Can twitter replace newswire for breaking news?

Petrovic, S., Osborne, M., Mccreadie, R. , Macdonald, C. and Ounis, I. (2013) Can twitter replace newswire for breaking news? In: ICWSM - 13, Boston, MA, USA, 8-10 Jul 2013,

[img]
Preview
Text
82566.pdf - Published Version

175kB

Publisher's URL: http://www.icwsm.org/2013/

Abstract

Twitter is often considered to be a useful source of real-time news, potentially replacing newswire for this purpose. But is this true? In this paper, we examine the extent to which news reporting in newswire and Twitter overlap and whether Twitter often reports news faster than traditional newswire providers. In particular, we analyse 77 days worth of tweet and newswire articles with respect to both manually identified major news events and larger volumes of automatically identified news events. Our results indicate that Twitter reports the same events as newswire providers, in addition to a long tail of minor events ignored by mainstream media. However, contrary to popular belief, neither stream leads the other when dealing with major news events, indicating that the value that Twitter can bring in a news setting comes predominantly from increased event coverage, not timeliness of reporting.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Mccreadie, Dr Richard and Macdonald, Professor Craig and Ounis, Professor Iadh
Authors: Petrovic, S., Osborne, M., Mccreadie, R., Macdonald, C., and Ounis, I.
Subjects:Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2013 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Publisher Policy:Reproduced with the permission of the publisher

University Staff: Request a correction | Enlighten Editors: Update this record

Project CodeAward NoProject NamePrincipal InvestigatorFunder's NameFunder RefLead Dept
593591CROSS: Real-time Story Detection Across Multiple Massive StreamsIadh OunisEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)EP/J020664/1COM - COMPUTING SCIENCE