Now Tweet This! Social media and the news

By Rick Borchelt

We all know that social media have become all but ubiquitous as part of our daily news content stream, especially for younger audiences. But has it changed — or is it changing — the work of the journalism and PIO enterprise? Or merely given a glitzy, high-tech edge to the same issues we’ve always dealt with? In one very real sense, it’s hard to say — the first Tweet was sent only five years ago, and even the extremely rapid adoption of this technology, and its congeners Facebook and other social media, argues that they may represent only transient forms of communication in a world prone to adopting new technologies. It’s difficult to conceive of a new technology like Facebook or Twitter so completely reordering the news business in the short time conventional wisdom has it — and these three studies call into question whether journalists and PIOs use new and social media in ways that are really that different after all.

Cremedas, M. and S. Lysack (2011). “New Media” Skills Competency Expected of TV Reporters and Producers: A Survey. Electronic News 5:41.

In the first of the reports in this column, Cremedas and Lysack simply categorized the extent to which news organizations have added social media to their newsroom activities. I was prepared to see rapid adoption of social media in the news business, but this — even though it’s already outdated, relying as it did on a survey conducted in 2009 — surprised me.

We know from other data sources that interactive media use is high in TV newsroom environments. The Radio and Television News Directors Association reported in 2010 that almost all (98 percent) of television stations had websites with local news. As early as 2008, some 60 percent of local television newsroom staff performed some mixture of web and broadcast duties. Cremedas and Lysack set about documenting how this affects the working life of the TV news professional.

The authors surveyed the newsrooms of more than 500 local affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox that present local news. Their aim was to “examine the current state of online news production at local television stations — what is being produced and who is producing it — and what emphasis news directors place on ‘new media’ skills when making hiring decisions.”

The integration of news staff in web production was virtually seamless, the authors found. Practically everyone in the newsroom these days is expected to generate web content, although a surprisingly disproportionate share of the burden falls to reporters and newscast producers rather than on low-level staff or interns. This work mix is reflected in the fact that, when asked what kind of new hires they’re looking for, newsroom executives in today’s market overwhelmingly prefer to hire people with existing web skills, although not necessarily advanced skills like HTML coding. But Luddites need not despair completely; traditional newsroom skills still hold sway: “More important for job applicants, according to numerous news managers, are fundamental journalism skills such as critical thinking, clarity of news writing, videography, and editing,” the authors report.

The kind of news content that stations are posting to their websites is also telling. In the early days of news websites, the content focus was expansion of amplification of news stories after they’d run on air. Today, two thirds of the stations “always” post breaking news, the study found, while about a quarter of the stations report that they “often” do it. Only 8 percent of stations “sometimes” or “never” post breaking news before the regular newscast. As the authors note: “Maintaining a station’s website also means many newsroom managers have changed their thinking when it comes to breaking news. Now the priority isn’t only getting the story on the air, but also, for the majority of stations, making sure breaking news is reported on the website. With the trend of increasing online news consumer use, not to mention the emergence of news delivery to mobile devices, it will be interesting to see if priorities shift again and the web becomes the priority for reporting breaking news alerts.”

Armstrong, C.L. and F. Gao (2010) Now Tweet This: How News Organizations Use Twitter. Electronic News 4:218.

Armstrong and Gao tell the story of how, in October 2007, wildfires raged throughout San Diego and southern California. KPBS, the NPR affiliate, had been posting updates to its website when its server crashed and left station personnel posting to Twitter how quickly the fire was spreading and which areas were in imminent danger. Those 140 character updates provided some key information to those who needed to know, in a time when the quick spread of information was paramount.

“That event was one of the first examples of how journalism can use Twitter to fulfill one of its key missions, which is to provide information to citizens,” the authors say — and Twitter has become in a very short time a primary means of reporting the news.

Armstrong and Gao were interested in a particular question around Twitter use: “the kinds of information and sources used in tweets from news organizations, as, to some extent, these choices might suggest some agenda on the part of the producers.” To examine potential differences, they compared how newspapers and television news organizations use Twitter — did the two differ because newspapers are often still focused on printed words, while broadcasting still places emphasis on visual communication?

The authors examined tweets from six newspapers and three television stations that were tweeted in late 2009. The nine represented different areas of the country, and included a mix of local, regional, and national outlets. All had to have started their Twitter feeds before the beginning of 2009.

Not surprisingly, crime (26 percent) was the most frequently tweeted topic, followed by public affairs (22 percent) and lifestyle (17 percent); the least tweeted topic was international news (8 percent). Science and health were included in the “lifestyle” rankings.

Crime news was most frequently tweeted by regional media (41 percent) but least frequently by national media (10 percent); local media (30 percent) were more likely to tweet lifestyle news than were national media (16 percent) or regional media (11 percent), Armstrong and Gao found. In business news, regional media tweeted a business story in 16 percent of tweets, more than double that of local or national media. Comparing newspaper and TV, they said, statistically significant difference was only found for crime news, with a higher frequency of being tweeted by TV news (38 percent) than by newspapers (21 percent).

In stark contrast to the situation Cremedas and Lysack found with websites, Armstrong and Gao found that only 5 percent of tweets by news organizations focused on breaking news. “Coders found that the goal of most tweets (86.7 percent) was to drive traffic to the news sites, with only 4.7 percent focusing on breaking news.”

Perhaps, most surprising in their findings, the authors reveal, was that the focus on names and faces in the news was split in their analysis. “Most journalism and news writing instructors would say that individuals are paramount for news coverage and that people make news stories. Ironically, our findings don’t support this idea” — although regional media seemed to include mentions of individuals in many of their tweets (55 percent), local (35 percent) and national (38 percent) media were more likely not to reference individuals in tweets.

“Overall, our results indicate that while these agencies are employing Twitter, they don’t seem to be using it in innovative ways,” the authors conclude. While Twitter allows for instantaneous updates, in a way that print newspapers desperately need to reach their public, they found that “the main use of Twitter is to drive traffic to the news site … and that very few tweets were used to provide breaking news or serve in the social responsibility role.”

Waters, R. D. and J. Y. Jamal (2011 in press). Tweet, tweet, tweet: A content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ Twitter updates. Public Relations Review (2011), doi:10.1016/j.pubrev. 2011.03.002

So that’s what’s happening in newsrooms, but how is Twitter faring in the nonprofit world?

As of June 2010, there were at least 25,000 nonprofits using Twitter, Waters and Jamal note. But how they use it, and with what success, is practically unknown. To get a better sense of nonprofit Twitter use, the authors surveyed the top 200 nonprofits listed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy (which means they also raise or accept money); 81 of those 200 actively used Twitter. The researchers randomly selected a third (27) of those, captured their tweets for the month of March 2010, and performed content analysis on a variety of characteristics of the tweets.

The organizations surveyed represented the broad spectrum of nonprofits, including public/society benefit (44 percent), health (26 percent), and human services (15 percent). They averaged about 4,500 followers each (there was a big range here, from 91 to 19,000), and each tweeted an average of about 30 messages a month.

What did they tweet about? Well, 5 percent or so were way off topic — Final Four basketball, for example, so clearly sometimes nobody is minding the store. But the vast majority — almost 80 percent — referred users back to a non-Twitter website using a hyperlink. Of those, about a fifth were re-tweets of something from another source, and another fifth carried a hash tag that indicated they were part of a larger, searchable conversation online.

Surprisingly, given the much-touted value of social media in promoting dialogue and building relationships, nonprofits used their tweets over- whelmingly for one-way communication rather than for two-way communication or dialogue. “The prevalence of one-way messages in the present sample runs counter to consultants’ advice that stresses the community-building strength of social media,” the authors note. “Rather than capitalizing on the interactive nature and dialogic capabilities of the social media service, nonprofit organizations are primarily using Twitter as a means of sharing information instead of relationship building. Overall, their Twitter updates sent messages that directed their followers to a variety of information subsidies on their websites. The provision of information certainly could help the nonprofits’ followers feel that they could trust the organization; however, the one-sided approach of the tweets certainly results in a lopsided relationship.”

“While the provision of information demonstrates a willingness to share information, a follower of these nonprofit organizations’ Twitter accounts might sense an unwillingness to answer questions or respond to others’ comments,” the paper concludes.

“Scholarly Pursuits” features articles from journals produced in the United States and abroad. If you read an article you think would make a good candidate for this column, send it along to [rickb@ nasw.org](mailto:rickb@ nasw.org).

_Rick Borchelt is special assistant for public affairs to the Director of the National Cancer Institute at NIH.

(NASW members can read the rest of the Summer 2011 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)

September 7, 2011

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