Legacy News Media on Twitter: Still Waiting for Reciprocal Journalism

Next up at Social Media and Society is Jacob Groshek, whose interest is in new modes of journalism on social media. Journalism has traditionally been operating through gatekeeping, deciding what news is being published to their audiences and what news do not. This is still a key mechanism in digital networks, but increasingly redesigned to adjust to the multitude of senders and receivers that are now present in online spaces. All of us are now potential gatekeepers, making our own decisions about what to publish and what to ignore.

How does this situate the traditional media gatekeepers in this new environment – say on Twitter? Are they more prominent (in terms of their volume of posts, number of followers and followees) than other users? Are they mentioning, mentioned, and retweeted more often than other users? This study captured Twitter data using the TCAT tool, in this case on the Ferguson controversy, and captured some 4.2 million tweets from 1.4 million users during the trial of the police officer who killed Michael Brown.

Within this dataset, influence was defined and measured using the betweenness centrality algorithm, as a measure of how people connect to other users. This identifies the connectors: the key participants through whom messages pass. The project coded the top 100 accounts identified in this way, to examine whether they were legacy or new media journalists, or other participants.

Public school administrator turned Ferguson activist @Deray appears as a crucial central node in this analysis, but the structure of the network also changes over time. This is related in part to mainstream media coverage, as well as to the overall dynamics of the events themselves. Only some 18% of the most prominent users, within the messaging network, were legacy news representatives; this drops towards the end of the period studied here.

Other actors are more significant here – and the network-based approach of this study really focusses on a journalism of reciprocity (on engagement through @mentions and retweets), so however these legacy media may be covering the events, they are not engaging with other users in doing so, even though they have by far the largest number of followers on average. These legacy media actors are participating on Twitter in a very different way from other users, even though they are often invited to do so. This may indicate the continuing need for a culture change amongst these media organisations.