Journalists and Twitter: A Multidimensional Quantitative Description of Usage Patterns

Abstract

We conduct a large scale quantitative comparison of the usage pattern of a microblogging service by journalists, news organizations, and news consumers. Through two statistical tests of eighteen numerical features over 5,000 news producers and 1 million news consumers, we find that Arab journalists and English news organizations tend to broadcast their tweets to a large audience; that English journalists adopt a strategy of targeted and engaging communication; that journalists are more distinguishable in the Arab world than in the European English speaking countries; that print and radio journalists have a very dissimilar behavior while the television ones share some characteristics with each of them; and that British and Irish journalists are similar to a large extent. This paper is the first to provide a multidimensional bird's-eye view on the usage pattern of journalists over Twitter.