Mining Social Media for Newsgathering: A Review

Social media is becoming an increasingly important data source for learning about breaking news and for following the latest developments of ongoing news. This is in part possible thanks to the existence of mobile devices, which allows anyone with access to the Internet to post updates from anywhere, leading in turn to a growing presence of citizen journalism. Consequently, social media has become a go-to resource for journalists during the process of newsgathering. Use of social media for newsgathering is however challenging, and suitable tools are needed in order to facilitate access to useful information for reporting. In this paper, we provide an overview of research in data mining and natural language processing for mining social media for newsgathering. We discuss five different areas that researchers have worked on to mitigate the challenges inherent to social media newsgathering: news discovery, curation of news, validation and verification of content, newsgathering dashboards, and other tasks. We outline the progress made so far in the field, summarise the current challenges as well as discuss future directions in the use of computational journalism to assist with social media newsgathering. This review is relevant to computer scientists researching news in social media as well as for interdisciplinary researchers interested in the intersection of computer science and journalism.Comment: Accepted for publication in Online Social Networks and Medi

Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Oblique strategies for ambient journalism

Alfred Hermida recently posited ‘ambient journalism’ as a new framework for para- and professional journalists, who use social networks like Twitter for story sources, and as a news delivery platform. Beginning with this framework, this article explores the following questions: How does Hermida define ‘ambient journalism’ and what is its significance? Are there alternative definitions? What lessons do current platforms provide for the design of future, real-time platforms that ‘ambient journalists’ might use? What lessons does the work of Brian Eno provide–the musician and producer who coined the term ‘ambient music’ over three decades ago? My aim here is to formulate an alternative definition of ambient journalism that emphasises craft, skills acquisition, and the mental models of professional journalists, which are the foundations more generally for journalism practices. Rather than Hermida’s participatory media context I emphasise ‘institutional adaptiveness’: how journalists and newsrooms in media institutions rely on craft and skills, and how emerging platforms can augment these foundations, rather than replace them

Neutral Isn’t Neutral: An Analysis of Misinformation and Sentiment in the Wake of the Capitol Riots

January 6th, 2021 was a significant moment in the history of the United States of America. Protestors stormed the Capitol building over the results of the 2020 presidential election in which Joseph R. Biden defeated incumbent president Donald J. Trump. The Capitol riots were partially incited by the presence of misinformation on social media and was an example of the power misinformation has. This study presented two questions. Question one pertains to the sentiment analysis of verified Twitter users and their sentiment towards Trump. Question two pertains to analyzing tweets from verified accounts for misinformation between the dates of January 6th, 2021 and January 13th, 2021. To answer these questions, a machine learning sentiment analysis was conducted on 13 randomly selected Twitter accounts with noted liberal and conservative political leanings to assess their sentiment towards Trump. The accounts were analyzed and then categorized as being either anti-Trump or Trump-neutral. Once the accounts were appropriately categorized a collection of their tweets mentioning Trump were documented to create a consecutive day sample to examine their reporting and analyze how misinformation differed between the two. The results of this study show that one, sentiment analysis is a useful tool for examining and categorizing tweets and their overall accounts based on their sentiments and two, that there was a notable difference in the spread of misinformation between the two categories

Australia-Papua New Guinea emerging leaders dialogue: outcomes report

Presents the outcomes of a dialogue involving twenty-two emerging leaders from Papua New Guinea and Australia, from across the business, government, media and non-government sectors. Introduction: The Lowy Institute hosted the inaugural Australia-Papua New Guinea Emerging Leaders Dialogue on 26 November 2013. The Dialogue was convened with the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and was an initiative that arose from the 2012 Papua New Guinea-Australia Ministerial Forum. Twenty-two emerging leaders from Papua New Guinea and Australia, from across the business, government, media and non-government sector, participated in the Dialogue. The Dialogue focused on four main themes: Growing the economy and attracting investment in the Asian Century; Politics and accountability – new expectations; National infrastructure challenges – new approaches; Reform and innovations in the delivery of health and education services. Key findings: Perceptions of Papua New Guinea among the Australian public and business community are narrowly based. They focus on media reports on mining, crime and corruption. These perceptions could be improved by businesses better publicising their successes in Papua New Guinea, the use of creative media and increasing people-to-people links between the two countries through networking and structured collaboration. Social media is rapidly changing the media landscape in Papua New Guinea. Although traditional media continues to be important, the proliferation of mobile phones has given Papua New Guineans, including those living in rural or remote areas, the ability to influence what the media reports and to get their message into the public sphere. Australia and Papua New Guinea, although at difference stages of development, face many of the same challenges in infrastructure and the delivery of services to remote areas. Papua New Guinea could benefit from Australia’s experience in consultative infrastructure planning between governments and business and using emerging, cheap technologies to meet the health and education needs of remote communities

Social media and journalism: how twitter impacts news coverage in Kenya

Twitter had been extensively adopted by the public, journalists, and news organizations as a new digital tool for disseminating information. Therefore, if Twitter is considered a new and effective way of gathering information that makes up news content, an investigation on how it impacts news coverage, journalists, and newsroom practices is significant. The present study conducted said investigation and came up with findings that significantly contributed to the available information about the relationship between Twitter and news dissemination. It particularly investigated how Twitter impacts news content and coverage, journalistic routines, and newsroom practices in Kenya. This study draws its data from a review of journalists from four major media organizations in Kenya. The results suggest that Twitter has had a significant impact on both news content and coverage and journalistic routine. However, the platform was found to not have a significant impact on newsroom practices. Further explanation of the results is provided in the document