Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns
Summary:
This paper is an extension of work done by De Choudhury, Diakopoulos, and Naaman, where they trained a classifier that categorized Twitter accounts into organizations, journalists/bloggers, and ordinary individuals. However, this study seeks to prove statistical significance of eight different comparisons: journalists and news organizations, journalists and news consumers, four media types (newspaper, magazine, radio, television), and two regions (European English and Arabic speaking countries). Bagdouri chose to use Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests because of limitations a regular Welch’s t-test poses such as the assumption of normality of distributions and is constrained to the comparison of means.
Bagdouri was able to conclude that journalists target their communication and personally interact with their readers. In contrast, news outlets avoid personal style and broadcast their posts instead. From the region comparison analysis, Bagdouri determined that Arab journalists broadcast more tweets and their audience have a positive reaction to it. When comparing the different media types, print and radio journalists are the most dissimilar groups. It’s important to note that television journalists share similarities with radio and print journalists. For journalists of the same language but from different countries, in this paper’s case are British and Irish journalists, very few dissimilarities are observed.
Reflection:
The study states that “Journalists and organizations also differ in the medium used to publish their tweets. In fact, while they both use a desktop in about 30% of the time, mobile is the preferred medium for journalists (54.95%), and organizations tend to use special Twitter applications for posting more than 28% of the tweets”. Personally, I’m not surprised that the preferred medium for journalists is mobile. I would be very interested in what the age demographics of journalists are because I believe that many of the journalists in this paper are of Generation Y–who are often associated with the current technological revolution. My reasoning is that Generation Y are individuals that grew up along with the significant changes in technology, so they would most likely be more comfortable with posting on Twitter from their mobile compared to news organizations.
One conclusion made in this paper that stood out to me was that most journalists tend to target their communication and interact with their readers more than news outlets. However, Arab journalists go against this notion because they broadcast their tweets. The study mentions that “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…For each original tweet, on average, Arab journalists receive over four times more retweets than the English ones do.” If Arab journalists are broadcasting more tweets, I am curious about what conclusions can be made from a comparison of Twitter features between Arab journalists and Arab news organizations. How similar are journalists and news organizations from Arab speaking countries? Furthermore, this study only covered European English and Arabic speaking regions. Consequently, what other regions have journalists broadcasting more tweets similar to Arab speaking countries? Do those regions receive positive reactions similar to Arab speaking countries?
Further Work:
- After reading through Bagdouri’s study, I am very interested in the vast amount of features that can be extracted from posts on Twitter which makes me eager to use it as a media platform to extract data for my data science project this semester.
- One of the features this paper utilizes to make many of their conclusions is “Targeted communication”. Specifically, the paper talks about mentions which indicate the average number of mentions of other users per original tweet for a given account and questions which indicates the ratio of original tweets that include a question mark in its Arabic or English form. It would be interesting to see if there is any pattern relating the individuals that journalists and news outlets mention in their tweets and how different are the types of questions journalists ask compared to news outlets.
- This paper clearly emphasizes the fact that Twitter is becoming a primary platform for breaking news. However, there are other platforms for breaking news as well. For example, Facebook is a platform for which numerous individuals around the world use–including journalists and news outlets. While Facebook is clearly different Twitter, I would like to see if the conclusions made in this study hold up on Facebook. If not, which conclusions don’t hold up and why?
- Lastly, with the rise of fake news in the present day, a question that arises is how much do news consumers trust journalists compared to news outlets? Consequently, how would we statistically prove the extent news consumers trust a news source? Furthermore, how are the features “audience perception” and “audience reaction” of journalists and news outlets changing over time? Is fake news affecting these features over time?
