Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011

Metaphor and intertextuality in media framings of the (1984-85) British Miners' Strike:a multimodal analysis

The British Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. Media stance toward the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike (Williams 2009a, 2014). Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal BBC report only recently made public shows that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ (Harcup 2014). Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this paper, drawing on Critical Cognitive Linguistics, I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Miners, persisted through the year long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of (de)legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representatio

Balancing tradition with new norms: The case of online newsmaking at the SABC

Scholarship on the impact specific digital technologies have on the practice of journalism from the different media contexts in Africa paints many interesting, yet varied pictures. It is evident that the specific levels of impact are subject to contextual nuances. Public broadcasting remains a crucial media player in many parts of the continent, and that is most often subject to significant influences from the local political, technological and sociocultural environment. This article explores how online newsmaking practices and formats at the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) ' one of Africa's foremost public broadcasters ' are shaped by the identified local factors. Employing a mix of key informant interviews and content analyses, the findings reveal that there is quite a strong traditional element to the online news production process, shaped by dominant old broadcasting routines and structures. That said, the online news team is increasingly being challenged to work with converged skillsets, innovative tools, and evolving mindsets that are shaped by distinctive digital influences. The study suggests that such an arrangement, while allowing newsmakers in this domain to meet the demands of the local media environment, does limit their ability to harness the full potentials of the digital platform