Journalists and Twitter: A Muti-dimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns – Mossaab Bagdouri

Summary

Twitter is a great platform for journalists and news organizations to reach out and interact with their audiences. In this paper, Bagdouri studies the interaction of journalists / news organizations and their audience by surveying 18 features of three different account categories (journalists, news organizations, and news consumers),  across two languages and cultural backgrounds (English-speaking and Arab-speaking countries), and three types of news media (print, radio, and television). By performing Welch’s t-test and Kolmogrov-Smirnov test with these features and different categories of Twitter accounts, Bagdouri found that journalists tend to target and have personal engagements with their audience, whereas news organizations prefer broadcasting their posts and are more official. The same pattern is found when comparing Arab journalists and English journalists, where Arab journalists appear to broadcast more tweets and more distinguishable from their audience than English journalists. The paper also finds that journalists across different media types are very different. 

Reflection

This is an overall very interesting paper. I really like how Bagdouri compares journalists from different cultural backgrounds and how he compares journalists/news organizations with their audiences. These comparisons are probably not done in previous work, since this research surveys the largest set of twitter accounts and tweets and is more focused on journalists. However, the paper’s definition for “audience” intrigues me. “Audience” in this paper are accounts that “have a bidirectional follower / friend relationship” with selected journalists. The limitation that the paper addresses is that some of these audience accounts might include other journalists, but since the number of journalists is statistically insignificant compare to the total number, this isn’t really a limitation. This definition of “audience” omits twitter accounts that follow these journalists and don’t have a bidirectional follower relationship, and these twitter accounts are true audience of these journalists in my opinion. People that journalists follow may include other journalists and their friends in real life, and they are not representative of what the actual audience perception and reaction are like. I think it would be better to survey all the followers, instead of just the ones with bidirectional relationship with the journalists.

Another thing that intrigues me is that the journalists are not separated into news categories. Sports journalists and news organizations might tweet differently and have different interactions with their audience than the ones that cover politics. Audience might also react to different categories of news differently. For example, I often see sports fans tweeting out their excitement or disappointment with original tweets, which means less interaction with the journalists, and people react to political figures’ tweets or news by retweeting the original tweet extensively. Analyzing different news categories of journalists and news organizations can definitely be developed as part of the future work of this research.

This research can also consider a third type of users, Opinion-ist (writers who write Opinions). Opinion-ist are not journalists, but they still talk about news and are often quite influential. It would be interesting to compare journalists and opinion-ist to see how similar they are and how personal/targeting they are, since the research already showed that journalists are more targeting and relatable than news organization accounts. 

Since this research can be seen as an extension of De Choudhury, Diakopoulos, and Naaman (2012)’s classifier research, an account classifier that’s based on Bagdouri’s data would be interesting. This classifier will make the verification process easier and suggest more targeted accounts to new users, and it should be able to at least identify whether an account belongs to a journalist, a news organization, or a news consumer, and what language they primarily speak. If more analysis is done with different news categories, the classifier should also be able to categorize different accounts.

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Mossaab Bagdouri. “Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns”

Summary:

The last couple years witness a major shift in people’s sources of news. Due to its convenient, instant and interactive nature; Twitter is arising as a major news platform, especially among the younger generations. As a result, there is a demand for understanding the behaviors and strategies of journalists on Twitter. This research aims to answers several questions:

1. Do journalists build more personal engagement with their audience than organization broadcast
2. Can English journalists’ behaviors be generalized to a broader population with a different cultural, linguistic, and regional background?
3. Can new consumers be distinguished from journalists by their behavior on Twitter?
4. Do journalists working for different types of news outlet act differently?
5. Do journalists speaking the same language but live in different regions share similar behaviors on Twitter?

Thirteen million tweets of 5,358 Twitter accounts of journalists and news organizations and two billion posts from more than one million of their connections are collected. The authors extract eighteen numerical features from these data and conduct Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical tests to analyze their distributions across different groups.

The authors discovered a few interesting patterns of behaviors across the groups:

1. Organization broadcasts use more formal language and share more links than journalists while journalists prefer to build a more engaging, targeted communication with their audiences.
2. The higher frequency of question mark usage also suggests that journalists use Twitter as a source of information.
3. Some journalists (Arabic) are more distinguishable from news consumers than others (Arabic).
4. Journalists’ behaviors differ across media types.

Reflection:

 To begin with, the authors mentioned in the introduction they strike to provide observations that can be generalized to the larger population of journalists rather than a particular group like previous studies. Even though their dataset is massive, the majority of it still belongs to English speaking journalists. Only two tests involve Arabic speaking journalists. Furthermore, they never explain why they choose Arabic instead of other languages and Ireland instead of other British-English speaking regions. Hence, an interesting question is how journalists from other regions act differently to those studied in this research?

 In addition, the journalists’ preference of medium varies significantly across the groups. While journalists use mobile for 54.95% of the time, news organizations use desktop and special Twitter application more often. Meanwhile, Arabic journalists use desktop twice as frequent as news consumers. However, print journalists are not fond of the ideas of posting articles via mobile phones. It might be interesting to investigate which factors affect the journalists’ preference of medium used to publish their tweets. Do younger and on-site journalists tend to post via mobile devices? What type of posts are mostly posted via mobile device: breaking news, discussion, questions, etc.? Is there a correlation between the validity of the account and its medium preference? As posting via mobile devices is more convenient and instant, it might suggest a lack of consideration and time investment in the tweets. A perfect example is the President; most of his tweets are posted from his phones. However, fake news is possibly generated and posted by an algorithm thus tweets posted via desktop might have a higher chance of being fake news.

Despite the fact that the behavior of Arabic and English speaking journalists are mostly similar, the audiences’ reactions to their tweets diverge significantly. Arabic journalists’ tweets receive much more retweets and favorites compared to that of news consumers. On the other hand, English journalists receive fewer reactions for their tweets than other news consumers’. What are the causes of this pattern? Can this be because there are more internet figures (celebrities, vloggers, etc.) in the English speaking region than that of the Arabic world?

Finally, one of the biggest pitfalls of this research is that it detects answer-seeking question tweets based solely on the existence of question marks. Even though the authors recognize the potential of misclassification, they decide to go with the simple, naïve approach without providing a justification. Since the usage of rhetorical questions as click baits has been emerging in recent years, the rate of false negative might be quite high, especially with less formal tweets by journalists and news consumers. Therefore, it possibly will provide a more accurate insight if future research can use natural language processing techniques to classify whether a tweet is an answer-seeking question. Moreover, it might be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the use of rhetorical questions and the validity of the news and the reaction of the audience?

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Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns

Summary:

This is a paper that talk about their study on twitter in the news. They did extension research into the Twitter accounts held by journalists, news organizations, and consumers. Using the data from the accounts they were able to use Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to show statistical differences in eight comparisons across two regions, Arab world and European world. They found that journalists use a direct form of communication design to engage their audience and use twitter as a source of information. On the other hand, news outlets use a professional style in their tweets and are more likely to use links in their post. They also they found that Arab journalist are more distinguishable from news consumers than English ones.

Reflection:

• Quote: “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”

• Honestly, this makes totally sense to me because I think that most of the Journalists in this study are younger Journalists who would be more incline to be on their phone all the time. I know that my generation is always on our phones and it would make sense that Journalists who are in my generation or the one before would also be on their phones all the time. I would love to see an age breakdown of the journalists in this study.

• Overall, I didn’t find the results of the study suspiring because Bagdouri’s results says that news organizations are less likely to retweet posts or engage with users. This makes sense because when the news organizations accounts post they are posting for the whole company and thus can’t risk endorsing a tweet that would bring the hate from their twitter community. Whereas, a journalist is only speaking for themselves so they can post more of what they believe in.

Additional Questions:

• How does the “fake news” change the way we view tweets from journalists and news organizations?
• How does journalists or news organizations political leaning affect how the public looks and engages with the tweets?

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