Research Shows Journalism Students Embracing Twitter Revolution Differently

JOURNALISM STUDENTS USING TWITTER FOR GATHERING AND SPREADING NEWS

A new study from University of Maryland research team Anthony Herman and Elizabeth Klinck shows that Twitter usage between college journalism majors and non-journalism majors is markedly different.

This difference, primarily seen in how the two different groups disseminate and gather news on the social networking site, manifests itself when news is “breaking” in the community and around the world. Those that use Twitter more often and for more purposes relating to news – the journalism majors – tend to be more ahead of the curve than their counterparts.

TWITTER IS BECOMING A WIDELY USED TOOL FOR PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

Twitter is a social networking tool accessible via an application on smart phones and for free on the Internet at Twitter.com. Users can sign-up to receive a profile. From there, they can share their thoughts to all of the people that choose to “follow” them – as long as the text is in 140 characters or less. Perhaps more importantly, they themselves can follow whoever has a Twitter. Media outlets use Twitter both to break news and to share links to existing news stories. Celebrities and athletes use it as a soapbox for their (often) rambling thoughts about life.

More prevalently, Twitter has been a key instrument in aiding and spreading word of the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Those witnessing the uprisings shot video with their mobile devices and uploaded it to Twitter, where it was spread throughout the Internet and seen millions of times. In addition, during a time where traditional forms of communication proved to be fruitless, Twitter proved to be a strong way of helping people stay connected.

RESEARCH TEAM USED SURVEY TO GATHER RESULTS

The research question from Herman and Klinck posed: “Do college students who are journalism majors use Twitter more as a news-gathering service than other college students?” Both Herman and Klinck believed the answer to their question would be a resounding “yes;” after all, in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in which they (and the majority of the journalism students taking the survey) are studying, Twitter use was being taught in several classes.

The team used a survey that was distributed through University of Maryland students of all majors. The team eliminated the results of those who did not use Twitter and those who took the survey that were not currently enrolled and pursuing an undergraduate degree and then compared the responses of the two groups (journalism majors and everyone else).

JOURNALISM STUDENTS FOLLOW MEDIA; OTHERS FOLLOW ENTERTAINERS

The results were typical in some areas and vague in others.

Journalism majors logged in to Twitter more and created content – “tweeted” – more than their non-journalism counterparts, but those two factors did not translate into more followers for either of the groups.

Instead, the biggest difference was seen in whom the two groups were most interested in following (displayed in the above chart). Journalism majors reported to be most interested in receiving news when logging onto Twitter – over half responded that their primary purpose was to receive news in some form (every major media outlet, from Washington, D.C., radio station WTOP to the Los Angeles Times uses Twitter, as well as sport websites like ESPN). Only 20 percent of non-journalism majors responded that way; they were far more interested in following entertainment icons (36 percent) and friends and family (32 percent).

In addition, the students studying journalism showed a tendency to “retweet” – copy a tweet from a source and then tweet it oneself, while giving the original source credit – far more often than other students. This was the most statistically significant discovery of the entire study.

The implications of this study were recently seen in a non-lab situation. The recent earthquake and resulting tsunami that devastated Japan occurred slightly past midnight on March 11. Many people in the country did not receive news about the devastation until the next day, but those connected to social media knew of the events before they were reported on CNN or written about in the Washington Post.

University of Maryland Research Could Have Lasting Impact on Political Advertising

2008 Study Measures the Effect of Persuasion over Time

Dr. Edward L. Fink of the Communication Department at the University of Maryland recently discussed a 2008 study that he described as having "practical implications for advertising, marketing, health campaigns, and political campaigns."

The study, published in the journal Communication Monographs, is titled "The Effects of Message Discrepancy and Source Credibility." It was completed by Dr. Fink and associates Sungeun Chung and Stan A. Kaplowitz.

In it, the research team concluded that persuasive messages from sources with high levels of credibility induced much greater differences in belief change than messages from sources with low credibility, which is to be expected.  More interestingly, the team discovered that in the short term, messages that advocated extreme views brought about a greater belief change than messages that advocated only slight change. 

STUDENTS WERE FORCED TO MAKE TOUGH DECISIONS BEFORE AND AFTER BEING PERSUADED

The experiment used 95 Michigan State students, who sat in front of computers and read two different presentations.  The first presentation was a fake sentencing guideline for criminal court cases involving armed robbery.  The second presentation was supposedly taken from a meeting of the board of trustees at their university.  In that presentation, students discovered that the board planned to raise the tuition at Michigan State the following year. 

After reading the first presentation, the students were each given an argument from a judge's opinion about how long sentencing for armed robbery cases really should be.  The judge's opinions varied in recommended sentencing length, and the students were told before they read whether the judge was respected or not by his peers.  Using the computer-mouse technique, the research team tracked how persuaded or not the students were becoming until they made a final decision on how long they believed the sentencing should be - usually about 50 seconds later. 

The second study followed suit - after reading the presentation, students were given a different argument from a member of the board of trustees who they were told was either pro-student or anti-student (thus determining his credibility to the students).  Their beliefs were tracked.

THE MODEL USED WAS CONFIRMED MORE STRONGLY THAN ANTICIPATED

Using previous persuasion models, the team knew that source credibility and message discrepancy - how different the message being pushed was from the original beliefs held by the students - were the two biggest factors in persuasion.  The researchers sought to determine whether they could find an equation that roughly tracked the participants' beliefs from the beginning of the study until they made a new decision; it turned out that the equation they decided upon was near perfect.

"I was surprised the model worked so well," admitted Dr. Fink. "It wasn't a smooth curve because of the short time period, so we had to compromise a bit, but it lined up the way we hoped it would."

The team discovered that beliefs progress over an L-shaped curve until they settle on a new equilibrium, or state of rest.  Two of the curves - belief changes charted from students after being persuaded from high credibility sources with either an extremely different message (blue curve) or only a marginally different message (red curve) are shown below.  The graph indicates that the extreme position changed the students' beliefs much more.

THE EXPERIMENT CAN BE DUPLICATED OUTSIDE OF THE LABORATORY

Dr. Fink believes that the results of the study have real-life implications.  He was most interested in the students' belief changes on the topic of the tuition raise, because that decision would affect the students directly.  He thus described that particular study as having a level of ego involvement, which is important with advertising.

"If somebody is not interested in cars, or if somebody is not interested in purchasing a car, then an advertisement about cars wouldn't have the same effect, it wouldn't have ego involvement," explained Dr. Fink.  "You have to have the combination of the two for a car advertisement to actually have a level of involvement."

Dr. Fink also believes the study should show similar results across different demographics of age. "I might say a joke that most college kids wouldn't laugh at but that most 40-year-old adults would find funny, and vice versa," he said.

"As long as the content is equal amongst groups, then the process is the same as well.  For example, if you were doing a study on criminal sentencing for trial lawyers, because they're a group, just like college students are a group, it would have the same effect as the study done on college tuition for the college kids."

THE RESULTS COULD BE SEEN APPLIED AROUND ELECTION TIME

One thing that Dr. Fink emphasized was that this study's endpoint was when the participants reached a new decision.  In this way, the study was different from previous research that examined the impact of persuasive messages for days and weeks after the participants had been persuaded.  The results were markedly different as well.

"Messages with moderate message discrepancy [in the previous study] showed to be fairly ineffective initially, like in our study.  Over a course of weeks, however, they become extremely effective.  The opposite holds true, as well - over time, they flip."

Dr. Fink advised that this phenomenon could be utilized by political campaigns as the next election nears.

"Election day advertisements should be completely different from ads that were run two weeks prior," he said. "The ads run on election day should be much more extreme than the others."

THIS STUDY HAS BEEN ANALYZED MULTIPLE TIMES

This was not the first time that Dr. Fink and his team analyzed data from this type of study. According to Dr. Fink, this was actually the third trial of a study originally conducted in 1996. 

"We had a lot of different questions that weren't answered in previous studies, and the data was rich," Dr. Fink said.  "There were still a lot of things to do, so we analyzed [the data] a third time."

He said that the focus of this research was different from the previous times, because there wasn't such an end-result focus.

"Most studies are just question and answer - yes or no - and they take up to 40 seconds.  This was a study about the thinking process that goes into it."

Research Shows Political and Business Stories Induce Similar Comments

Stories and Comments Taken From Unique Site NewsTrust

By Tony Herman

New research from students at the University of Maryland shows that lengthy, negative comments following online news stories may not just be limited to stories concerning the political arena - they can be found after business stories as well.  

The Changing Landscape of Journalism

This blog is in reaction to a recent NPR segment. 

I think Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Kelly got too wrapped-up in discussing the news that would be displayed on The Daily and forgot some of the practical and daily application functions that go along with it.  Jarvis’s arguments against The Daily’s longevity was that it relied on “the hope to charge content that web people would not be able to charge” and that the only reason people think this will work is because of reading it “in a more old-fashioned way.”  In my opinion, those are shortsighted.  People will read news in a way that is convenient, easy, and cheap.  While the iPad is admittedly not cheap, it is becoming cheaper rapidly.  (Side note: I found the discussion about the price decline of the Kindle fascinating.  I knew that the price was dropping severely, but I didn’t think there was a chance that it could become free in the next year - although because it is still at $139, I have my doubts.)  So, as the iPad becomes cheaper, more people will buy it – not that it hasn’t been selling off the charts anyway – and more people will pay the $0.79 weekly fee for The Daily.  It’s a no-brainer to me.  Not everyone has a laptop, and fewer people bring their laptop everywhere they go, but everyone I know that has an iPad considers it a necessity to bring whenever they leave their house.  I’ve stated in class I believe iPad-like devices are the way of the future, and with so many similar-looking products already hitting the shelves, I see no reason why The Daily wouldn’t work. 

The other piece of the program that I found to be the most interesting was actually discussed at the very end.  I have remained skeptical on the value of citizen journalism because I simply do not trust the at-large population and am cynical.  Kevin Kelly did strike a chord with me, however, when he quite rightly pointed out that the Wikipedia’s of the world and the social networks that all put out news reported by average people have a much greater chance of accuracy than the “news” of the past that was controlled by single people.  I will continue to think on this point, as I have been caught up on not trusting individuals rather than trusting mass numbers to “get it right.” Egypt is changing my mind, too.

What The Daily Show Is Doing for News Credibility

From all academic.com, I found an article entitled “‘Truthiness’ and Satire News: Influence of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Television News Credibility,” which I obviously believed to be perfect for the subject at hand (citation below). The article both provided interesting data and raised many interesting questions.

Many people will deservedly question the credibility of either Daily Show or The Colbert Report when they watch it, but what the article warns more about is people who watch those shows questioning the credibility of the news that those shows parody, and – like it or not – that has become the trend. A third of the people who watch The Daily Show are under the age of 30. These people, according to the essay, treat the show for “political information consumption” as much as they do for entertainment, and “Previous research suggests that Daily Show viewing correlates with lower levels of trust in the news media.”

Clearly, what we have is a large group of Americans about to take over the “power” of the country who no longer believe in the news media. How big of a problem this is depends on your perspective. The media will still go on, whether people believe in them or not; all you have to do is remember that without the media, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would be unknowns. Their shows thrive because they target the media. Another thing to keep in mind as well is that while it could just be gamesmanship, some members of the news media have actually publicly stated that they enjoy what The Daily Show is doing for their craft. Respected anchor Brian Williams said to Stewart that Stewart’s watchful eye over the media has increased their performance and attention to fact checking because they know that if they slip, they’ll be hearing about it the next night at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.

I by no means am a person that won’t believe a news story until Jon Stewart tells me I can do so, but before journalism majors start changing their majors, that last point is one to bear in mind.

Stewart, Daxton. and Littau, Jeremy. ""Truthiness" and Satire News: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Television News Credibility" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Marriott Downtown, Chicago, IL, Aug 06, 2008 . 2010-11-12