A cross-national comparison of Twitter user interactions with leading political journalists
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A cross-national comparison of Twitter user interactions with leading political journalists (Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 2018)
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A cross-national comparison of Twitter user interactions with leading political journalists
- 1. A cross-national comparison of Twitter user interactions with leading political journalists Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns
- 2. Relevance & research overview: Why social media analytics? Journalism research shows a gradual embrace of social media as platforms utility of Twitter especially as a source of live updates during breaking news situations (Bruno 2011; Neuberger et al. 2014) subjects of journalists’ stories are present on social media (Ausserhofer & Maireder 2013); potential career benefits of developing a “personal brand” independent of the news organisation itself (Molyneux & Holton 2015). journalists are simply going where their audiences are (Newman et al., 2017) Few studies focus on engagement networks of journalists on Twitter Explorations of homophily patterns (Hanusch & Nölleke 2018; Nuernbergk 2016; Vergeer 2015) What’s missing? longitudinal observations of digital traces (e.g. stability of interactions, reciprocity) & research on interactants in these networks (e.g. motives) Comparison between media types (emerging vs. legacy etc.) Linking interview research with digital trace data for the same organisations/journalists ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 2
- 3. Journalism beyond the crisis: Why Australia, UK, and Germany? Differences in the structure of their news media industries Different professional and popular take-up of Twitter and other social media platforms for news consumption, political debate, and other purposes. Australians und Britons have been comparatively enthusiastic adopters of social media for news and other purposes, while Germans remain behind Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018: 31% of German internet users currently use social media as a source of news; this compares to 52% in Australia and 39% in the UK, where social media have even overtaken print sources Twitter use very popular in the UK (29%), compared to 18% in Australia and 13% in Germany ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 3
- 4. Methods and Sampling Focus on political journalists: elite of their professions; seen as role models by many other journalists in each country (Albaek et al. 2014) Longitudinal, cross-national study: analysis builds on a comprehensive dataset of the tweets by and directed at journalists in 2017 in AUS, UK, GER Identification of accounts: use of official registers to retrieve an up-to-date list of current press corps members (1), search for accounts for the journalists’ names on Twitter (2), manual review of identified accounts (3) Data collection via Twitter’s API with Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT) (Borra and Rieder 2014) Capture of any new public tweets originating from these accounts, and any public tweets by other Twitter accounts that @mentioned or retweeted them What are the audiences and audience responses journalists face on Twitter, and how diverse or limited are their interactions? What networks emerge through their own engagement? ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 4
- 5. Journalists’ tweets 2017: Activity and engagement 609 1507 2411 150 495 1274 292 677 1038 60 222 466 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 GER AUS UK Mean/Median Activity per Journalist M Tweets Md Tweets M Mentions Md Mentions 1.7 tweets/ day 4.1 tweets/ day 6.6 tweets/ day ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 5
- 6. Journalists’ tweets 2017: Total activity 243,431 274,201 446,107 110,552 100,823 154,662 112,474 117,091 188,559 GER AUS UK Tweets (Total), @mentions (Total), Retweets (Total) Tweets (Sum) Retweets (Sum) Mentions (Sum) ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 6
- 7. Journalists’ tweets 2017: Top decile activity 62% 50% 44% 39% 29% 29% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% GER AUS UK Top Decile Activity (in %) Top Decile Most Active Top Decile Most Followed ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 7
- 8. Engagement metrics 2017: Journalists as receivers – @mentions and retweets 714,206 1,904,700 7,034,736 185,648 450,495 2,033,976 548,651 1,429,061 5,092,424 GER AUS UK @mentions and Retweets (Total) Total mentions received Retweets received @mentions received @mentions by 86,900 users @mentions by 178,338 users @mentions by 499,459 users ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 8
- 9. Engagement metrics 2017: Journalists as receivers – @mentions and retweets 548 2,750 11,003 74 323 9771,411 8,348 26,761 224 1,129 2,998 GER AUS UK Mentions and Retweets (Mean and Median for Press Corps Members) M Retweets received Md Retweets received M @mentions received Md @mentions received 3.9 @mentions/ day Most followed share: 73% 22.9 @mentions/ day Most followed share: 67% 73.3 @mentions/ day Most followed share: 57% ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 9
- 10. Germany: Survey of interactants of journalists survey of interactants of journalists on Twitter 12,018 accounts @mentioned BPK journalists during April/May 2017 random sample of 4,000 users selected for survey invitation institutional accounts and suspended accounts were removed invitations were sent to 3,743 user accounts via Twitter (in June 2017) response rate: 4.2% (n=159) exclusion of users who self-identified as journalists 93% of the remaining users stated that they already interacted with journalists’ accounts on Twitter (n=136) 27% interact “frequently” with journalists mostly male (82%) – M age = 42.6 years respondents who consider themselves as strongly right-wing (11-point-scale: 9-11) @mention journalists frequently: 54.5% (χ(2)=7.678, p<.05) ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 10
- 11. 112,474 117,091 188,559 19,751 20,702 39,105 GER AUS UK sent @mentions and number of @mentioned accounts Mentions to all users Mentions to press corps members only Unique accounts @mentioned Engagement metrics 2017: Journalists as senders – @mentions = 12% = 22% = 18% ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 11
- 12. Engagement network Network characteristics (Mentions only made by Press Corps Journalists, 2017) BPK Network Press Gallery (AUS) Network Press Gallery (UK) Network BPK Network Press Gallery (AUS) Network Press Gallery (UK) Network Nodes 1,352 1,349 2,215 19,949 20,127 39,835 Tracked Journalists in Network with Activity 213 125 158 366 178 184 Edges 2,395 2,918 3,947 52,180 54,294 89,091 Degree 1.771 2.163 1.782 2.616 2.698 2.237 Network Diameter 9 6 9 8 6 6 Density 0.001 0.002 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 At least ten mentions required Yes Yes Yes no (=all) no (=all) no (=all) Giant Component (Nodes, in %) 1,305 (96.5%) 1,331 (98.7%) 2,181 (98.5%) 19,928 (99.9%) 20,119 (100%) 39,835 (100%) Notes. Self-loops as edges excluded. Gephi stats. ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 12
- 13. Core networks of regularly @mentioned accounts (<9 mentions/year) Network characteristics (Mentions only made by Press Corps Journalists, 2017) BPK Network Press Gallery (AUS) Network Press Gallery (UK) Network Nodes 1,352 1,349 2,215 Edges 2,395 2,918 3,947 Degree 1.771 2.163 1.782 Network Diameter 9 6 9 Density 0,001 0,002 0,001 Algorithm: Force Atlas 2, node size: In-degree ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 13
- 14. Engagement network: Actor composition Most @mentioned Types of Accounts (2017) by press corps members by Bundespresse- konferenz accounts in % by Press Gallery accounts (AUS) in % by Press Gallery accounts (UK) in % Journalists (individual profiles) 52 31% 107 48% 143 54% News organisations 40 24% 31 14% 39 15% Political actors 54 32% 47 21% 41 15% International accounts 4 2% 5 2% 6 2% Other 20 12% 31 14% 30 11% Total 170 100% 223a 100% 267b 100% Notes: Accounts were only considered for analysis if mentioned by at least three different journalists with weight >9 during 2017. a two accounts were deleted and thus not classified. b eight accounts were deleted or not classifiable. ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 14
- 15. Summary and Conclusion Cross-national social media analytics: Strongly divergent patterns of activity and engagement for both journalists and their interactants Most active journalists shape the press corps’ related communication on Twitter to a lesser extent in UK and Australia Journalists’ own conversational activities remain relatively elitist Although journalists also interact with ordinary users, these occasional interactions seem to be important only in isolated cases How and under what circumstances do journalists respond to attempts by non-elite actors to shape the news? thread analysis required A pilot survey of German interactants shows that both criticism and feedback are important drivers of frequent attempts to interact with journalists Media repertoire of interactants: Influence of blogs or non-traditional sources ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 15
- 16. Thank you University of Trier Christian Nuernbergk (@nuernbergk) QUT Digital Media Research Centre Axel Bruns (@snurb_dot_info) ECREA 2018 Christian Nuernbergk & Axel Bruns 16 Acknowledgment This research is supported by the ARC Discovery project “Journalism beyond the Crisis”, the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”, and the ARC LIEF project “TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis”, as well as the QUT Digital Observatory.
Editor's Notes
- G‘Day everyone, I am Christian Nuernbergk, currently working at Trier University in Germany and also LMU Munich- As Aljosha said, we are focusing on Social Media Analytics now and will present findings from a longitudinal study over the course of the year 2017. Therefore we compare Twitter user interactions of political journalists in three countries.
- Why this social media analytics approach? First of all we acknowledge that Journalism beyond the crisis is increasingly influenced by social media and platforms. As the other presentations in this panel have shown, we address these changes in journalism particularly through interview-based research. By using social media analytics as another project component, we want to broaden our view based on the digital traces left by journalists and their interactants, based on their sharing practices and their actual engagement. We therefore also seek data from the audience side. The research has shown that journalists have gradually embraced social media. After more then ten years, journalists have now broadly accepted social media in their professional toolkits There are different reasons for this; journalists simply may go there, because they follow their audience, which is now increasingly consuming and following the news also via social media. Furthermore, the subjects of journalists’ stories are present on social media Some journalists are being encouraged to develop a social media presence by the social media ‘evangelists’ employed by their news organisations (Tenore 2010); And they might be also motivated to maintain individual profiles beside the news organization itself because of potential career benefits in terms of branding While survey data has shown that Journalists are especially keen to adopt Twitter in their toolkit, only few studies focus on the actual engagement networks of journalists on Twitter using an data analytics approach. We identified a lack of longitudinal studies in this direction and also lack of research on interactants in these networks. We don‘t know much about the number and the motivation of people who engage with journalists accounts. Besides logitudinal studies also a systematic comparisons across journalists working for different media types is missing in relation to these networks. However, there are studies which have explored homophiliy patterns across Journalists networks. While these studies have developed interesting criteria in terms of measuring homophily, they still have a snapshot character. Also reciprocal relations are not explored to a greater extent. We think that linking interview-based research with digital trace data in this area is particularly fruitful.
- In our project Journalism beyond the crisis we systematically we apply a three country comparison to this social media analytics approach. In this triangle, we can compare two English-speaking countries (UK and Australia), two countries with a greater population (UK and Germany), Countries with a higher (UK and Australia) and lower take up (Germany) of Twitter and other social media in terms of news consumption, political debate and journalistic engagement. The three country also differ in terms of the structure of their news market industries and the make up of the news sector as media system typologies suggest. The UK and Germany actually share some commonalities in terms of a strong public service broadcasting sector and a high level of ownership regulation. The more liberal-system in Australia exhibits a news media landscape which is notoriously concentrated, with only a small number of media companies (News Corporation, Fairfax, and the public broadcaster ABC) dominating online marketshare (Young 2010) and a less diverse media landscape. Australians have been comparatively enthusiastic adopters of social media for news and other purposes, while Germans have taken a significantly more skeptical view. According to the Digital News Report 2018, 31% of Germans currently use social media as a source of news; this compares to 52% in Australia and 39% in the UK, where social media have even overtaken print sources (Newman et al. 2018: 81, 127). Interestingly, Twitter is much more popular in the UK (29% use Twitter) than in Australia and especially than in Germany (13% only). However, the Australian audience exhibits a higher degree of participation than in the other two countries. Here, 25% comment on news via social media or on a website compared to just 14% in Germany and UK. A higher percentage of Australians also stated to follow journalists than in Germany via social media. We suggest that these differences will become visible also when we analyse the journalists’ engagement networks in social media. (strong public service broadcasting sector in Germany and the UK, strongly partisan commercial press in the UK, very concentrated media landscape in Australia) (while the German market for news is considerably more diverse and features strong public service media alongside a wide range of national and regional print and broadcast offerings (Thomaß and Horz 2018). The UK media landscape is, characterised by a strongly partisan mass circulation commercial national press and a system of public service broadcasting led by the BBC. A sharp distinction exists between the quality and tabloid national press and between the regimes that govern the print and broadcast media. Public service broadcasting operates a system characterised by a strong tradition of political neutrality. Statutory regulation requires all news produced by broadcasters, television and radio, to remain impartial and to provide balanced coverage.) UK: 39% have used social media in the last week for news. UK: 14% use Twitter for news (Germany: 5%, Australia: 10%), UK: 29% use Twitter (Germany: 13%; Australia 18%). UK: 14% comment on news via social or on a website (Germany: 14%, Australia: 25%) Of the users who said they had used social media for news in the last week, 11% of the German respondents and 18% of the Australians stated they were following a journalist on a social media channel (Hasebrink and Hölig 2018: 47; Park et al. 2018: 99). These figures suggest that, on average, Australian journalists will be likely to have more followers and receive more engagement than their German colleagues.
- We focus here on political journalists because they represent the most prestigious elite of their professions as Albaek et al. (2014) write; as a result, they are likely both to be seen as rolemodels by many other journalists in each country, and to be observed and interacted with particularly keenly by their audiences. We suggest that the rather diverse political beat also attracts a larger audience participating in these networks. However, to get a broader picture, we particularly do not focus on a specific political topic. We study the activities evolving around these journalists in a year-long, and thus politically also more diverse timeframe. We selected Australia, the UK and Germany as mentioned before and conducted our data retrieval in three steps. First, we used official registers published by the press galleries in the three countries to get an up-to-date list of corps members. Several hundred journalists of all media types are registered in these three institutions. Second, we searched for the names of these listed journalists on Twitter, and third we manually reviewed this list of identified accounts. In the following step the data collection commenced in 2016 and is still running. Via the Twitter API, We used the Twitter capture and Analysis Toolkit developed by Borra and Rieder. Since our trackers for each journalist started, we captured all new tweets originating from these accounts and all public tweets that mentioned or retweeted them. Thus, the audience side is included. With this project, we seek to answer what number of audience responses journalists face on Twitter and if and how journalists interact with this audience. We are particularly concerned with the networks emerging through the journalists own activity.
- So let us have a closer look on our findings. Over the course of the year 2017, the cross-national comparison exhibits substantial differences regarding the overall activity of the observed journalists. In Germany, political journalists compose 609 tweets on average over the course of the year, which translates to roughly 2 tweets per day. The low median of 150 tweets suggests that this activity is made up particularly by a smaller group of more active journalists. In Australia and the UK in particular, the mean and median activity is substantially higher. Australian journalists composed 1500 tweets on average, and UK Journalists 2400 tweets. This translates to 4 tweets per day in Australia und seven tweets per day in the UK. This higher actitvity comes along with a greater number of users mentioned during the year in Australia and the UK than in Germany.
- For the 303 accredited Press Gallery members in Australia at the time, we identified 189 Twitter accounts (62%) through this process; for the 825 members of the Bundespressekonferenz, we identified 461 accounts (56%). For 202 members of the Press Gallery in the UK we identified 182 users with accounts (90%). Despite the considerable smaller absolute number of press gallery members on Twitter in UK and Australia, we see that overall output of the press gallery members in these two countries is much higher than in Germany. Furthermore, we found more active accounts in the UK and Australia than in Germany, where only 86% of the identified accounts tweeted during 2017. This chart also suggest that UK journalists wrote more original tweets than their German colleagues. Roughly half of tweets in the German case are retweets, this proportion is substantially lower in Great Britain and also in Australia.
- We also analysed how much of the tweets were composed by particular groups among the press gallery members. Here, we looked for both, the most active users and the most followed ones. Therefore, decile measures were computed for the number of tweets and for the number of followers. 62% of all tweets composed by press corps members in Germany were written by the 10% of the most active users. This share is considerably higher in Germany than in Australia and the UK. In the english-speaking countries the Twitter use of journalists is more balanced and less biased towards the most active users. The share of the most popular users is also lower in the UK and in Australia than in Germany. Thus, in Germany, the most active and the most followed journalits account for a greater number of the tweets composed by press gallery members than in the two other countries. However, a political journalists‘ popularity on Twitter in all three countries seems to be positively associated with a higher level of activity.
- The next chart shows how the audience engages with these journalists‘ accounts. In Germany we found, over the course of the year 87.000 users who @mention journalists. @mentioning is also much more common than retweeting journalists, which is the case in all three countries. Altogether, these 87000 users @mention journalists 500000 times. In the UK these numbers are six to ten-times higher. 500.000 users @mention these journalists in more than 5 million cases. Also in Australia, with a much smaller population, these numbers are nearly three times higher than in Germany. These notably differences, which might be explained at least partially by the different Twitter adoption and usage level among internet users and the different population sizes in the three countries observed. But we speculate that this does not entirely explain these different levels. We suppose that also the much higher level of journalistic activity on Twitter generates more feedback and thus results in more @mentions and retweets made by interactants of journalists.
- These patterns are even more confirmed, when we inspect the mean and median values received mentions in the three countries. On average, German journalists receive @mentions 4 times a day, whereas their Australian colleagues receive 23 @mentions. Much more engagement is centred around British journalists with nearly 75 @mentions per day on average. Here, users in Germany tend to focuse predominantly on the top decile of most followed accounts. This longitudinal data suggests that the audience engagement in these network is far from evenly distributed among the journalists. In the UK, this proportion of the most followed top decile among all journalists receiving @mentions is a bit less higher than in Australia and Germany. Even the median journalist press gallery member in Britain receives 3000 @mentions, compared to the 200 @mentions only of his counterpart in Germany.
- To get further explanations for these patterns, we took Germany as a case for a pilot survey among interactants of journalists in Germany. I conducted this survey also in 2017. Our tracking data shows that roughly 12000 accounts @mentioned Journalists in the federal press conference (the Bundespressekonferenz) during April / May 2017. Using random sampling I selected 4000 users as potential survey participants. Before sending out survey invitations, all accounts statuses were checked. Suspended or protected accounts were removed, as well as institutional, non-individual account types. Thus, 3743 invitation tweets were sent out in June 2017. It was not possible to contact these users through another channel, e.g. by using their e-mails in our study. Therefore we @mentioned them on Twitter and asked for their participation. Because of measures taken up by Twitter to prevent spam or mass mailings, invitations were sent out during a period of more than three weeks. There were no follow-up invitations or reminders. 159 users participated in the survey, which seems rather low. However, this number is quite acceptable given the fact that not all users are likely to receive notifications from accounts they themselves do not follow. In early 2017 Twitter changed notifications, users are only getting notified about @mentions from accounts they don’t follow, if they declared so through their account settings. Among the potential interactants of journalists we also find many other journalist. The purpose of our study was to receive more insights about the non-journalists interactants. Respondents who identified themselves as journalists during the survey, were removed. 136 cases remained, 93% of those confirmed that they have written public messages to journalists on Twitter in the past. Who it is, who engages with Journalists on Twitter? Among those who interact, only 27% stated to do so frequently with journalists. The interactants of journalists were highly interested in politics, mostly male and are 43 years old on average. These patterns resemble findings from Hölig (2018) who studied a larger sample of active Tweeters in Germany in general. Bivariate statistics show that especially right-wing people are significantly more likely to interact frequently with journalists on Twitter.
- Finally we want to inspect more closely who it is Journalists actively tweet to. Here our cross-national comparison shows interesting differences among the three countries. German journalists are less likely to write to other accounts of journalists than their counterparts in Australia and the UK. 12% of the @mentions in journalistic tweets are directed to other journalists in the press corps. This ingroup orientation seems to be more likely among the Australian journalists. Interestingly, especially compared to the striking different levels of audience engagement around the accounts and the much greater number of @mentions journalists receive there, UK and Australian journalists themselves do not engage with much greater numbers of users. It is rather less likely that a member of the much greater audience receives an individual response.
- How do the networks look like then? If all relations through @mentions composed by journalists are considered, the German and Australian network each consist of roughly 20000 nodes and 50000 edges. The network deriving from the journalists activity in the UK consists of 40000 nodes an 90000 edges. However, only a few of these nodes are mentioned reguarly and are thus expected to have an greater impact on the political journalists and their journalistic work on Twitter. If just look on accounts which were mentioned at least ten times in 2017, the networks become much smaller and only consist of 1000 up to 2000 nodes.
- If we further include the network structure, we observe a much more dense network in the Australian case, also exhibiting a smaller diameter compared to German and British network. This is also reflected in a higher non-weighted average degree. The network itself is more connected, even journalists who interact exclusively with a large group of users are more bound to the network center, because they also have many relations in common with other journalists. As we have seen, this can be also explained by the higher degree of journalist-journalist interactions in this network. In the German case, the network is less centered and we have more journalists who separate themselves through regular interactions with users they exclusively write to. There is a smaller number of accounts on which many journalists center on. What we observe as well as is that in all networks the nodes with the highest indegrees, those who the journalists regularly like to talk or write about, are leading politicians. And, unsurprisingly, the networks also partially cluster around news organisations. Journalists working for the same org share more connections. Indegree-Centralization <5% in all cases
- Our last finding inspects more closely the actor composition within these networks. Therefore, we only looked on those accounts with whom journalists interact at least ten times during 2017. Because we were interested in those actors, who are mentioned by several journalists and not only one, we only included actors who were @mentioned by three different journalists at least ten times during the examined period of one year. These users are most often other journalists. However, the focus on journalists in Germany is less dominant than in Australia and the UK, were nearly or more than half of all these actors studied here are journalists. In Germany, on the other hand, are more politicians selected as preferred interaction partners than in the other two countries. Users who cannot be assigned with a political or media-related role, who may be ordinary users only made up between 11% and 14% of these exclusive interaction partners.
- As a short summary and conclusion I would like to present following takeaways: The cross national comparison showed strongly divergent patterns of activity and engagement, but particularly for their interactants The different patterns found here point to the considerably different roles that Twitter - and by extension, social media more broadly - play as platforms for the sourcing, dissemination, and discussion of the news in each country: Concerning the journalists in these networks, we found that the most active journalists do less strongly shape the press’corps related communication on Twitter in the UK and in Australia than in Germany The actor composition shows that journalists rather interacts with ordinary users in isolated cases and on a occasional basis, where as their regular contributions remain relatively elitist. To further analyze why and when journalists with ordinary users, a thread analysis would be conclusive. - The additional survey of German interactants highlighted that especially feedback, and to a lesser extent also criticism as motives can explain interactions. Especially the media repertoire of these interactants, which might fuel into criticism, needs further evaluation. Here, frequent blogs use is associated with frequent attempts of contacting journalists. Especially the combination of network analysis with topic modeling and (automated) content analysis seems to be fruitful to extract the relevant relations from such trace data and to observe changes in interaction partners over time.