{"id":560,"date":"2019-01-29T07:39:15","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T07:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/?p=560"},"modified":"2019-01-29T07:39:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-29T07:39:17","slug":"reflection-1-01-29-liz-dao","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/2019\/01\/29\/reflection-1-01-29-liz-dao\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection #1 \u2013 [01\/29] \u2013 [Liz Dao]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mossaab Bagdouri. \u201cJournalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Summary:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last couple years\nwitness a major shift in people’s sources of news. Due to its convenient,\ninstant and interactive nature; Twitter is arising as a major news platform,\nespecially among the younger generations. As a result, there is a demand for\nunderstanding the behaviors and strategies of journalists on Twitter. This\nresearch aims to answers several questions: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Do journalists build more personal\nengagement with their audience than organization broadcast<\/li>
  2. Can English journalists’ behaviors be\ngeneralized to a broader population with a different cultural, linguistic, and\nregional background?<\/li>
  3. Can new consumers be distinguished from\njournalists by their behavior on Twitter?<\/li>
  4. Do journalists working for different types\nof news outlet act differently?<\/li>
  5. Do journalists speaking the same language\nbut live in different regions share similar behaviors on Twitter?<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Thirteen million tweets\nof 5,358 Twitter accounts of journalists and news organizations and two billion\nposts from more than one million of their connections are collected. The\nauthors extract eighteen numerical features from these data and conduct Welch\nand Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical tests to analyze their distributions across\ndifferent groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The authors discovered a\nfew interesting patterns of behaviors across the groups:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    1. Organization broadcasts use more formal\nlanguage and share more links than journalists while journalists prefer to\nbuild a more engaging, targeted communication with their audiences. <\/li>
    2. The higher frequency of question mark\nusage also suggests that journalists use Twitter as a source of information.<\/li>
    3. Some journalists (Arabic) are more\ndistinguishable from news consumers than others (Arabic). <\/li>
    4. Journalists’ behaviors differ across media\ntypes.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Reflection:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

       To begin with, the authors mentioned in the\nintroduction they strike to provide observations that can be generalized to the\nlarger population of journalists rather than a particular group like previous\nstudies. Even though their dataset is massive, the majority of it still belongs\nto English speaking journalists. Only two tests involve Arabic speaking journalists.\nFurthermore, they never explain why they choose Arabic instead of other\nlanguages and Ireland instead of other British-English speaking regions. Hence, an interesting question is how\njournalists from other regions act differently to those studied in this\nresearch?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

       In addition, the journalists’ preference of\nmedium varies significantly across the groups. While journalists use mobile for\n54.95% of the time, news organizations use desktop and special Twitter\napplication more often. Meanwhile, Arabic journalists use desktop twice as\nfrequent as news consumers. However, print journalists are not fond of the\nideas of posting articles via mobile phones. It might be interesting to investigate which factors affect the\njournalists’ preference of medium used to publish their tweets. Do younger and\non-site journalists tend to post via mobile devices? What type of posts are\nmostly posted via mobile device: breaking news, discussion, questions, etc.? Is\nthere a correlation between the validity of the account and its medium\npreference?<\/strong> As posting via mobile devices is more convenient and instant,\nit might suggest a lack of consideration and time investment in the tweets. A\nperfect example is the President; most of his tweets are posted from his\nphones. However, fake news is possibly generated and posted by an algorithm\nthus tweets posted via desktop might have a higher chance of being fake news. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Despite the fact that the\nbehavior of Arabic and English speaking journalists are mostly similar, the\naudiences’ reactions to their tweets diverge significantly. Arabic journalists’\ntweets receive much more retweets and favorites compared to that of news\nconsumers. On the other hand, English journalists receive fewer reactions for\ntheir tweets than other news consumers’. What\nare the causes of this pattern? Can this be because there are more internet\nfigures (celebrities, vloggers, etc.) in the English speaking region than that\nof the Arabic world?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Finally, one of the\nbiggest pitfalls of this research is that it detects answer-seeking question\ntweets based solely on the existence of question marks. Even though the authors\nrecognize the potential of misclassification, they decide to go with the\nsimple, na\u00efve approach without providing a justification. Since the usage of rhetorical\nquestions as click baits has been emerging in recent years, the rate of false\nnegative might be quite high, especially with less formal tweets by journalists\nand news consumers. Therefore, it\npossibly will provide a more accurate insight if future research can use\nnatural language processing techniques to classify whether a tweet is an\nanswer-seeking question. Moreover, it might be interesting to see if there is a\ncorrelation between the use of rhetorical questions and the validity of the\nnews and the reaction of the audience? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Mossaab Bagdouri. \u201cJournalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":561,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs5984\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}