Summary:
Over the recent years, Twitter has grown to become a primary platform for breaking news. In order to understand the prominence and influence of journalists, organizations, and consumers on this social media site, Mossab Bagdouri created a quantitative study to compare Twitter usage of journalists, organizations, and consumers. He used 18 features in his comparison of the different types of users. He was lead to the following conclusions:
- Organizations tend to broadcast their information, while journalists tend to be more personal.
- Arab journalists tend to broadcast more than their English counterparts.
- Arab journalists are more distinguished than English journalists.
- Print and radio journalists are dissimilar, while Television journalists stand somewhere in the middle.
- British and Irish journals share similar characteristics.
Reflection:
My main critique of this paper was the lack of discussion Bagdouri made for the various conclusions. He explained the topic and the data derived from the study, but he never fully dove in to discuss the conclusions. Around half of the conclusions were pretty much self-explanatory. However, the remaining ones were interesting, such as, Arab journalists tend to broadcast more and they are also more distinguished.
One possible point of discussion based on the conclusion that Arab journalists tend to broadcast more could be whether that was related to the different laws or cultures associated with the journalist’s residing country.Does that mean English journalists are more open to share their views and opinions or that Arab journalists have more of a stricter definition of journalism and just want to convey their message? Another study based off this conclusion could be comparing the amount of journalists who publish their own opinions.
Relating to the conclusion that Arab journalists are more distinguished, this could be explained by the number of Twitter users in English speaking countries vs in the Arab countries. Another explanation could be that since English journalists are more personal, the interaction with their users could create “citizen journalists”, and in turn, have create more verified users. There also could be more of these “citizen journalists” in English-speaking countries, increasing the number of people verified.
Further Research:
There’s been a lot of fake news in the past few years on many platforms, including Twitter. Not long after these posts, there might be several comments questioning the validity of that particular information, but by that time it might be too late and many people could have seen and believed it. Another interesting study could be comparing the number of verifiable news published using the same previous categories (e.g. journalist vs organization vs consumers, English speaking countries vs Arab countries). Some questions that study can answer would be:
- Are the standards of reporting actual news in journalism upheld in English speaking countries?
- Are there similar standards of validity in different regions of the world?
- Do journalists publish as much verifiable information as organizations?
- Is there current news that most people believe in but isn’t true?
- Are consumers more likely to verify news before sharing it?
