TAGS: journalism / social media / twitter

News as a process: How journalism works in the age of Twitter

by Mathew Ingram
DE C. 21 , 20 1 1 - 9 :3 7 A M PST
S U M M A R Y : A new study of the way information flowed during the Arab Spring uprisings earlier

this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call news as a process works, and the
roles bloggers, mainstream media and others play during a breaking news event.

[http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/140956933_3448b081b8_z.png]
Weve written many times about how journalism is changing in the age of social media, thanks to
what Om has called the democracy of distribution [http://gigaom.com/2011/05/10/the-distributiondemocracy-and-the-future-of-media/] provided by tools like Twitter and how everyone now has
the opportunity to function as a journalist, even for a short time, during news events like the attack
on Osama bin Ladens compound [http://gigaom.com/2011/05/05/does-posting-things-to-twittermake-you-a-journalist/]. A new study of the way information flowed during the Arab Spring
uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call
news as a process works [http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1246/613], and the roles
bloggers, mainstream media and other actors play during a breaking news event. More than
anything, its a portrait of what the news looks like now.
The study, entitled The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian
and Egyptian Revolutions, was published in the International Journal of Communications, and
involved several researchers from the Web Ecology Project, Gilad Lotan from the social-media
service Social Flow, and Microsoft researcher and sociologist Danah Boyd. (A PDF version of the
study is available here [http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1246/643].) The researchers
looked at two datasets: one composed of 168,000 tweets from January 12 to 19 that contained

hashtags such as #sidibouzid and #tunisia, and one composed of 230,000 tweets from January 24
to 29, containing hashtags such as #egypt or #jan25 (the date of a mass demonstration that played
a key role in the subsequent Egyptian revolution).
The research broke those who tweeted about both events down into a number of groups of key
actors including activists, mainstream media outlets, individual journalists, bloggers, digerati
and celebrities and then tracked how information about various events during both periods
flowed from one source to another. One interesting aspect of the study is that some key players in
both events were almost impossible to classify as belonging to a single group. Jillian York, for
example, is a researcher who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation but is also a prominent
blogger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jillian_York] for Global Voices and is passionate about issues
in the Arab world.

Twitter becomes a crowdsourced newswire

As the study describes, Twitter has come to play a crucial role in the way that news functions
during events like the Egyptian revolution like a crowdsourced newswire filled with everything
from breaking news to rumor and everything in between [http://gigaom.com/2011/11/16/memo-toap-twitter-is-the-newswire-now/], and one that both uses and is used by mainstream media:

The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to one of networked digital media has altered
both information flows and the nature of news work during unplanned or critical world events
such as the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, MSM turn to Twitter, both to learn from on-theground sources, and to rapidly distribute updates.

The evolution of what media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have called networked
journalism [http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/07/05/networked-journalism/] has made the
business of news much more chaotic, since it now consists of thousands of voices instead of just a
few prominent ones who happen to have the tools to make themselves heard. If there is a growth
area in media, it is in the field of curated news, where real-time filters like NPRs Andy Carvin or
the BBCs user-generated-content desk verify and re-distribute the news that comes in from tens
of thousands of sources [http://gigaom.com/2011/05/17/what-journalism-is-like-now-working-with2000-sources/], and use tools like Storify to present a coherent picture of what is happening on
the ground.
The study makes the point that mainstream media outlets play a key role in the dissemination of
news during such events (and also notes that journalists tend to retweet other journalists more
often than they do non-mainstream sources), but it also makes it obvious that prominent bloggers
and activists are crucial information conduits as well. In graphic representations created by Global
Voices using the studys data [http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/12/20/mena-global-voicesbridges-on-twitter/], for example, blogger Nasser Wedaddy is a key hub that distributes information

to bloggers, activists and mainstream media. (Heres another fascinating visualization of networked
data flows [https://gephi.org/2011/the-egyptian-revolution-on-twitter/] in Egypt during the
revolution in February.)

[http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/6511778417_81cb8d9594_b.jpg]

Its called social media for a reason

As noted by Nancy Messieh at The Next Web, one of the additional points the study makes is that
the personal Twitter accounts belonging to journalists were far more likely to be retweeted or
engaged with by others [http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/20/on-twitter-people-want-tofollow-personal-versus-official-accounts-of-journalists/] than official accounts for the media outlets
they worked for. The point here is one we have tried to make repeatedly: Social media is called
social for a reason. Its about human beings connecting with other human beings around an event,
and the more that media outlets try to stifle the human aspect of these tools through repressive
social-media policies, for example [http://gigaom.com/2011/10/26/its-time-to-admit-that-journalistsare-human-beings/] the less likely they will be to benefit from using them.

[http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/study-twitter-information-flow.png]
Another benefit of a distributed or networked version of journalism is one sociologist Zeynep
Tufekci has made in the course of her research into how Twitter and other social tools affected the
events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. As she wrote in a recent blog post, one of the realities of
mainstream media is what is often called pack journalism [http://technosociology.org/?
p=638]: the kind that sees hundreds of journalists show up for official briefings by government or
military sources, but few pursue their own stories outside the official sphere. Social media and
citizen journalism, Tufekci says, can be a powerful antidote to this kind of process, and thats
fundamentally a positive force for journalism.
As we look at the way news and information flows in this new world of social networks, and what
Andy Carvin has called random acts of journalism by those who may not even see themselves as
journalists [http://gigaom.com/2011/11/18/what-happens-when-journalism-is-everywhere/], its easy
to get distracted by how chaotic the process seems, and how difficult it is to separate the signal
from the noise. But more information is better even if it requires new skills on the part of
journalists when it comes to filtering that information and journalism, as Jay Rosen has pointed
out, tends to get better when more people do it [http://gigaom.com/2011/04/27/journalism-getsbetter-the-more-people-that-do-it/].
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en] of
Flickr user Petteri Sulonen [http://www.flickr.com/photos/primejunta/140956933/]

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