Summary
Bagdouri investigates the intersection of journalism and Twitter with a multi-faceted analysis that spans a set of “5000 news producers and 1 million news consumers”. The main research questions Bagdouri seeks to answer are:
- Is Twitter usage the same or different for news producers compared to news consumers?
- Can previous findings be applied to a wholly different group of journalists?
The reason for doing such an investigation is that previous studies focused on a small and specific set of data that it was difficult to apply those findings to a larger and more spread-out set of data. With a larger set of data, Bagdouri analyzes different features of over 13 million tweets and over 5,000 Twitter accounts of journalists and news organizations using different statistical analyses, in particular Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical tests.
Reflection
Having rarely used Twitter as a social media platform before reading this article, this Bagdouri’s research gave me insight into some of the more practical usages of the platform: mainly broadcasting and disseminating information.
The beginning of the article starts off with selecting criteria to compare the groups of Twitter accounts, and Bagdouri comes up with eighteen different criteria. How were those chosen, and are they good metrics? In my opinion, some of these metrics are not as easily quantifiable as Bagdouri suggests. For example, one feature that was analyzed was audience reaction. This is a binary classification: did another user retweet, or did the user favorite a tweet? To me, in a study that aims to describe how journalists and consumers interact through social media we would need better classification that involves not only positive reactions but negative ones as well. For instance, measuring number of times people had seen a particular tweet but did not favorite nor retweet could be a third classification in this sub-category.
Other categories are easier to define and to collect data for, though their purposes are not entirely clear. For instance, the author mentions publication medium as a means of differentiating between tweets made through mobile or desktop applications, but to me this does not seem like a classification that would yield any insight regarding the way journalists and consumers of news interact.
One thing that I still have questions about though are how does Bagdouri account for cultural differences? The author is aware that differences may exist between Arabic and English journalists, and analyzes each group independently, but then compares the two without providing an explanation or hypothesis for the difference (e.g. “We note first the unsurprising observation that journalists are more likely to have a verified account [is] 8.46% vs 0.35% for Arabic, and 14.84% vs 2.96% for English).
In the end, it seems the paper has moved from the broader category of journalism source vs consumer to a more specific type of journalism source vs consumer. The paper suggests two strategies, Twitter for independent journalists vs Twitter for news organizations, reaches the same audience based on the fact that the two groups receive roughly the same number of favorites. Is this idea flawed because Bagdouri does not compare tweet-by-tweet over the same particular event? To me, this is flawed because viewers might relate to certain events more closely, e.g. news about a hurricane in Florida may see more retweets and favorites versus news about the oldest cat in Ireland.
Additional Questions
- How can we explore, track, and analyze the dissemination of information not just from news source to viewer, but from viewer A to viewer A’s friend?
- How does indirect news affect perceptions of whether or not a source is accurate in the age of “fake news”?
