Brief:
Bagdouri conducted a large scale study on the use of Twitter by news producers and consumers. The primary groups being analyzed in the study are journalists and organizations from both European english speaking countries, and Arab speaking countries. Quantitative analysis is done to compare the writing styles between the aforementioned groups, and their audience interaction.
Reflection:
Culture seems to have a significant effect on how news is shared and received by their intended recipients.
Journalist vs Consumer: The study mentions that Arab journalists receive more reaction to their tweets compared to Arab news consumers, while the situation is reversed in the English population (English news consumers receive more reaction compared to English journalists). It is interesting that such a disparity exists, and it raises the question of why Arab journalists evoke reactions, while in English speaking European countries, the consumers evoke reactions.
Targets and Broadcasts: Another thing that stuck out to me in the study was the difference in how the journalists would communicate. It was seen that while Arab journalists have more followers, and tweet in a way that broadens their reach, English journalists are much more likely to engage other users when they tweet. Perhaps this is a reason as to why consumers are more likely to evoke reactions in English journalism, but this also raises the question: Are people more likely to react to consumers when journalists engage them, or are people more likely to react to other consumers because of other variables (English speakers may be more likely to argue against a journalist’s points).
Organizations and journalists: Interestingly enough, it is seen that organizations are more likely to broadcast news, whereas journalists are more likely to engage with consumers. Journalists dedicate much more of their tweets replying to other people (44% for journalists vs <12% for organizations), and interact with other user’s tweets more often. While this fact is not inherently shocking, it seems to suggest that the study may have some flaws. Perhaps upon scraping the data, there wasn’t as much of an effort to distinguishing Arab journalists from Arab organizations as there was to distinguish English journalists from English organizations.
General questions: One of the big differences between English and Arabic journalism is the amount of interactions that the consumer has with the journalist. Since it is stated that Arab journalists tweet more than twice as much as English one, share 75% more links, and use 39% more hashtags, is the difference in interactions due to how tweets are composed by the journalist? The study seems to suggest that Arab journalists are much more likely to share information in a way that does not promote conversation or interaction. There is also a question of if the methods of separating organizations from journalists is accurate, as Arab journalists seem to share similar characteristics as organizations.
