Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns
Bagdouri, M. et al (2016) conducted one of the largest to date studies on the usage patterns of journalists, news organizations, and news consumers on Twitter. The study also explored the differences in the aforementioned user groups between English and Arab users. At the offset, Bagdouri, M. et al (2016) proposed the following research questions:
• Do journalists engage personally with their audience compared to news organizations?
• Do observations about English journalists—who are typically studied in previous work—apply to journalists from different regional, cultural, and lingual backgrounds (e.g., Arab journalists)?
• 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 characteristics?
Through the Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical tests, Bagdouri, M. et al (2016) compared fourteen features found in 13 million tweets of 5,358 Twitter accounts of journalists and news organizations, as well as two billion posts from over one million of their connections. The following results were observed:
• Organizations broadcast a number of tweets to a large audience, while journalists will target their tweets towards individual users.
• Arab journalists tend to broadcast to a larger follower base, while English journalists tend to have a more individual directed approach to a smaller follower base.
• Arab journalists are more distinguishable than their English counterparts.
• Print and radio journalists have dissimilar behaviors; however, television journalists share commonalities with both print and radio journalists.
• British and Irish journalists are largely similar.
Although Bagdouri, M. et al (2016) succeeded in answering their original questions, I found the lack of explanation beyond the statistical analysis to raise a number of questions. Although quantifying certain phenomena is an important first step, establishing correlation would help us better utilize the data. Questions such as the following quickly rose to mind:
• Does the difference in broadcasting and targeting behaviors lead to a significant different in the reception of the news?
• What social (or other factors) lead to differences between Arab and English journalists, what can we learn from these differences, and how can we utilize that data moving forward?
• Does commonality between same language journalists extend beyond the British Isles?
While Bagdouri, M. et al (2016) occasionally attempted to answer a few of these questions, many of the explanations were closer to conjecture than to empirical evidence.
Cite:
Bagdouri, M. (2016). Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns. Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Retrieved January 29, 2019.
