Twitter is an increasingly popular platform for information and news sharing. Prior research has studied the evolving usage behaviors of this new platform. Bagdouri aimed to provide a bird’s eye view of journalists’ use of twitter by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of tweets from two regions, three user account category types, and three media types. The paper explores and compares the differences in usage between these groups with these characteristics, using more data and carrying out a more comprehensive analysis than previous work. The following questions were asked.
-Do journalists engage personally with their audience compared to new organizations?
-Do observations about English journalists apply to journalists from different regional, cultural, and lingual backgrounds?
-Do journalists use Twitter in a manner dissimilar from news consumers, and do these (dis)similarities hold across different regions?
-Are journalists a homogeneous group, or do they differ as a function of the type of the news outlet they work for?
-To which extent do journalists who speak the same language, but belong to different countries share similar characteristic?
Bagdouri collected a large set of tweets and extracted eighteen features with which the analysis was performed. Journalists were found to exhibit more targeted, personalized behavior, while news organizations more commonly use a more official, formalized style. Arab journalists were also found to share more tweets than English journalists and their audience appears to react positively. Finally, print and radio journalists were found to be the most distinguishable groups, while television and radio journalists exhibit similar behavior.
Bagdouri made some interesting conclusions related to Twitter use, but I felt that more explanation could have been included to suggest what the impact of the work is. It was mentioned in the introduction that the findings of the paper could be used to design more customized tools for the referenced group of professionals. However, it is unclear to me what tools are being referred to or how they could be customized. Could Twitter use these findings related to specific user groups to develop new features for these particular users?
I would be interested in seeing additional work exploring the impact of the differences in communication styles between journalists and news organizations. In particular, how do audiences respond to more formalized, official communication compared to more personal messages? A study looking at tweets with identical content but different writing styles would be interesting.
Finally, future work could focus on why Arab journalists were found to tweet twice as often, share 75% more links and include 39% more hashtags. What are the contributing factors? Arab audiences were found to still have a positive reaction to the greater number of tweets, but additional analysis of audience perceptions could be carried out.
