Journal Entry 1: Political Communication and Professionalization

This journal entry explores the professionalization of political communication in the context of contemporary media, particularly the impact of Web 2.0 and social media. The author identifies a key issue as the disparity between political communication and mass media, highlighting challenges such as unauthorized information leaks, the decline of authorized media services, and the risks to politicians' public image. The entry discusses the importance of authenticity, the role of polling, and the need for professional reputation management policies. It further breaks down the issue into reputation management, dealing with mass media, and adapting to contemporary media, ultimately advocating for professional media advisors to navigate these complexities. The author references several academic sources to support their arguments.

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Jornal Entry 1 – Issues in political communication
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Journal Entry one
The issue that I identified in political communication that can be encountered in my
practice is the professionalization of communication in politics. The most pressing issue in
this regard is the disparity between the functioning of political communication and mass
media services. Growth and advancement of WEB 2.0 , more commonly referred to as social
media has been paramount in encapsulating the knowledge exchange system between
individuals (Steiglitz & Dan-Xuan 2013). There is no opacity in the amount and type of
information that is released and most often, information that are released, or as we can say
leaked, to the public, come from unsolicited sources and have no connection with the primary
political agenda whatsoever (Trottier & Fuchs 2014). There are two main impacts that we can
identify in this regard –
a. Authorised media services suffer to attract readers or audiences because of the lack of
content. Thus they may be forced to release content that are public attractors, but in
essence tend to deviate from the ideology that the political agenda is attempting to
promote.
b. The entire political community faces the risk of releasing information to the public
that can potentially be considered harmful for themselves. That also runs the risk of a
depreciating public image for the political community as well as the candidates. It is
crucial that in political activities, a good reputation is managed.
The first address to this issue needs to be done in the form of authenticity of the
politicians. Image management is a huge issue for the politicians and especially when they
are concerned with the betterment of society as a whole, the issue becomes more demanding.
Public demands that politicians maintain authenticity in their communication of ideologies
also pressurize the individuals and sometimes even force them to commit communication

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‘slips’ or mistakes that become the crown gem for hungry media personnel to build a publicly
viral story that is often not in favour of the politician (Gaden & Dumitrica 2015; Sanders
2008).
The role of polling has also been identified as a progressive factor in the generation of
public friendly headlines that maintain coherence with the positive image building stories for
the politicians. However it has also been seen that polling has become a widely used activity
across the entire realm of social media. There are advantages as well as disadvantages for a
situation like this. Qualitative polling can prove to be extremely useful when it is used to
understand public. This is where the advantage of social media lies. Data scientists can
successfully help understand, through sentiment analysis, how and where the peak public
sentiments lie during political seasons (Davies 2016). These can be generated through
targeted polling. However, this does not necessarily indicate predictability of public reactions
to newly developed strategies simply because quantitatively, the polls that are generated and
undertaken on social media, even though they cover maximum area, are not bound by
authorised rule sets that dictate the number and type of public engaged.
In my understanding, an important drawback in the strategy that we overlook is the lack
of professionalism in political communication and its adaptation with contemporary contexts
of public engagement, Social Media Marketing and Online Reputation Management. I would
break down my understanding of the issue in the following points
 Reputation Management Policies – Social media is a vast source as well as
destination for information dump and digital algorithms are well trained to identify
and highlight articles and pieces according to their key words (Doorley & Garcia
2015). Thus any form of information that is potentially harmful for the candidates
need to be carefully addressed by specialized media management personnel to filter
and produce the best positive case studies possible.

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 Dealing with Mass Media – Most media services are on the lookout for content that
they can sell. Public reception of conflicting content has always been high and
therefore these media always keep a watchful eye on any slips and mistakes that will
give them a good story (Chadwick 2017). Maximum press exposure therefore needs
to be organized and disciplined in order to reduce the risks of mistakenly giving away
information that can jeopardize the situation.
 Dealing with contemporary media – There needs to be a balance between the
political campaigns and the needs of authorised journalists to cover the stories. While
the content on the part of the politician needs to uphold a positive image, that on the
side of the journalists needs to be attractive enough for the public (Chadwick 2017).
The aforementioned points are all that can be addressed by a professional media advisor
who can take care of the disparities and issues concerning professionalization of political
communication in correspondence with contemporary media.

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References
Chadwick, A., 2017. The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford University Press.
Davies, W., 2016. The age of post-truth politics. The New York Times, 24, p.2016.
Doorley, J. and Garcia, H.F., 2015. Reputation management: The key to successful public
relations and corporate communication. Routledge.
Gaden, G. and Dumitrica, D., 2015. The ‘real deal’: Strategic authenticity, politics and social
media. First Monday, 20(1).
Sanders, K., 2008. Communicating politics in the twenty-first century. Macmillan
International Higher Education.
Stieglitz, S. and Dang-Xuan, L., 2013. Social media and political communication: a social
media analytics framework. Social network analysis and mining, 3(4), pp.1277-1291.
Trottier, D. and Fuchs, C. eds., 2014. Social media, politics and the state: Protests,
revolutions, riots, crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Routledge.