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?
