Are you Talking to Me?
(Towards) An analysis of Journalism conversation on Twitter
Questions
Are news organisations conversing with the public?
Are journalists conversing with the public?
Are conversations happening mainly within the news community?
| Study | Subjects | Timespan | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herrera-Damas and Hermida (2014) | 3 radio stations (CAN) | 2 weeks(non consecutive) | 2010 & 2011 |
| Lasorsa et. al (2012) | 500 journalists (US) | 2 weeks | first 10 tweets per day |
| Cleary et. al (2014) | CNN + 3 anchors | 1 month | |
| Rosenstiel et. al, (2011) | 13 news organisation (37 accounts) | 1 week | 3,646 tweets |
DATA
“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it....”
- Dan Ariely
Organisation accounts
guardian, guardiannews, MailOnline, DailyMail, DailyMailUK, BBCWorld, BBCNews, BBCBreaking, cnni, cnn, nytimes, nytimesworld, Reuters, ReutersLive, FinancialTimes, ft, thetimes, SkyNews, SkyNewsBreak, DailyMirror, ampp3d, Channel4News, TheSunNewspaper, Telegraph, independent, thei100
Individuals accounts
List of 2200+ 'Journalists on Twitter' from journalism.co.uk
Streaming gives us:
- Tweets created or
retweeted by the user - Replies to and retweets
of any Tweet created by the user
Streaming does not give us:
- Tweets mentioning the user
- Manual Retweets
- Tweets by protected users
2303 Twitter accounts
20th March to 15th July
11,638,197 Tweets
Ignore retweets made by other people
1,225,752 Tweets
| Original Tweets | Retweets | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organisations | 150,203 (80.47%) | 36,443 (19.53%) | 186,646 |
| Individuals | 739,204 (71.14%) | 299,902 (28.86%) | 1,039,106 |
| Total | 889,407 | 336,345 |
@mentions
Number of @mentions made
| Original | Retweets | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. | Min | Max | Avg. | Min | Max | |
| Organisations | 821 | 5 | 4949 | 2356 | 6 | 14177 |
| Individuals | 269 | 1 | 9564 | 218 | 1 | 21531 |
Unique users @Mentioned
| Original | Retweets | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. | Min | Max | Avg. | Min | Max | |
| Organisations | 137 | 1 | 451 | 212 | 6 | 1191 |
| Individuals | 107 | 1 | 2683 | 110 | 1 | 3518 |
157,512 unique accounts mentioned
152,078 accounts available
Others either already included in study, banned or deleted
Can we classify a user as news/non-news?
25,629 media/journalism accounts
Selected Organisation @Mentions
| Organisation | News | Non-News |
|---|---|---|
| Guardian | 3,110 | 529 |
| Daily Mail | 1,886 | 977 |
| BBC | 16,101 | 5,552 |
| The Times | 707 | 435 |
| The Mirror | 3,455 | 3,499 |
Total mentions
| News | Non-News | |
|---|---|---|
| Organisations | 1611.5 | 1018.9 |
| Individuals | 214.5 | 239.9 |
Total mentions (>=5 mentions)
| News | Non-News | |
|---|---|---|
| Organisations | 1481.89 | 802.6 |
| Individuals | 123.8 | 93.12 |
Average number of users mentioned (>=5 mentions)
| News | Non-News | |
|---|---|---|
| Organisations | 28.83 | 16.74 |
| Individuals | 7.92 | 8.06 |
Preliminary Findings
- Possible to conduct large scale analysis of news communities on Twitter
- Differences exist between organisations and individuals on Twitter
- Evidence that both organisations and individuals favour communication within the news community
Next...
- Improve user classification
- Implement pipeline (continuous analysis)
- Conversation thread analysis
- Content analysis
- Content sharing analysis
- Profile growth analysis
Thanks!
Image Credits
Caution - CC BY 2.0 by Eugene Zemlyanskiy
Twitter bird logo © Twitter Inc.