Politicians and journalists still biggest source of news on Twitter

Twitter has become an important platform for the launching and spreading of news, but it’s still the traditional sources, like journalists and politicians, who are responsible for most of the news-oriented tweets. That is one of the main conclusions of a study by researchers at Antwerp University, the results of which have been published in the magazine Digital Journalism.

The team analysed the news stories around the Belgian election campaign of 2014. They examined where the stories first emerged and how they were then spread. Among the messages that were spread via various media, Twitter was the first platform on which they could be found 41% of the time. They first appeared on news websites 29% of the time and in newspapers 18% of the time. Television and radio were further behind.

“However, we noticed that 80% of the influential tweets still come from traditional actors like journalists and politicians,” said researcher Raymond Harder. “It remains difficult for regular citizens to launch news and get it spread.” Political scientists in Flanders, however, often do succeed in getting their tweets out to different media.

The researchers also determined that Twitter was generally the original source of campaign messages from politicians or of live reports from journalists present at a campaign event. In a follow-up study, they will analyse which specific users succeed the most in spreading messages via Twitter.

Photo: Stuart Miles/Ingimage