Brief Summary of “Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns”:
By conducting what might remain the largest study of the use of Twitter by news producers and consumers, they were able to use Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to quantify the statistical differences in eight comparisons between accounts spanning two regions (Arab world, and European speaking countries), three user categories (journalists, news organizations, and consumers), and three media types (print, radio, and television). They found that the accounts of news outlets use an official style and share more links than journalists, whereas journalists have a targeted communication that is engaging their audience, suggesting that they also use Twitter as a source of information. Also, that Arab journalists are less likely to have this communication pattern, however, they are more distinguishable from news consumers, than English journalists are. And finally, that print and radio journalists have a very dissimilar behavior while the television ones share some characteristics with each of them.
Reflection:
While reading the article, these were a few lines that stood out to me.
- Quote 1: While interviewing several political journalists working for American newspapers: “He found these journalists to be more conservative about publicly sharing their opinions than what Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton had reported”.
- Reflection 1: After watching the past presidential election, I’m not surprised that the less popular (by followers) journalists, would be conservative to share their personal opinions on political topics. What might be a bold (but not necessarily incorrect) claim, that the major news outlets have begun to stain their reputation of being credible sources of information by consistently aligning with what is being reported based upon their political affiliation. Major news outlets don’t necessarily “suffer” from these political affiliations, for example, if I wanted to just brush up on today’s events from a viewpoint that wouldn’t make me furious, I would turn to the news station that historically supports my political views. However, I can see where journalists have to stay as neutral as possible, in order to preserve their reputation among their narrower audience. This claim might be supported by the fact that journalists are more likely to have a verified account when compared to news outlets, thus showing that they value accuracy when it comes to their reporting, and not their respective political opinions.
- Quote 2: When comparing the count and the nature of the tweets between journalist and organizations: “For each tweet published by a journalist, an organization publishes three, on average”.
- Reflection 2: After reading this line from the article, I honestly was not surprised, and made me think of the line from “Anchorman”, that news organizations are turning to “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for news reporting. News organizations often have characteristics that resembles a large business, therefore they have a larger access to resources and have more mouths to feed when it comes to having their reporters out in the field. As many of these news outlets have their own station that is aired throughout the day, they have a mindset of needing to consistently come up with news in order to please these audience, whereas journalists probably focus more of what needs to be reported.
Additional Questions Work Enables:
- An additional question that this work might enable is the potential of analyzing the revenue streams of these journalist and organizations. Is there a relationship between reporting locations and the amount of revenue they generate from that location, thus potentially influencing these journalists and organizations to cover certain locations over others.
- Another additional question that this work might enable is the potential of using the omitted accounts which were originally omitted due to some journalists having more than one affiliation, and seeing if these journalists often tailored their reporting from one reporting station to another.
