This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in the Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News

Summary:

The main question that this paper wanted to address was: Is there any systematic stylistic and other content differences between fake and real news? The authors used three different datasets during this study. The first set was a used an analysis of real and fake news from the 2016 elections. The second contained articles about US politics from real, fake, and satire sources. Finally, the third set contained real and satire news articles. The authors show that “fake news articles tend to be shorter in terms of content, but use repetitive language and fewer punctuation.” The authors show that they can use the features they found in the paper to predict if an article is real, fake or satire news with an SVM.

Reflection:

I thought this paper was better structured and focused than the last paper that we read. They had a much more clear direction with what question that they wanted to answer. It was also stated early in the paper how and why this paper was different from the previous studies that had come before it: “The inclusion of satire as a third category of news is a unique contribution of our work.” In the results section, the authors also expanded discussions on what their statistical findings could mean and why the findings turned out in a certain way.

While again I do not find the results to be too shocking it was cool to see that using the features the authors found a model can be built to predict if an article is real or fake. (I also really enjoyed how the authors structured the title)

Questions Brought Up:

Why just SVM?

One of the main questions I was wondering throughout the paper was why didn’t the authors try multiple types of machine learning algorithms to see which one would best predict fake news articles? Maybe the were leaving this for further papers, but it would have been neat to see how different types of classifiers would work on this type of prediction.

Would having evenly distributed data set cause problems with the prediction models that the authors use?

I noticed that two out of three of their data sets were evenly distributed between real and fake/satire news sources. I wonder if having the same percent of sources would mess up the prediction algorithm. Assuming that the amount of real news stories is not one to one with fake news stories, would the algorithm think that fake news stories are more/less prevalent than they actually are? I know that they could randomize the way they fed in the fake and real stories, but I wonder if it is better to have data sets that model the real world more closely.

Personally, for the training on walking prediction that I have done in the past, we have had to vary the way the data is pre-processed because the algorithm will learn the certain walking course before it will learn to predict a person’s step. We neededo have a more random walking course and just take the delta of the steps to get a model that would better suit the real world.

Future Questions/topics:

Could a browser extension house the prediction model that they have developed and possibly alert the users when an article could be potentially fake?

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Journalists and Twitter: A Muti-dimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns – Mossaab Bagdouri

Summary

Twitter is a great platform for journalists and news organizations to reach out and interact with their audiences. In this paper, Bagdouri studies the interaction of journalists / news organizations and their audience by surveying 18 features of three different account categories (journalists, news organizations, and news consumers),  across two languages and cultural backgrounds (English-speaking and Arab-speaking countries), and three types of news media (print, radio, and television). By performing Welch’s t-test and Kolmogrov-Smirnov test with these features and different categories of Twitter accounts, Bagdouri found that journalists tend to target and have personal engagements with their audience, whereas news organizations prefer broadcasting their posts and are more official. The same pattern is found when comparing Arab journalists and English journalists, where Arab journalists appear to broadcast more tweets and more distinguishable from their audience than English journalists. The paper also finds that journalists across different media types are very different. 

Reflection

This is an overall very interesting paper. I really like how Bagdouri compares journalists from different cultural backgrounds and how he compares journalists/news organizations with their audiences. These comparisons are probably not done in previous work, since this research surveys the largest set of twitter accounts and tweets and is more focused on journalists. However, the paper’s definition for “audience” intrigues me. “Audience” in this paper are accounts that “have a bidirectional follower / friend relationship” with selected journalists. The limitation that the paper addresses is that some of these audience accounts might include other journalists, but since the number of journalists is statistically insignificant compare to the total number, this isn’t really a limitation. This definition of “audience” omits twitter accounts that follow these journalists and don’t have a bidirectional follower relationship, and these twitter accounts are true audience of these journalists in my opinion. People that journalists follow may include other journalists and their friends in real life, and they are not representative of what the actual audience perception and reaction are like. I think it would be better to survey all the followers, instead of just the ones with bidirectional relationship with the journalists.

Another thing that intrigues me is that the journalists are not separated into news categories. Sports journalists and news organizations might tweet differently and have different interactions with their audience than the ones that cover politics. Audience might also react to different categories of news differently. For example, I often see sports fans tweeting out their excitement or disappointment with original tweets, which means less interaction with the journalists, and people react to political figures’ tweets or news by retweeting the original tweet extensively. Analyzing different news categories of journalists and news organizations can definitely be developed as part of the future work of this research.

This research can also consider a third type of users, Opinion-ist (writers who write Opinions). Opinion-ist are not journalists, but they still talk about news and are often quite influential. It would be interesting to compare journalists and opinion-ist to see how similar they are and how personal/targeting they are, since the research already showed that journalists are more targeting and relatable than news organization accounts. 

Since this research can be seen as an extension of De Choudhury, Diakopoulos, and Naaman (2012)’s classifier research, an account classifier that’s based on Bagdouri’s data would be interesting. This classifier will make the verification process easier and suggest more targeted accounts to new users, and it should be able to at least identify whether an account belongs to a journalist, a news organization, or a news consumer, and what language they primarily speak. If more analysis is done with different news categories, the classifier should also be able to categorize different accounts.

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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?

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Summery: 

The purpose of the study was to broaden our understanding of journalists’ use of twitter and to complement prior studies. Their work can be used to “inform the design of more customized tools for this group of professionals.” The study conducted on 5, 000 twitter accounts in order to extract eighteen summarizing features. Based on multiple findings, the study provided the following conclusions:

• the accounts of news outlets use an official style and share more links than journalists
• Arab journalists broadcast more tweets and are more distinguishable 
• television journalists share similarities with radio and print journalists
• Print and radio journalists are the most dissimilar groups 

Reflection: 

With twitter becoming the most powerful medium to reach the public, it essential to study the usage paten of journalists, news organizations, and news consumers and contrast their strategy. Considering their findings and summarization, we can reflect on different aspects and their implications on the journalist’s’ use of Twitter. 

Reflection I (Organizations Broadcast, Journalists Target)

According the study, “For each tweet published by a journalist, an organization publishes three, on average.” Moreover, an organization shares a link in every other tweet (perhaps from its own website). But a journalist shares only one link in six tweets. This probably great indication of how organizations and journalists differ in terms of twitter usage.  I believe that while journalists use twitter to express their idea and connect with people, Organizations uses it for promotion and to attract audiences. These findings also raise another question which is: Are journalists concerned more about the creditability of their sources to share it with news consumers, thus limiting their influence toward news consumers. It is clear that more work must be done to exactly determine the impact of the above findings.

Further Interesting work regarding this:

• The effectiveness of sharing a link in a tweet in terms of promoting your organization. By collecting data how many times the link accessed by news consumers, we can find out if sharing a link, a good way of promoting organization. 
• Are there any similarities or differences between the journalist’s audience and the audience of the organization which the journalist affiliated with? This might indicate if the organization the journalist works for influences his/her twitter usage. 
• I am also very interested in finding out how effective is to use twitter as a source of information. If it does, it might also affect the culture of journalism either in a positive or negative way. 

Reflection II (Arab Journalists Are More Distinguishable)

According to the study, “Arab journalists are less likely to have this communication pattern, though. They also are more distinguishable from news consumers than English journalists are.” These might raise a big question on the relationship between Arab journalists and their news consumers. Is there any disconnection or mistress between the news consumer and the Arab journalists? We can further our understanding by conducting more research based on the findings provided by this study. 

Further Interesting work regarding this:

• Does a difference in culture affect or influence twitter usage? Conducting research on journalists from different part of the world might provide some meaningful findings  
• Does the journalist communication patter with the news consumers indicates creditability of the journalist or the news organization he/she represents? Does having less communication pattern indicates the journalist is not trusted or affiliated with organizations not supported by most of the news consumers?
• Is there any significant difference in word usage between Arab and English journalists? How they conduct themselves on twitter might indicate the cultural shift in twitter usage by the journalists. 

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Analyzing Right-wing YouTube Channels:
Hate, Violence and Discrimination S

Summary:

The paper investigates the occurrence of hateful content and discriminatory bias in right-wing channels. First, the authors examine the similarities and dissimilarities between comments and video content on YouTube channels to see whether content creators express less, equally, or more hatred and discrimination than their audience. In addition, the results of right-wing channels are compared to those of baseline channels to check if extreme content is common on social media platforms or more prominent in right-wing channels.

The dataset consists of videos and comments from 12 right-wing channels and 10 most subscribed channels on YouTube. The authors conduct a three-layered analysis through which they evaluate lexicon, topics and discriminatory bias in videos and comments from the collected channels.

The results suggest that right-wing channels’ topics are more concentrated, focusing on terrorism and war. Moreover, these channels have a higher percentage of negative word categories, such as aggression and violence compared to baseline channels. Surprisingly, the level of bias against immigrants and LGBT people is comparable between right-wing and baseline channels. However, the negative bias against the Muslim community is more noticeable in right-wing channels. The analysis also shows that right-wing video hosts use negative words as often as commenters, yet the actual semantic fields vary. On the other hand, compared to the content creators, the viewers of right-wing channels express a higher bias against LGBT people and lower bias against Muslims in the comment section.

Reflection:

It is obvious that the research, as a whole, is partial and flawed. Not only that the title and the research questions reflect the authors’ strong presumption of the conservative section but also the authors’ choice of data is questionable. Why did they choose the website InfoWars and Social Blade as a seed? Furthermore, the phrase “according to our understanding” suggests their description of right-wing is not only ambiguous but also potentially biased. The confusion carries over to their selection of baseline channels. Despite being selected from the “news and politics” category, the fact that the majority of the comments are related to gaming (RiceGum, PewDiePie, Minecraft) means those channels cover a much wider range of topics. One of the channels is even called “DramaAlert”, which contributes more than one-third of the total number of comments of baseline channels. Hence, there is no surprise that entertaining videos contain more positive words than those discussing serious, controversial topics. Rather, the research should have studied the extremist behavior in political predominant YouTube channels. It will be interesting to see if right-wing channels can be separated from the mix.

Even though the authors’ bias discredit many of their findings, some analysis might still provide some insight and inspiration for future research. One worth noticing observation is that Muslims and terrorism overshadow other topics such as LGBT, illegal immigrants, anti-abortion, etc. Is terrorism always the prominent focus? Has this topic gained more attention because of the series of recent attacks and the President’s election campaign? It might be interesting to see if the change in the trend of topics and people opinion through time, especially after a major incident.

Another surprising finding is the dissimilarity between the video hosts and the commenters. Despite the comparable level of negativity, the variance in the semantic fields present in the caption and in the comments in right-wing channels varies greatly across videos. In another word, the viewers’ response to the conservative videos is more unpredictable and less affected by the sentiment of the hosts. The authors mentioned previous studies show hateful users “more negative, more profane and, counter-intuitively, use fewer words associated with topics … ” Does this suggest right-wing channels’ audience is more hateful and aggressive? Do their comments remain as offensive and negative in other videos? Does a user’s tendency to leave a hateful comment correlate to his/her subscription?

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Summary: 

In this research paper, Bagdouri compares the Twitter usage data of journalists, news organizations, and news consumers. These users are also categorized based on their region as an European English-speaking country or an Arabic speaking country as well as their media type of either print, radio, or television. They found significant differences in audience engagement, tweet style, distinguishability from news-consumers, similarities and dissimilarities between different media types, and insignificant differences between journalists who share a language but do not share a country [1]. By analyzing and reflecting on this data, the paper intended to answer some of their own research questions and determine how the use of Twitter is changing the role of journalists and news organizations in society. 

Reflection: 

Social media has drastically altered how consumers acquire information in our society. According to the Pew Research Center, about 68% of Americans get news from social media [2]. Social media has given a voice to those who may not have had one through traditional news sources and has allowed them to tell their own stories. It’s also raised awareness of a variety of movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.  

Social media has also changed how journalists and news organizations share information. With an increasing presence on social media platforms, journalists and news organizations have to keep up with social media’s pace. Among journalists and news organizations, Bagdouri compares the number of shared links per tweets, the number of lists containing these accounts, average number of tweets per day, average number of hashtags per tweet, and the frequency of engaging with the audience through retweeting, replying, and favoriting. The finding was that organizations are more likely to broadcast their tweet and that journalists target their audience and engage with them more. This analysis prompts the following questions: 

• As the topic of ‘fake news’ becomes more prevalent, is it possible to use similar data to determine the credibility of a news source?  
• What is the overlap for journalists who work for news organizations?  

Some potential research to answer these questions could compare the tweets and Twitter usage of credible versus non-credible or less-credible news sources and the interactions between them and their audience. It could also explore the positive or negative reactions to their tweets. 

Based on user engagement between journalists and their audience, Bagdouri also suggested that journalists are most likely gaining information from their audience.  

• What machine learning and natural language processing techniques can be used to verify the credibility of this audience and to help journalists target ‘credible’ Twitter users for future information?  

Bagdouri also finds significant differences in Twitter usage between European English-speaking journalists and Arab journalists showing that Arab journalists are more likely to broadcast information rather than target their audience. The research also finds that Arab journalists are typically more distinguishable from their audience.

• What cultural and/or political differences may contribute to this distinction?
• Do Arab journalists from different countries show any dissimilar patterns?

The research done in this paper is quite thorough for the sample size. It would be interesting to see the same study done with varying cultures such as American news, Canadian news, and news from different countries in Africa. The article prompts interesting questions about the evolving role of news organizations and journalists in our society.

[1] Bagdouri, M. 2016. Journalists and twitter: A multidimensional quantitative description of usage patterns. In Proceedings of the 10th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM ’16. To appear.

[2] http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/

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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.

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Quick Summary:

After conducting the largest study on news producers/consumers on Twitter by crawling millions of tweets from 5,000 Twitter accounts as well as those of over a million news consumers, Bagdouri et al. were able to extract some interesting information about Arab and English news producers and the way they broadcast/interact with their consumers. They utilized Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to quantify statistically significant differences in eight comparisons.

Some key points of interest include:

• News organizations tweet more often that journalists, using more hashtags and links
• Journalists seem to interact with their consumers much more often than organizations
• English journalists are more likely to be verified than their Arabic counterparts
• Arab journalists are much more distinguishable from their consumers than English journalists

Reflection:

RThis study was an important step in understanding how news producers’ function is changing in our society. With all the “fake news” going around, it is imperative that we better understand these changes to make sure they are for good, and not for the worse.

Throughout the paper, I found a lot of the results unsurprising (ex: Journalists tweet from their phones more often than news organizations, British and Irish journalists are similar), but there were a few results that peaked my interest.

• Organization post 3x more, share more links, and post more hashtags than journalists. This leads one to believe that news organizations are using Twitter as a medium to GAIN ATTENTION, rather than perhaps focusing on conveying quality information. And, it appears to work; news organizations have a significant amount more followers than journalists.
• Journalists mention almost 2x more and reply much more often to their consumers. They also use more personal language. Clearly, journalists interact more with their consumers… but is this a good thing, or is it concerning? It could be that journalists are furthering an investigation on news, they could be looking to further their personal political agenda by interacting with their consumers, OR they may just be trying to create a closer relationship with their consumers. This would be something I personally would find interesting to further explore: What are the motivations behind journalists responding to their consumers so often?
• English Journalists are more often verified than Arab Journalists. My concern with this statistic is that there could be a myriad of reasons for this. Is Twitter not paying close enough attention to the Arab world to endorse their news sources? Or are they ignoring most non-English speaking countries? Could English journalists be more verified and followed because they reach a greater audience? Is it because more English speakers use Twitter?
• Arab journalists are 22 times more likely to be verified than their consumers. In comparison, English journalists are only 5 times more likely to be verified than their consumers. This indicates that Arab journalists are much more distinguishable from their consumers- but why? It could be that there are more casual users in the Arab world, or maybe that there are less high-profile Arab celebrities in comparison to their journalists. Either way, this is another question I’d like to see further explored.
• Finally, I found it interesting was that almost 3% of English news consumers studied were verified. I was SHOCKED to hear that 1-in-34 news-consuming English twitter users were verified- am I next to get the blue checkmark? Or one of the other 34 people in this class?

After examining this study, I feel much more informed about how to disseminate information from various news sources on Twitter, and hope that a more detailed study is done on some of the specific questions asked in my reflection.

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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?

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Summary:
This research paper compares microblogging patterns of twitter accounts. The accounts are categorized according to country (United Kingdom, Ireland, Gibraltar), media format (radio stations, TV channels, newspapers, magazines), and profile (journalists, organizations). Eighteen numerical features were tested with two statistical tests: Welch’s t-test (to test if two samples have equal means) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (to test if two samples belong to the same distribution). Journalists were classified into two cultures, English and Arab, and comparisons between the two cultures were analyzed. The study found differences between how organizations and journalists disseminate news, as well as differences between how Arab and English journalists disseminate news.

Reflection:
Categorizing journalists by political party affiliation: The paper compares the behaviors of news organizations and individual journalists. It would be interesting to compare journalists by classifying them according to political party: republican, democrat, or independent. Features such as number of followers, percent verified, and number of hashtags could be compared between republican and democratic Twitter accounts. The new research question could be: To what extent do Democratic and Republican journalists share common characteristics?
Percent verified: It would be interesting to investigate whether the percentage of journalist accounts that are verified differs between different countries or regions. For example, do English-speaking countries have higher verification percentages among journalists than non-English-speaking countries do?
Customized tools: The paper suggests that the findings of this research can be used to develop “more customized tools” for journalists. I think the author should have expanded on that in the conclusion section, because it is difficult to understand what exactly they had in mind with this suggestion. I think one idea could be to create a program that crawls Twitter to determine which hashtags in a journalist’s region are most popular, in order to give the journalist recommendations as to what hashtags to use. Similarly, another program could crawl Twitter to determine whether journalist tweets with questions are more popular than tweets without questions, in order to recommend to a journalist whether they should ask questions in their tweets.
Connection between journalist and news organization: The study looks at journalists and news organizations as separate. However, most journalists work for one news organization. I think it would be interesting to look at each journalist’s connection to their news organization. One of the conclusions of the paper is that “organizations broadcast, journalists target.” Do journalists’ techniques of disseminating news more closely resemble the techniques of their news organization than other news organizations? Are there any similarities between a journalist’s account and its news organization’s account?

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