Overview
The article tells of the “largest study to date of the use of Twitter by news producers and consumers.” The authors collected an enormous amount of twitter data corresponding to news organizations, journalists, and news consumers. From this data, they extracted a series of quantitative measures for the groups and clustered them to illustrate six aspects of the groups. They extended their classification by taking data from various regions of the world encompassing multiple languages and cultures and maintaining these classifications throughout their comparison and analysis. They compared these aspects of their defined groups using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Welch’s t-test. Using these aspects to compare the groups the authors attempted to gain an overview of use of Twitter in the news cycle from multiple angles.
Reflection
This article gave me a lot to reflect on and raised some interesting questions in regards to the study itself, but also other useful insights that could be gained about the news industry by analyzing the data from Twitter and other large social media platforms.
- Near the beginning of the article the authors mention several questions they hope to answer with this study. Reflecting on the reading led me to question whether a study designed to answer so many questions relying on so many variables could be scientifically sound. While their data and analysis could definitely help gain insight into the five separate questions they aimed to answer, spanning from the way journalists interact to their cultural backgrounds, I am not sure if such an approach could definitively answer any of the questions given such a wide focus.
- Later in the article the authors defines news consumers individuals who have a bidirectional follower / friend relationship or are mentioned in any tweet of the journalists they sampled. This raised the question to me are the people with bidirectional follower / friend relationships with individual journalists really the consumers of the news, and are those people journalists mention in their tweets really consumers of the news. It would seem possible to me that an individual journalist’s Twitter account could have many follower / friend connections with people for reasons other than news dissemination. Furthermore, it seems possible to me that a journalist may mention someone in a tweet who is not a consumer of their news; such as mentioning a public figure relevant to something they or saying or mentioning a personal friend in a tweet. From personal experience, I can think of many people who consume news of a specific organization or journalist but do not have a friend / follower relationship with said party. The article itself references that journalists may be less inclined to follow individual consumers of the news in favor of more high profile individuals and those highly active on Twitter, from this I wonder what portion of the people journalists have a friend / follower relationship with are actually individuals looking at the journalist’s Twitter for news?
- The article references that they do not think that many individuals with whom a journalist has a friend / follower relationship with are other journalists. This made me wonder would it not be likely that a journalist, or member of any profession, be in connection with other journalist, or people with the same profession? It makes me wonder if the number of journalists sampled as people with a friend / follower connection to another journalist is actually as insignificant as the authors say.
The research shown in this article is very interesting and spurs many questions about news in social media. I am very interested to find out how the use of social media by news organizations and figures has altered the quality of the information they present. I find that this specific study has several flaws and sources of bias in its design and do not think that its conclusions are supported or logically follow from their experiment.
