Summary:
This paper was primarily about how Twitter was being used by news producers and consumers, particularly in analyzing the differences between how journalists and organizations in Arab and European English-speaking countries use the platform. Through crawling thousands of tweets from various accounts, comparisons were made between these groups based on a set of features. Some of the key conclusions drawn are listed below.
- News outlets tend to have a more official style and share more links than journalists on their accounts.
- Journalists tend to target their communication and maintain a personal engagement with their audience. It’s also found that journalists may be using Twitter to gather information. Organizations, however, tend to broadcast their tweets and avoid the personal engagement that journalists pursue in their tweets.
- Arab journalists prefer to broadcast their tweets more than the average English journalist will. They also tend to be more distinguishable compared to news consumers in the Arab world.
- Print and radio journalists have a large number of differences between each other, whereas TV journalists tend to share characteristics with both groups.
- Journalists who speak the same language but reside in different countries tend to share many similarities with each other.
Reflection:
I have listed below a few of the lines that interested me in the paper.
“These two features perhaps suggest that people who want to get the news from Twitter expect to find them in the timelines of the organizations more than from the journalists.”
This suggestion based on the collected data did not surprise me at all, as organizations tend to be more well-known compared to journalists reporting similar information. Therefore, it would make sense that a larger majority of people expect to find news in the timelines of organizations. Organizations also have a greater chance of being verified compared to individual journalists. However, this does make me ponder if journalists had broadcasted information or became verified just as often, would users flock to their timelines for gathering information? Although journalists tend to have more personal engagements on Twitter, I’m curious as to whether or not users may decide to visit timelines of journalists to gather information if those accounts had appeared on their feed more often.
“The broadcast communication behavior is evident for Arab journalists. They tweet more than twice as much as the English ones, share 75% more links, and use 39% more hashtags.”
This statistic was interesting to me, as I’m curious as to why Arab journalists broadcast their information more so than their English counterparts. Could this have any doing with the fact that Arab journalists are more distinguishable than news consumers? It’s also interesting to me that Arab journalists are on Twitter more often, as I’m interested in which regions of the world is Twitter a more dominant news source.
“British journalists have more followers than the Irish ones (45K vs. 10K) and are included in more lists (262 vs. 98). But these facts are not surprising when we take in consideration the number of inhabitants in these two countries.”
This statistic surprised me because I believed that different regions of the world would have different levels of Twitter activity. However, this statistic shows that journalists who speak the same language from different countries have a lot in common. This makes me wonder whether or not there is a relationship between language and level of Twitter activity.
Other Considerations:
Is the President’s use of Twitter to deliver key information influencing others to join Twitter? Is it making Twitter users more likely to use Twitter as their primary medium of obtaining news?
