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

From Laptop to Living Room: Strategies for Local Television News Stations to Boost Viewership with Facebook and Twitter

Social media is continuously increasing in popularity and relevance. According to a 2019 Pew Research poll, soon the average person will spend more time on social media than watching TV (Figure 1)​. With data like that in mind, the aim for this project is to show how a local news station can use Facebook and Twitter to effectively engage with consumers, strengthen the connection a station has with its audience, and bring more viewers to watch newscasts on live television. Those who work in television understand the power of the internet and social media in journalism. This project will be a guide of what works on Facebook and Twitter that in turn works for news stations. The power and influence of the digital realm will not get weaker anytime soon. This project collected research from academics and applied those findings to success on TV. Figure 1: 2018 data shows that TV and online are the top sources for local news in America (pewresearch.org)Master of Arts in Digital Communicatio

Social media mining for journalism

The exponential growth of social media as a central communication practice, and its agility in capturing and announcing breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media, has changed the journalistic landscape: social media has been adopted as a significant source by professional journalists, and conversely, citizens are able to use social media as a form of direct reportage. This brings along new opportunities for newsrooms and journalists by providing new means for newsgathering through access to a wealth of citizen reportage and updates about current affairs, as well as an additional showcase for news dissemination