Twitter: traditional media’s amplifier
Three folks from HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, and a physicist from Stanford University, wondering which authors on Twitter were most influential, designed an experiment: they examined a database of 16 million tweets on 3,361 topics in September and October of last year that appeared in Twitter’s “Trending Topics” spotlight.
Nick Bilton, the indispensible “Bits” blogger for The New York Times, summarized the scholars’ report in a post last week. If you want to read the study itself, titled “Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay,” you’ll find the most comprehensible stuff in the Introduction and Conclusion. The rest of the paper includes a lot of “huh?” math like this:
Only Twitter’s engineers and managers know the algorithm that causes a topic to appear in the trending lost. But, as the authors of the study write, it can be safely assumed topics that rise to the trending list “capture the attention of a large audience for a short time, thus contributing in some measure to the public agenda.”
The scholars found the authors who are retweeted the most and whose tweets become tending topics are primarily from traditional media sources.
We find that a large portion of these authors are popular news sources such as CNN, the New York Times, and ESPN. This illustrates that social media, far from being an alternative source of news, functions more as a filter and an amplifier for interesting news from traditional media.
Sixteen of the top 22 retweeted authors for the period of the study were traditional media, led by CNN’s breaking news account, @cnnbrk, whose tweets on 84 topics were retweeted 8,444 times.
I’ve never seen a study of what percentage of links to traditional media people include in their Facebook status, but, based on my own daily use of Facebook, it’s got to be a high percentage.
That social media relies on traditional media for the links to news it disseminates isn’t a surprise. An older (by about 5 years) form of interactive media, blogs, relies heavily on traditional media for the information upon which it comments, opines and rants.
Two years ago I did a study on the linking patterns of six influential political blogs. I clicked on every link on the front page of those six blogs during a seven-day period in January, 2008, in the run-up to the first presidential primaries. Then I sorted the more than 2,000 links I found into four categories: links to traditional media, links to other blogs, links to another post on the same blog, and links to primary source material.
(My study was published in an academic journal in 2009. You can read a press release summary of the study, or, if your taste runs to this kind of thing, you can read the article itself.)
Almost half (47 percent) of the links in the six blogs I studied – Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Talking Points Memo, Michelle Malkin, InstaPundit and Power Line – took readers to traditional media websites, with The New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post, CNN, and Yahoo News the most popular.
Twenty-three percent of the links led to other blogs, 15 of the links led to another post on the same blog. Only 15 percent of the links took the reader to primary source material — websites of government agencies, candidates, political parties, think tanks or not-for-profit or lobbying organizations.
There are an estimated 24,000 government websites, with almost 5,000 of them having “.gov” in their addresses. And that’s just government. Who knows how many candidates websites are out there, with dozens and dozens of pages of each candidate’s position papers, speeches, public statements, etc.?
A political blogger writing about a bill in Congress or a candidate’s speech, in other words, does not link to (and may not even read) the bill or the speech but instead relies on reporters working for traditional media for information, and then links to stories in traditional media outlets.
No doubt there is much, much more original reporting on Twitter, from Tahrir Square to Roslindale Square, than on political blogs.
But the most rewteeted, and thus influential, posts on Twitter originate with the reporters and editor of traditional media. It makes sense. Who else the information-gathering resources and news-presentation resources traditional media has?
Even as new communications technologies — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, the torrent of social media sites — offer new ways to disseminate information, the backbone of news-gathering and reporting remains (and is the really a surprise?) traditional media.
Follow @mleccese on Twitter.
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About the author
Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College, covered Massachusetts politics, business and the arts for more than 25 years as a newspaper reporter, editor and magazine writer. He has More »Recent blog posts
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