Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Peddling or Creating? Investigating the Role of Twitter in News Reporting

  • Conference paper
Book cover Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6611))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

The widespread use of social media is regarded by many as the emergence of a new highway for information and news sharing promising a new information-driven “social revolution”. In this paper, we analyze how this idea transfers to the news reporting domain. To analyze the role of social media in news reporting, we ask whether citizen journalists tend to create news or peddle (re-report) existing content. We introduce a framework for exploring divergence between news sources by providing multiple views on corpora in comparison. The results of our case study comparing Twitter and other news sources suggest that a major role of Twitter authors consists of neither creating nor peddling, but extending them by commenting on news.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Barrón-Cedeño, A., Eiselt, A., Rosso, P.: Monolingual Text Similarity Measures: A Comparison of Models over Wikipedia Articles Revisions. In: Proc. of ICON 2009, pp. 29–38. Macmillan, Basingstoke (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, K.P.: Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy. In: Proc. of ICSWM 2009. AAAI, Menlo Park (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, K.P.: Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy. In: Proc. of ICWSM 2010. AAAI, Menlo Park (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Church, K.W., Hanks, P.: Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics 16(1), 22–29 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  5. English, E.O., Brown, P.E., Pietra, V.J.D., Mercer, R.L., Pietra, S.A.D., Lai, J.C.: An estimate of an upper bound for the entropy of English. Computational Linguistics 18, 31–40 (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Esuli, A., Sebastiani, F.: Sentiwordnet: A publicly available lexical resource for opinion mining. In: Proc. of LREC 2006. LREC (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Gladwell, M.: Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (2010). New Yorker Magazine (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Grossman, L.: Iran protests: Twitter, the medium of the movement. Time Magazine (June 2009), http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html

  9. Huberman, B.A., Romero, D.M., Wu, F.: Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. ArXiv e-prints (December 2008), http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1045

  10. Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., Tseng, B.: Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: Proc. of WebKDD/SNA-KDD 2007, pp. 56–65. ACM, USA (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kilgarriff, A.: Comparing corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 6, 1–37 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Kullback, S., Leibler, R.A.: On information and sufficiency. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22(1), 79–86 (1951)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Lafferty, J., Zhai, C.: Probabilistic relevance models based on document and query generation. In: Language Modeling and Information Retrieval, pp. 1–10. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Leskovec, J., Backstron, L., Kleinberg, J.M.: Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. In: Proc. of KDD 2009, pp. 497–506. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Prasad, J., Paepcke, A.: Coreex: content extraction from online news articles. In: Proc. of CIKM 2008, pp. 1391–1392. ACM, New York (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Shirky, C.: How social media can make history. TED Talk (June 2009), http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

  17. Verspoor, K., Cohen, K.B., Hunter, L.: The textual characteristics of traditional and open access scientific journals are similar. BMC bioinformatics 10(1), 183+ (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Zhao, D., Rosson, M.B.: How and why people twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In: Proc. of GROUP 2009, pp. 243–252. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, K.U. Leuven, Belgium

    Ilija Subašić & Bettina Berendt

Authors
  1. Ilija Subašić
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Bettina Berendt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information School, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, S1 4DP, Sheffield, UK

    Paul Clough

  2. CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Colum Foley , Cathal Gurrin  & Hyowon Lee ,  & 

  3. Centre for Next Generation Localisation, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Gareth J. F. Jones

  4. TNO Human Factors, Brassersplein 2, 2612 CT, Delft, The Netherlands

    Wessel Kraaij

  5. Yahoo! Research, 177 Diagonal, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Vanessa Mudoch

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Subašić, I., Berendt, B. (2011). Peddling or Creating? Investigating the Role of Twitter in News Reporting. In: Clough, P., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_21

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20160-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20161-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation