Twitter use is prevalent in news organizations today, but it is used in limited ways, according to a study by the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that examines how the media and reporters use the technology in their daily news outreach.
The study finds that news organizations use their Twitter feeds in limited ways—primarily as another vehicle of dissemination for their own material. Sharing outside content and engaging directly with audiences are rare occurrences, the report finds. Additionally, the study reveals that the news agenda on Twitter closely matches the agenda put forward through these news outlets’ legacy platforms.
SMPA students from Professors Kimberly Gross and Robert Entman’s senior seminars spent a semester coding the data of thousands of tweets, providing content analysis and applying the theories learned in the classroom to real-world research.
“This study gave students the opportunity to work on a significant research project about an evolving medium,” says Dr. Gross, one of the co-authors of the study. “As most of our understanding of Twitter is based on anecdotal evidence, collecting and analyzing empirical data is very valuable to our understanding of it.”
News organizations may well be using Twitter to tap into public sentiment in other ways—such as reading comments from followers. The study finds, however, that these organizations may not be taking full advantage of Twitter’s interactive and reportorial opportunities.
“There are similarities here with the early days of the web, when news organizations rarely linked to anything outside their own walls,” says Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It bears watching whether the interactive and social attributes of Twitter eventually become a larger part of what news organizations do in this realm.”
These are among the findings from the report, which analyzed more than 3,600 tweets from 13 major news organizations over the course of one week.
Among the findings:
- The news outlets studied varied widely in the number of Twitter feeds or channels offered and in how frequently they posted.
- These news organizations were much more similar in the focus of their Twitter activity.
- News organizations rarely used Twitter as a reporting tool or to curate or recommend information that originated elsewhere.
- Popular individual reporters were not much more likely than the news institutions to use Twitter as a reporting tool or as a way to share information produced by those outside their own news organization.
Researchers also examined the Twitter feeds of health reporters. These reporters made more use of the reportorial ability of Twitter, though they still produced far more tweets that disseminated their own material.
The complete study can be found here: How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter