JOUR206 Storify: Twitter Analysis

As part of a group assignment in my Journalism class, I was to collaborate with students in my class plus a student from Sweden at a partner university doing a similar subject. Our outcome was to be a Storify, online resources (pictures, blogs, tweets, news items, our own research) and collate these into a news story. Our group chose to look at international news coverage comparing Sweden and Australia.

My role was to analyse tweets from news broadcasters in both Australia and Sweden who predominantly report on international news. Our Swedish comrade Madde chose SVT Nyheter (SVT News) from Sweden and my classmates and I in Australia chose SBS News for Australia. As a control I also analysed tweets from the Al Jazeera English account, Al Jazeera (based in Qatar) being considered by our group the world leader in international news.

Method:

Using TwimeMachine, I collected tweets made by SVT, SBS and Al Jazeera for the week between 21 Oct 2013 – 27 Oct 2013. I copied these tweets into a spreadsheet on Google Drive. Each news organisation was given their own spreadsheet, with a separate spreadsheet presenting the data. Each tweet was sorted under a theme and given a code: 

(Note: Codes were deliberately misspelled so as to easier count these when using the “Find” function in Google Drive e.g. searching “helth” would present me with an exact number of tweets filed under health)

DX: Death, destruction, natural disasters, war and conflict, injury or danger.

Envmnt: Environmental issues, renewable energies, agricultural issues, animal welfare.

Current Affairs: Self explanatory, anything not particularly related to any code.

Spart: Sports coverage. 

Politix: Movements of government, government officials and law enforcement.

Human Interest: Related to more than one code, features and information on people rather than any particular event in an emotional way. Brings about interest, sympathy or motivation.

Biz: Business and Economics. 

Helth: Stories on health and well being.

All Tweets analysed are enclosed in the spreadsheets for each news organisation below:

Al Jazeera (@AJEnglish)
SVT Nyheter (@SVTNyheter)
SBS News (@SBSNews)

Results

Tweets in each category were counted and data was placed in a spreadsheet on Google Drive, linked below. These were then represented in pie graphs. 

News Organisation Twitter Analysis Data

Total Tweets in Time Frame 

Al Jazeera: 610

SVT Nyeter: 157 
(Note: All tweets were in Swedish and were translated by Google Translate) 

SBS News: 287

International Agenda

This graph shows the total number of tweets and the world news tweets within those. Al Jazeera’s English Twitter was almost entirely about international affairs. One tweet was about Qatar.

Themes

Not all tweets used in time frame were used when analysing themes. I cut out all local news tweets and instead looked at the themes of the tweets that were not based in the news agency’s country of origin. These tweets were cut down again and I only looked at those tweets deemed actual news. Non-news items included opinion and comment pieces, Retweets, weather, announcements etc. 

(Hover over pie sections for more info) 

Al Jazeera

Of the 610 tweets, 405 of them were deemed usable for this analysis.

SVT Nyheter

157 tweets were used

SBS News

287 tweets were used

On the whole, from these results, it can be said that both SVT and SBS value world news items to the same degree, both tweeting international news items a little less than 25% over the week selected.

From what I have collected over the weekly period mentioned, it shows that international politics and any instance where people are in danger or hurt are deemed more interesting and news worthy than other subject. The fact that "Current Affairs" items are one of the biggest is not surprising, as a news organisations primary responsibility is to keep citizens informed about such things.