Homophily in Twitter Interactions amongst Australian Journalists

I’m on one of my rare visits to ICA, and at a journalism session that starts with my colleague Folker Hanusch. He points out the considerable offline homophily between journalists - they hang out and interact with each other, and this may also translate to an online context. Some of this also intersects with news organisations, news beats, gender, and other identity traits, however – and on specific platforms, of course, homophily may also result in different patterns for different forms of interaction (e.g. @mentions vs. retweets on Twitter).

This study worked with the Australian TrISMA infrastructure and tracked some 4,000 Australian journalists, capturing some 2.6m tweets over an entire year. Some 30% of those tweets engaged with other journalists. Men engaged more strongly with other men; women @mentioned other women but still retweeted men more often.

There was also more engagement within than across organisations overall, but this was most pronounced for Fairfax and NewsCorp but reversed for regional outlet APN and newswire AAP (which provides news for other outlets). There was also strong homophily within beats, and this was most pronounced within sports, but less so in business or foreign news. Similarly, there is homophily in the larger states, but heterophily within the smaller Australian states and territories. Geographic proximity is the strongest predictor, while media outlet is the least strong. There is less homophily for retweets, which if retweets are seen as endorsements shows some good mutual support across boundaries.