Introduction

Journalism, news production and consumption practices have been heavily impacted by the rise and development of online technologies. New media and web applications have triggered an evolution of information dissemination routines, journalistic norms, as well as of news genres and news discourse practices (Kolodzy 2006; Knox 2007; Bednarek and Caple 2012).

In recent years, news broadcasting has been mainly influenced by two factors, i.e., a rise in the consumption of news through mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and an increasing use of social media as news providing channels (Newman et al. 2019). Many media industry agencies have now started to employ applications available on mobile devices, such as Instagram, Snapchat or WhatsApp, and utilize the affordances offered by these technologies to disseminate information and engage with the audience.

The following paper focuses on the use of Instagram by newspaper agencies. Its aim is to offer a description of selected practices employed by two newspapers from the UK and from Poland: The Guardian and Gazeta Wyborcza. More specifically, the study investigates chosen aspects of the content and structure of the posts shared via the application, such as the themes most frequently covered in the posts, the type and function of the messages and selected discourse properties.

Instagram as a medium

Instagram, launched in 2010, is an online photo- and video-sharing social medium. The application allows users to create audiovisual content, take pictures or record videos and post them online. The users may share, tag, like or comment on the content posted in the medium (Carah and Shaul 2016; Filimonov et al. 2016).

Instagram belongs to the most popular social media, with nearly 1 billion monthly active users. It is mainly used by the younger generation – 60% of the users are between 18 and 34 years old. In the UK there are nearly 24 million users of Instagram, with around 33% of them between 25 and 34 years of age. In Poland, Instagram is less popular with about seven million users, most of whom are between 18 and 24 years old.

The medium has been shown to encourage one-to-many interaction, with a low degree of reciprocity.