Summary:
Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns
This study is an extension on other studies that study news organizations/journalists in the past. This study is supposed to be bigger than most of the other released studies and answered five 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?
The authors found that journalists do engage more personally with their audiences, even to gather information from Twitter. The study also showed that Arab journalists were far more distinguishable than their English counterparts. Journalists also behave differently based off of what medium they work with, print and radio being the most dissimilar.
Reflection and Raised Questions:
Personally, I thought the first question that the study tried to answer seemed self-explanatory. Individual journalists would be more personable with their audience because it is more likely their personal account, with themselves or a small team running it, whereas an organizations account is run to promote the business. I think that the paper tried to answer to many questions and it hurt the value of the paper and the more intresting points that it was making.
What is too many questions for a paper and what are too many variables?
Going off what I said above, I want to know when you should draw a line for the number of questions you want to ask and try to answer during a study. I think that this research paper could have been split up into two research papers, one that asked questions comparing journalists and organizations (of the same culture/language) and one comparing journalists from different cultures and organizations.
This paper also had a lot of features that they used to compare the journalists. This made me think about something a PI told me about in my lab called p-hacking. He told me that a lot of researchers are under extreme pressure to get published and sometimes collect a lot of different data points in hopes that some of them will be statistically significant enough to publish, there is a very interesting paper about this entitled: Why Most Published Research Findings are False. This may be different across the fields of research and currently, I am not well versed in the field of data science research so this many features may be the norm.
Since Arab journalist was found to be more distinguishable than their English counterparts, Is there a way to classify different types of journalists based off where they are from and tell bias based off of tweets, community interaction, and writiting style?
I am very interested in machine learning and I wonder if it would be possible to do research and train a classifier to tell what part of the world a journalist is from based off of their tweets, content, and style of writing. Now, most of this is easily done by looking at their language and location, but being able to tell what type of bias they might have from their writing style would be a very interesting study.
This could potentially lead to other studies trying to classify what jounlists try to propogate “fake news” based off of their interactions with communities.
