News and information leadership in the digital age

ABSTRACT

This paper examines information networks on social media to draw conclusions about influence relationships among members of the mass media. The project considers social networks and information patterns using Twitter data, first at the newspaper level and second at the journalist level. Using a computational approach, we look for evidence of elite-directed information flows, as well as exploring whether we find evidence of an increase in the democratization of newsmaking. This study finds that elite voices continue to dominate information networks in the digital age; however, it also finds evidence that information can move expeditiously from journalists in local and regional outlets to elite ones, and vice versa. We move further to explore the content of tweets among the journalist network, finding that there are substantial, direct interactions among elite and regional and local journalists. Our results taken together uncover new network patterns and provide a novel insight on the role of information technologies in newsmaking in the digital age.

KEYWORDS:

• Information leadership
• journalism
• newsmaking
• social media
• imitation journalism
• computational methods

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this project were presented at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association in 2014 and 2015, and at VU Amsterdam, University of Exeter, University of Brasilia, and through the Social Media and Political Participation Global Project at New York University. We thank the LKAS award at the University of Glasgow for funding aspects of this research. The authors thank Wouter van Attevedlt, Sarah Birch, Johanna Dunaway, Steve Farnsworth, Cian O’Driscoll, Kelly Kollman, Susan Banducci, Travis Coan, Iulia Cioroianu, Mathieu Turgeon, Deen Freelon, Leticia Bode, Bob Boynton, and Brandon Valeriano for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Philip Habel has published work in political communication, public opinion, and computational social science [email: [email protected]].

Ruth Moon examines newsmaking and journalism, with particular interests in Africa [email: [email protected]].

Anjie Fang’s work uses a computational approach to look at information flows on social media [email: [email protected]].