching live, and another woman named Devon had 2,900, numbers akin to the NPR podcaster Sam Cedar who had 1,500 live watchers.
“The main streamer would probably be Asmongold. They can typically get up to 30 to 40,000 viewers live at a time, which puts them about the same audience as cable mainstream news,” Harris said. “And so I was just interested in if there is this common idea that people aren’t engaging with news anymore, why are these folks able to pay their bills by doing this? What is unique about this?”
After engaging in streams himself, Harris said that the behavior of the Twitch streamers was starkly different than that of news casters: “They scream and they swear, and they don’t necessarily follow this idea that you have to be unbiased and objective, right? They tell you exactly what their biases are.”
Right now, political streaming involves charged rhetoric around the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Streamers are not afraid to say that Israel is committing genocide or provide explicit encouragement for U.S. support to Israel, which is very different from mainstream news.
“That is a big appeal where this person looks like someone who I would talk to, right? There’s no makeup team. He’s in a T-shirt, right? A lot of these opinions particularly resonate with, I think, younger audiences as well because this person will talk to you about housing shortages in major cities,” Harris said. “He will tell you people are pissed that they can’t afford to buy homes. If you think about mainstream news, you don’t necessarily hear people give voice to that frustration and that anger.”
While Harris agrees that this is not the most polished form of news, the connection Twitch streamers are able to make with their audience allows them to connect to news in a more active manner. These streamers line up content for up to seven or eight hours at a time, and they often include audience interaction throughout their news reaction process.
The streamer will “watch through, they’ll pause it, they’ll talk with their audience. And so [the chat will] be talking to him, they’ll be commenting, they’ll be agreeing, they might be asking questions,” Harris said. “Sometimes, if they’re discussing a complicated topic, the streamer might ask them, ‘Hey, chat, will you send me this link to kind of further that conversation?’”
This interactive news format appeals to younger generations, but the divisive nature of these opinionated streams can leave lasting imprints on their viewers.
“These people are going for eight to 12 hours a day. They go usually six days a week. And so if you are a fan of these folks, that can have a very strong impact on your own world view,” Harris said. “If you believe that younger generations are less likely to tune in to broadcast news or print journalism, a lot of the time they are getting that information, but it’s being editorialized to them by these content creators.”
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