Are You Talking To Me?: An Analysis of Journalism Conversation on Social Media

Abstract

Social media has become a key medium for discussion and dissemination of news stories, fuelled by the low barrier to entry and the ease of interaction. News stories may be propagated through these networks either by official news organisation accounts, by individual journalists or by members of the public, through link sharing, endorsing or commenting. This preliminary research aims to show how computational analysis of large-scale data-sets allows us to investigate the means by which news stories are spread through social media, and how the conversation around them is shaped by journalists and news organisations. Through the capture of more than 11 million tweets relating to 2303 Twitter accounts connected to journalism and news organisations, we are able to analyse the conversation within and around journalism, examining who spreads information about news articles and who interacts in the discussion around them. Capturing the tweets of news organisations and journalists and the replies and retweets of these micro-blogs allows us to build a rich picture of interaction around news media.