TWEET AND RETWEET JOURNALISM DURING THE PANDEMIC: dissemination of and engagement with news on Twitter

Starting from a gap identified in the literature regarding the use of social networks by newspapers to disseminate urgent news, this article aims to study strategies of journalistic content in social media, particularly in the context of a public crisis and to compare the effectiveness of different types of news disseminated in this medium, namely in terms of reach and generated interaction. The following research question was defined: how popular was public health news in Brazil during the covid-19 pandemic? Based on contributions in the literature, a quantitative study was carried out, using the content analysis technique. The study enable to better understand the sharing behavior of news in Twitter, the consumption behavior of newspaper readers on social networks and the generation of news during the pandemic

An analysis of replies to Trump's tweets

Donald Trump has tweeted thousands of times during his presidency. These public statements are an increasingly important way through which Trump communicates his political and personal views. A better understanding of the way the American public consumes and responds to these tweets is therefore critical. In the present work, we address both consumption of and response to Trump's tweets by studying replies to them on Twitter. With respect to response, we find that a small number of older, white, left-leaning, and female Americans are responsible for the vast majority of replies to Trump's tweets. These individuals also attend to a broader range of Trump's tweets than the rest of the individuals we study. With respect to consumption, we note that Trump's tweets are often viewed not in isolation, but rather in the context of a set of algorithmically-curated replies. These replies may therefore color the way Americans consume Trump's tweets. To this end, we find some evidence that Twitter accounts see replies in line with their political leanings. However, we show that this can be largely, although not entirely, attributed to the fact that Twitter is more likely to show replies by accounts a user follows. As a basis for comparison, all results for Trump are compared and contrasted with replies to Joe Biden's tweets.Comment: Accepted at ICWSM'2

Tratamiento periodístico en Twitter de las elecciones europeas de 2019: análisis de casos locales

Las elecciones europeas han sido habitualmente consideradas como los comicios que generan menor implicación en la ciudadanía. Por ello, resulta de interés conocer cómo los medios locales, en tanto que creadores de comunidad, informan de las elecciones referentes a este sujeto político, que tiene implicaciones directas en la vida de los europeos. En esta ecuación comunicativa juega también un papel muy relevante Twitter, convertida en herramienta de comunicación digital. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el objeto de la investigación es analizar el tratamiento periodístico en Twitter brindado por distintos medios locales a las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo de 2019. Para ello, se aboga por un análisis de contenido dotado de parámetros de calidad periodística, que evalúa la actividad desarrollada por un conjunto de casos de interés. Se seleccionan seis diarios procedentes de tres países europeos con tradición de periodismo local: Alemania, España y Reino Unido. Como resultados, se aprecia una cobertura informativa superior a la esperada, con interesantes diferencias entre países. Los medios británicos plantean un enfoque más estrictamente local, si bien la mayoría de los casos analizados no emplean varias de las posibilidades de Twitter, que podrían ser de utilidad para que las elecciones europeas fueran asimiladas como propias

Crisis management on the agenda? A big data approach to analyzing how the Norwegian national news media facilitated public response to the Covid-19 crisis.

In public health crises, people need information to help them make decisions about how to protect themselves and others from risk. Successful crisis response is thus dependent on the dissemination of efficacious information. As online news is where most people get the majority of their information, providing it during a crisis is a task for journalists and the news media. However, there are gaps in the knowledge about how the news media fills their role in communicating health information during public health crises. With this thesis, I sought to help lessen the gap of knowledge about how the news media facilitate crisis response by analyzing what they communicated and how communication changed over different stages of the Covid-19 crisis in Norway. I apply a generative machine learning approach, topic modeling, to analyze more than twenty-two thousand online news articles published by two of Norway's most prominent national newspapers, VG and Aftenposten. The model uses Bayesian statistics to categorize text based on similar words appearing together and their likelihood of appearing with other words. The method allows researchers to discover latent topics and patterns within extensive data, producing comparable results to human coders at a scale that lends itself particularly well to give detailed descriptions of news media communication efforts. Using the topic model results, I propose and test a method for operationalizing and analyzing how risk and crisis communication changes in news media content over time. I identified topics reflective of the coverage of the crisis according to their conduciveness to sensemaking and self-efficacy in the Norwegian public — building on theory on crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC). The concept of the creeping crisis provided a theoretical basis for differentiating the Covid-19 crisis from other crises. Furthermore, agenda-setting provided an additional theoretical lens to help better understand the effectiveness of this communication on behavioral change and response. The applied method was found to be fruitful in giving insight into how the selected news organizations covered the Covid-19 crisis in Norway. I identified 200 different topics covered by VG and Aftenposten during the first stages of the Coronavirus crisis. 75 of these topics focused on the crisis itself. Subsequent topics identified staple news topics such as sports teams, culture and movies, social issues, and more. 48 topics were identified as conducive to crisis management, and these were analyzed based on their prevalence over different stages of the crisis. The findings suggest that Norwegian news media disseminated information facilitating crisis response throughout the first 15 months of the pandemic, starting from the pre-crisis stage to the initial crisis stage and into the maintenance stage of the pandemic. Communication changed dramatically between stages. All in all, these topics reflected 12.5 % of all news coverage published by the two newspapers. The results indicate that this coverage largely reflected assumptions about changing communication needs during a crisis, but topics also reflect additional risk communication efforts resulting from the extended timeframe of the Covid-19 crisis

#Journalism: Twitter’s impact on 21st century journalism practice

This thesis explores the impact of the hybrid media system on journalism practice in the West. To do this I use a conceptual framework which discusses the normalisation hypothesis in the context of the hybrid media system and considers both homophily =and institutional logics in an analysis of journalism-audience interactions on the social media platform Twitter. The study explores the question of normalisation through a quantitative analysis of political journalists’ Twitter interactions and two qualitative textual analyses of social media policies from mainstream news organisations in the US, UK, Ireland, and Canada. This thesis finds that homophily influences journalists’ interactions as they largely use Twitter to focus on each other, a type of practice that typifies “pack journalism” and is known to contribute to groupthink. News organizations are seen to reinforce traditional ideas of professional practice in their guidance which conceptualise the audience as passive, albeit potentially hostile, consumers rather than participants or collaborators and that while they neglect the potential for contributions from their news audiences they also lay down very prescriptive ideas about their employees can and cannot do on social media. These findings suggest that both practitioners and organizations are not only neglecting historic opportunities to create a renewed relationship with their audiences, but that they are also failing to develop proficiency in a system where power resides not just with those who held power in the older media system but also with those who best understand how to work with information in the newer system (Chadwick, 2017). The findings inform the concluding discussion which argues that journalism education needs to consider a hybrid curriculum rooted in academic research and industry practice to better prepare students for a media world of the futur