This article explores how journalists navigate the tensions between community engagement and professional detachment by tracing how journalists used Twitter during Tonga and Australia's inaugural rugby league test match in 2018. As a high-profile Pacific cultural and sporting event, it provides an opportunity to study how journalists engage with marginalised Pacific communities, and whether that engagement demonstrates the reciprocity needed to build relationships. More than 9000 tweets were analysed using quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal that media organisations and journalists tended more towards broadcasting than interactive approaches on Twitter. Practices differed between subgroups, however: Individual journalists engaged in public discussion more than media organisations, and Pacific journalists engaged more than non-Pacific journalists. In fact, Pacific journalists’ identity work – performed through specific discourses, including emojis – demonstrated a less detached journalism than did non-Pacific journalists, who appeared to talk past the Pacific communities in this Twitter public.