Katrin Weller
@kwelle
Tweeting the News
weller@hhu.de
SocMedNews Workhop at
ICWSM 2012, Dublin
Dimensions and Challenges of Social
04. June 2012 Journalism on Twitter
SocMedNews Workshop at ICWSM2012 1
Slides will be published at: http://www.slideshare.net/katrinweller

Tweeting the news
Source: https://twitter.com/notch/status/198068782697164801
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Is Twitter a news
medium?
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Reciprocity
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? In Proceedings of
the 19th International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, April 26-30, 2010, Raleigh NC, USA.
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We’re in the media
business, but we’re
not neccessarily a
media company.
Dick Costolo interview: http://allthingsd.com/20120206/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-the-full-dive-into-
media-interview-video/
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Is Twitter a News Medium?
Weekly curated email from Twitter http://blog.twitter.com/2012/05/best-of-twitter-in-your-inbox.html
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Job offer: https://twitter.com/jobs/positions?jvi=oCLoWfwr,Job
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Source: twitter.com on February 2nd, 2012 /
see also: http://blog.de.twitter.com/2012/02/twitter-und-fuball.html
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Source: twitter.com on May 21st, 2012.
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Where do users follow
the news?
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“As of February 2012, some 15% of
online adults use Twitter, and 8% do so
on a typical day.“
Source: PEW Internet: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Twitter-Use-
2012/Findings.aspx
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Journalists
Journalists: ‘online content has the bigger
audience’.
47% of journalists use Twitter for „sourcing
new story angles“.
Source: ORIELLA Digital Journalism Study 2011
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Who‘s telling the
news on Twitter?
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Top 100 Twitter users
29 CNN (@cnnbrk)
64 New York Times (@nytimes)
77 CNN (@cnn)
83 E! Online (@eonline)
98 MTV (@mtv)
Source: http://twitaholic.com/, June 2nd 2012.
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Journalists
Source: twitter.com on June 3, 2012
See also: http://gutjahr.biz/2011/03/kairo-bilanz/
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Twitter as News Agency
Companies
Institutions
Brands
Parties
Associations
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Companies‘ Investments
Source: World Newsmedia Innovation 2011
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Celebreties
Image: wikipedia
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The Audience is speaking
Long tail
Except: crises, unplanned (negative)
events, protest, boycott
Neuberger, C., Jo vom Hofe, H., & Nuernbergk, C. (2010). Twitter und Journalismus: Der Einfluss des „Social Web“
auf die Nachrichten. lfm: Düsseldorf.
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What‘s in the news?
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Soft News vs. Hard News
Tweets per minute
Anime: castle in the sky
Champions‘ League final
Beyonce‘s baby anouncement
Japanese new year
Super bowl
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Trending
Source: http://blog.hootsuite.com/top-twitter-trends-2011/
Images: wikipedia
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Trending
Source: http://blog.hootsuite.com/top-twitter-trends-2011/
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Key challenges of social
journalism
Relevance Credibility
& &
Filtering Verification
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True or false?
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Source: twitter.com on February 2nd, 2012
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True or false? - corrections
29
Source: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/01/do-you-trust-your-twitter-news-sources.html
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True or false?
30
Source: twitter.com on May 31st, 2012
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Credibility?
verified user account?
Tweet history of user?
Retweets of particular tweet?
Network factor  location and friends
locations?
Follower of critical account?
Reactions of other users?
Citation loops?
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Credibility
Source: Twitter.com on June 3, 2012.
See also: Neuberger, C., Jo vom Hofe, H., & Nuernbergk, C. (2010). Twitter und Journalismus: Der Einfluss
des „Social Web“ auf die Nachrichten. lfm: Düsseldorf.
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Relevant or not?
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Finding & Filtering
Book cover: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, by
Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber
SocMedNews Workshop at
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ICWSM2012

Finding & Filtering
„Eyewitness detector“
Finding local people
Finding diverse sources
Diakopoulos, N., De Choudhury, M., & Naaman, M. (2012). Finding and Assessing Social
Media Information Sources in the Context of Journalism. Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems (CHI).
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Finding & Filtering
Ranking by Interestingness
LiveTweet: http://livetweet.west.uni-koblenz.de
Che Alhadi, Arifah; Gottron, Thomas; Kunegis, Jérôme; Naveed, Nasir (2012): LiveTweet: Monitoring and Predicting
Interesting Microblog Posts. In: Proc. European Conf. on Information Retrieval Demonstrations. S. 569--570.
Naveed, Nasir; Gottron, Thomas; Kunegis, Jérôme; Che Alhadi, Arifah (2011): Bad News Travel Fast: A Content-based
Analysis of Interestingness on Twitter. In: Proc. Web Science Conf.
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Aggregation
Named entity recognition
Event detection
Smitashree Choudhury, John Breslin (2011):Extracting Semantic Entities and Events from Sports Tweets.
Making Sense of Mircroposts Workshop 2011, ESWC 2011, CEUR Volume 718, pp. 22-32
Classification and metadata
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Other dimensions and
challenges of social
journalism
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Dimensions & Challenges
Data journalism
Citing and archiving tweets
Legal & ethical issues
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Katrin Weller weller@hhu.de @kwelle
http://www.slideshare.net/katrinweller
Thanks to my colleagues
from Dept. of Information Science at University of Düsseldorf (#iwhhu)
and the Researchers Group on Science and the Internet (#nfgwin,
see http://www.nfgwin.uni-duesseldorf.de/en/node)
Greetings from Düsseldorf!
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