TV news and social audience in Europe (EU5) : on-screen and twitter strategies

Social networks have altered how viewers watch television and consume information. This new context has obliged broadcasters to adapt their practices to reach viewers in all platforms. In this article, we focus on how the evening news programmes from the general-interest DTT channels in the five main European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) appeal to their social audience. This concept, although ambiguous, refers to the activity of viewers on social networks in relation to the contents broadcast by the television industry in its multiple forms. We analyse both the screen strategies and their activity on their official Twitter accounts. Although the evening news is the anchor of the prime time and one of the main assets to instil the channels with prestige and influence, the conclusions point to a certain neglect of the social audience from the industry in these key programmes. But mostly, our research reveals how the specificities of the format and the nature of the content distinguish the evening news from other live TV show

Did you watch #TheWalkingDead last night? an examination of television hashtags and Twitter activity

This study examined on-screen hashtags and Twitter activity associated with four television programs (The Walking Dead, Pretty Little Liars, Scandal and Hannibal). Twitter facilitates real time discussions, allowing “water cooler conversations” about television to occur while shows air live. Hashtags organize these conversations around topics of interest. Active viewers will migrate to new media sources, searching for additional content that interests them. The act of complementarity increases their level of media enjoyment. The desire for this additional content dictates the viewer’s behavior. Network producers also promote media convergence, utilizing websites and social media to build word of mouth advertising for their programs. The combination of an abundance of exceptional programs and producer-driven media convergence might be causing viewers to feel a stronger urge to migrate to new media. A content analysis was conducted on three episodes per program, noting the use of any on-screen hashtags. Next, Twitter activity information was pulled using analytics software Radian6. Various comparisons were made, such as the number of mentions of title-based hashtags versus plot-related hashtags and cable versus network program hashtags. An analysis of hashtag characteristics (such as the hashtag screen location and the length of screen time it received) provided information on how networks are currently utilizing hashtags on-screen, and how audiences are using these hashtags in their Twitter conversations. Networks are placing a higher value on audience engagement. They are mining online data to improve their understanding of how existing viewers are reacting to their shows. The upcoming Nielsen and Twitter partnership will incorporate engagement in a new television rating. By understanding how viewers use sites like Twitter and Tumblr, networks can fine tune their dialogue with viewers

Tweeting television between innovation and normalization: How Lebanese television and audiences are making use of Twitter in political talk shows

Traditional media have progressively integrated newer media practices, with the constant emergence of new digital technologies, without abandoning their former ones. The adoption of Twitter by TV channels and by other social actors during political talk shows is a case in point. This article aims to assess whether the hybridization of TV talk shows and Twitter has innovated or normalized existing patterns of communication. In the former case, by enabling more interaction between different actors and space for audience deliberation, or in the latter case, by reproducing a traditional one-way communication and a centralized network of information that remains controlled and oriented by the elite (journalists and politicians). The incorporation of older and emergent media logic has an impact on the construction and distribution of political information as well as on the power relationships between journalists, politicians, and TV audiences. Besides allowing political talk shows to expand their flow of information, and to promote their news online, hybridized practices have not only altered the way citizens consume and engage with political information but also how they counter-frame traditional political media content by producing new ones. The research methodology consists of descriptive, content, and network analyses of tweets collected from three Lebanese local TV political talk show “Sarelwa2et” (MTV), “Btefro’ aa Watan” (Al Jadeed), and “Vision 2030” (LBCI) between February and March 2022. Results revealed that TV talk shows are making use of Twitter as a top-down transmitter of information and resorting poorly to its interactive potential. Some newer media practices of Twitter, such as @mention and replies are being applied but only to interact with politicians and journalists, failing to engage with a larger array of voices and thus, leading to an elite-centric discourse within the network. Also, tweets are mostly used to inform audiences and promote TV programs. In addition, network analyses of talk shows via hashtags demonstrated the central and not monopolized role of politicians and journalists as influencers, bridges, and quick spreaders of information. Finally, content analysis of dual screeners’ tweets (n=6000) indicated very little space in a Habermasian public sphere. The total of subjective opinions, irony, and attack/insult tweets are still higher than the total of the introduction of new issues and counter-frames tweets

#PrettyLittleLiars: ABC Family in TV’s Post-Network Era

This thesis explores the branding of ABC Family as a home for ‘Millennial’ viewers through its original TV drama programme, Pretty Little Liars. ABC Family emerged during what Amanda Lotz (2007) terms the ‘post-network’ era of American television, a period that has been characterised by fierce inter-network competition and the availability of TV programming on a larger array of platforms, including online platforms. These revolutionary changes have been coupled with the emergence of a commercially desirable demographic known as the ‘Millennials’, a group of young people who are considered to be ‘native’ to this ‘post-network’ environment and whose media use and preferences are challenging networks to revise their strategies and develop programmes that aim to solicit their attention and engagement. Pretty Little Liars has been specifically constructed to assert the brand identity of ABC Family as a channel “for and about Millennials” (Liesse A2). This programme has sought to distinguish itself within teen-oriented TV drama by incorporating cinematic aesthetics, serial storytelling, narrative complexity, and intertextuality – all of which have been characteristic of adult-oriented ‘high-end’ TV drama in the ‘post-network’ era. Pretty Little Liars has supplemented these efforts to distinguish itself by cultivating a thriving online presence. Important to this online presence are the use of ‘transmedia storytelling’ and social media. As this thesis demonstrates, transmedia storytelling and social media have the capacity to significantly extend the experience of a TV programme beyond what is aired on television. Importantly, their deployment in support of Pretty Little Liars has been successful in encouraging consistent viewing of new episodes as they are broadcast, a pattern that persists despite the post-network era’s capacity for delayed viewing on alternative platforms. This thesis undertakes an in-depth examination of ABC Family’s ‘post-network’ strategy in three chapters, each of which takes a different critical perspective. Chapter One examines the internal and external challenges that contributed to the emergence of ABC Family’s rebranding. Chapter Two analyses Pretty Little Liars as a ‘high end’ teen-oriented TV drama that functions to elevate the profile of ABC Family while simultaneously engaging ‘Millennial’ viewers. Finally, Chapter Three explores the transmedia extensions of Pretty Little Liars that function to supplement the television narrative in ways that encourage and reward consistent viewing patterns and long-term loyalty

Semiotic resources and argumentative strategies in tweets about political TV shows in Chile

The main aim of this research is to explore the argumentative and semiotic resources used in tweets related to political TV shows in Chile in 2016. To achieve this, I carried out a qualitative investigation that incorporates principles from critical discourse studies (Wodak & Meyer, 2016) for the analysis of the resources employed by Twitter users to present their political views in this type of digital media. Previous studies in political discourse and social media (KhosraviNik & Unger, 2016; KhosraviNik & Zia, 2014), and specifically the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016), have proved to be particularly useful to explore the argumentative strategies and semiotic resources involved in the discourse on political issues in different media. This research focuses on tweets about five Chilean political TV shows which encourage their audiences to extend the debate in a social media environment, showing hashtags and tweets. The data set comprises 39,684 hashtagged tweets from three months at the beginning, middle and end of the televised season. In the first stage of this research, I identify topics and diverse semiotic features in the whole data set. Among the topics identified in the data collection, those related to ethical concerns are the most frequent, alongside tweets related to public figures and institutions. The semiotic resources found in the data set were classified into overarching semiotic categories of verbal, visual and hypertextual. In the second stage, I analysed the interaction patterns present in the data and argumentative resources in a sample of tweets. To describe interaction patterns, I draw on Goffman’s (1981) model of interaction. I found that users addressed a wide variety of actors, not only among the participants of online or televised debates, but across the public sphere. The communication among these diverse actors blurred the boundaries between and within encounters, creating a new type of interaction that I called hybrid play. Regarding the diverse argumentative strategies identified in the sample, fallacies, including ad hominem, ad verecundiam, hasty generalization and straw man, were found. The other main discursive strategies analysed were topoi. There were several realizations of the topoi of burden and responsibility, related to issues of political contingency and users’ claims for action. Also present were topoi of urgency, comparison, decency, justice, human rights and history. Despite the claims that social media can allow manifestations of hostility or uncivil behaviour in relation to politics, the analysis showed that digitally mediated debates related to television shows in the Chilean context can be seen as an expansion of the public sphere in which users can participate to different degrees in political debates, criticizing the status quo and proposing their own political agendas, thereby potentially generating new spaces for political deliberation

The impact of NFT profile pictures within social network communities

This paper presents an analysis of the role of social media, specifically Twitter, in the context of non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs. Such emerging technology framing the creation and exchange of digital object, started years ago with early projects such as "CryptoPunks" and since early 2021, has received an increasing interest by a community of people creating, buying, selling NFT's and by the media reporting to the general public. In this work it is shown how the landscape of one class of projects, specifically those used as social media profile pictures, has become mainstream with leading projects such as "Bored Ape Yacht Club", "Cool Cats" and "Doodles". This work illustrates how heterogeneous data was collected from the Ethereum blockchain and Twitter and then analysed using algorithms and state-of-art metrics related to graphs. The initial results show that from a social network perspective, the collections of most popular NFTs can be considered as a single community around NFTs. Thus, while each project has its own value and volume of exchange, on a social level all of them are primarily influenced by the evolution of values and trades of "Bored Ape Yacht Club" collection.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT'22), September 07--09, 2022, Cypru

From Transmission to Participation: A Case Study of Democratic Debate at the BBC African Services

This thesis is about the blurring boundaries between audiences and producers as a result of new social media technology and new approaches to journalism in international broadcasting to Africa, commonly referred to as participatory journalism. Audience participation, it has been suggested, can foster stronger democracy through engaging citizens in democratic debate or in the BBC World Service words, ‘a global conversation’. Informed by deliberative democracy and dialogue theory, I use dialogic deliberation as a critical evaluative framework to understand the relationship between participatory journalism and democratic debate. This research goes beyond existing studies about participatory journalism by focusing on the relationship between a British broadcaster and social media audiences in Africa, thus contributing to a new understanding of media power and transnational deliberation between the Global North and the Global South. The work draws on ethnographic data collected through participant observation at the BBC African services in London and on social media through three mediated moments a) a crowd sourced Nigerian Election map b) the launch of a new audience led programme and c) Facebook discussions about football. Through unique access to both the newsroom, the BBC’s own web analytics systems, and by using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I demonstrate how it is changing journalistic and audience practices, and not social media technology by itself that is contributing to advancing international democratic debate. I also found that in order to allow for a more inclusive and accessible democratic debate, journalists need to give up their gatekeeping culture and use a more dialogic approach to participation including; inclusion and equality that allow personal storytelling, reciprocity and respect in debates, self-reflection of their own values and mutual exploration of news topics together with participating audiences

The impact of NFT profile pictures within social network communities

This paper presents an analysis of the role of social media, specifically Twitter, in the context of non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs. Such emerging technology framing the creation and exchange of digital object, started years ago with early projects such as ”CryptoPunks” and since early 2021, has received an increasing interest by a community of people creating, buying, selling NFTs and by the media reporting to the general public. In this work it is shown how the landscape of one class of projects, specifically those used as social media profile pictures, has become mainstream with leading projects such as ”Bored Ape Yacht Club”, ”Cool Cats” and ”Doodles”. This work illustrates how heterogeneous data was collected from the Ethereum blockchain and Twitter and then analysed using algorithms and state-of-art metrics related to graphs. The initial results show that from a social network perspective, the collections of most popular NFTs can be considered as a single community around NFTs. Thus, while each project has its own value and volume of exchange, on a social level all of them are primarily influenced by the evolution of values and trades of ”Bored Ape Yacht Club” collection

“Everyone in the realm has a voice”: Game of thrones, twitter and television fan engagement

With the broad adoption of Twitter and other social networks, the concept of social TV has sought to explain emerging viewing behaviours of active audiences to use social media alongside television to connect with like-minded fans and discuss televised content online. TV programmes on their part took the opportunity to engage fans in these online spaces to drive live viewing. This dissertation will examine how fan engagement practices are leveraged by the HBO series Game of Thrones on Twitter, raising the fundamental question of the nature of interaction between television professionals and viewers and whether Twitter indeed is the catalyst for discussion and open exchange the service likes to portray itself as. For this specific case study we combined both qualitative and quantitative methods and applied them to collected Twitter data, mainly focusing on a content analysis of transcribed tweets sent by the official Game of Thrones Twitter account between May 2014 and April 2015. Based on the results of this analysis, we argue that in the case of Game of Thrones meaningful exchange and engagement is kept at a minimum and Twitter’s potential is not fully exploited, but rather used as another one-to-many communication channel for promotion alongside others. For future research the question is raised whether other television programmes operate equally and whether Twitter as a medium might not be suited for extended discussion.Com a adoção generalizada do Twitter e de outras redes sociais, o conceito de Televisão Social veio explicar comportamentos de visualização de audiências ativas que utilizam as redes sociais, juntamente com a televisão, para que se faça uma ligação entre fãs com o mesmo tipo de gostos e discutam o conteúdo televisivo online. Os programas de televisão, por seu lado, retiram partido desta tendência e aproveitam a oportunidade de agarrar os fãs nos espaços online disponíveis, que proporcionam uma visualização em direto do programa de televisão. Esta dissertação vai analisar a forma como o compromisso dos fãs aumenta na série Guerra dos Tronos, da HBO, através do Twitter, levantando a questão fundamental da natureza da interação entre os profissionais de televisão e os telespectadores e a forma como o Twitter pode ser catalisador de discussão e partilha aberta, tal como o serviço gosta de se intitular. Para este estudo de caso específico combinámos ambos os métodos de análise qualitativa e quantitativa e aplicámos os mesmos aos dados recolhidos através do Twitter, focando a atenção, principalmente, na análise de conteúdo dos tweets transcritos que foram enviados pela conta oficial do Twitter da Guerra dos Tronos entre Maio 2014 e Abril 2015. Baseados nos resultados desta análise, argumentamos que, no caso da Guerra dos Tronos, o impacto da partilha e o compromisso é mínimo e o potencial do Twitter não é explorado ao máximo, mas sim utilizado como um canal de comunicação e promoção de um-para-muitos. Para investigação futura, a questão prendese com a forma similar como outros programas de televisão operam e até que ponto é que o Twitter, como meio de comunicação, pode não ser adequado a discussões prolongadas