Oh dear – I’m afraid it’s been some time since I last updated our Australian Twitter News Index; I’ve been significantly delayed by a number of overseas research engagements. So, to catch up to somewhere approximating the present, here’s a condensed run through some of the major developments of the past couple of months, starting from where we left off in the middle of March and taking us through the middle of May. I’ll update the last fortnight in some more detail in a separate post.

ATNIX Weeks 12-19/2013: 18 Mar. to 12 May 2013

We begin with the weekly figures for the sharing of links to Australian news sites on Twitter. Except for a brief dip in week 13 (158,000 tweets), the overall volume of tweets sharing news has been strong over this eight-week period – other than during that week, we never saw fewer than 170,000 tweets per week, and weeks 16 (195,000) and 18 (205,000) even troubled the 200,000-tweet marker.

The most remarkable story over these weeks is the continued strong performance of the ABC’s news content compared to long-time front runner Sydney Morning Herald. Notably, this isn’t due to a slump in the SMH’s own numbers, which – at an average of just under 30,000 tweets per week – remain slightly above the long-term average for the site. Rather, for reasons which I’m at a loss to explain, ABC News has pulled ahead by some margin since week 5 or so, and has put daylight between itself and its nearest rival. To illustrate: during the second half of 2012, the ABC received an average of 26,000 tweets per week for its news content – since week 6 of this year, that average has risen to 36,000. And this has happened while the links received by other sites have remained comparatively static.

Now, it’s possible that this increase in tweets linking to the ABC is the result of a net of spambots – Twitter accounts which seek to make their message appear less ‘spammy’ by including legitimate URLs in their tweets. News sites are often used for this purpose, since their content is easily discoverable and changes frequently. But – as you may remember from when news.com.au received an unexpected boost from spammers – those bots are often fairly easy to detect; they’re extremely heavy posters, use non-standard URL shorteners, or show other unusual tweeting patterns. None of this appears to be the case here – so either we’re dealing with a new step up in spamming technology, or a genuine and sustained increase in the number of links to ABC News content that are being shared on Twitter.

For the opinion and commentary sites and sections, the picture looks remarkably different – and at just under 25,000 tweets per week, the overall average has been bang on target for the year to date, but also (as we’ve become used to by now) subject to much more substantial day-to-day and week-to-week fluctuations than is the case for the sharing of news links.

There’s an obvious hitch, though, and that’s with the figures for The Conversation. Unknown to me, unfortunately The Conversation changed its default settings a few weeks back, as part of its expansion beyond Australia: while theconversation.edu.au still works, it now redirects immediately to theconversation.com, and almost all articles being shared on Twitter (especially through URL shorteners) also default to that URL. I wasn’t aware of this change, and thoroughly disagree with it: .com domain names are almost literally a dime-a-dozen commodity these days; .edu.au domains are far more tightly regulated and available only to a select group of accredited Australian education and research providers and related entities. The Conversation’s .edu.au domain always set it apart from the other opinion-mongers in Australia, as a site supported and populated by Australian universities and their staff. It would be a shame if this important distinction was lost in the shift to theconversation.com.

Most immediately, what the change has meant is that The Conversation has temporarily dropped off our radar, since week 13: we’ve dutifully continued to track theconversation.edu.au, but the real activity had shifted to theconversation.com. We’ll rectify this in the coming weeks, but for now it’s worth noting that the added 4,000-odd tweets which The Conversation regularly draws would have pushed our weekly opinion averages quite a bit higher than they’ve turned out to be.

The daily patterns over the past few weeks also point to the exceptional performance of ABC News links during this time; on its best days, the ABC received well over 4,000 more tweets than its nearest competitor, the Sydney Morning Herald. At the same time, though, the ABC’s characteristically deep slump during the weekend continues – in the absence of the weekend edition content which newspaper sites like SMH and Age excel at, the ABC drops down much further than its competitors during Saturday and Sunday. This also lends support to the theory that its strong weekday performance isn’t due to spam accounts: spambots don’t take time off on weekends, do they?

While there isn’t the time and space here to examine all of the various spikes in news sharing activity over the past eight weeks in full detail, and handful do stand out and deserve further scrutiny. ABC News’ most remarkable spike occurs on 16 April, when it even touches the 10,000 tweets/day mark. The reasons for this are diverse, however: articles covering the Boston Marathon attacks and the simultaneous fire at the JFK Library receive some 600 and 320 tweets, respectively, and a range of subsequent updates are also shared. At nearly 900 tweets, the leading article on the day, however, refers to a new bombing in Iraq which killed 20 – an event whose coverage many Twitter users compared to the wall-to-wall reporting about the Boston attack and subsequent manhunt. Third in the mix, with some 720 tweets, is a domestic story about One Nation co-founder David Ettridge’s new lawsuit against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

The second most significant ABC spike during these weeks is on 7 May, and here it appears that the ABC may have tapped into substantial overseas interest as well as a domestic audience: the lead item this day is an extended interview with Malaysian Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim which was published under the Australia Network News banner and drew some 630 tweets. Given this billing, and Twitter’s popularity in Malaysia, it’s likely that quite a few of the users sharing the story would have been based in Malaysia.

Finally, also of note is a very strong spike for The Age on 29 April. Here, we once again see the utility of Twitter as a medium for breaking news and urgent messages being demonstrated: some 3,300 tweets that day referred to just one story, about a 15-year-old girl who had disappeared in Melbourne the afternoon before. Notably, some 2,700 of those tweets linked to a version of the article which was formatted for mobile devices; clearly, many Melbournians decided to help raise awareness of the police call for assistance as soon as they saw it.

So much, then, for a quick catch-up which almost brings us up to speed again. Next time we’ll deal with some of the issues caused by recent changes to how Twitter provides is data, reintroduce The Conversation to ATNIX, and check on how the Australian edition of UK newspaper The Guardian has been received.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Natural disasters appear set to be a frequent phenomenon in Queensland and the rest of Australia over the coming years. From the devastating south east Queensland floods in 2011 to this summer’s series of cyclones affecting most of the state, from record heatwaves to the major bushfires striking southern states, emergency services and related agencies are being stretched to their limits and barely have a chance to catch their breath between disasters any more.

It is becoming all the more important, therefore, to involve the general public in disaster response and recovery activities where it is safe and sensible to do so. In the first place, this relates to the dissemination of information about the current disaster situation, where – in addition to conventional channels including television and local radio – online media play an increasingly important role.

Secondly, such media can also be instrumental in coordinating community-led responses to major disaster events – as demonstrated by the spontaneously organised army of clean-up volunteers following the 2011 floods, or the Baked Relief initiative which provided free home-cooked food to many of these volunteers.

Mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly seen as a key component in emergency services' crisis communication toolkit, therefore. The Queensland Police Service’s Media Unit has received national and international praise for its use of such tools, and my colleagues and I at the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) have documented just how successful their @QPSMedia Twitter account was at keeping Queenslanders informed about the 2011 floods. (See http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf for our full report.)

But more still can and must be done to develop our emergency services' social media skills and capabilities. Strategies for disseminating information effectively, and for engaging with social media users to ensure that they contribute productively to this dissemination effort, must continue to be updated as the general uses of these platforms themselves change; from reviewing the use of social media in recent events in Australia and elsewhere we can learn much about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to crisis communication in social media spaces.

Even less developed are our processes for sourcing first-hand information from social media users. What is already evident is that such information can be highly valuable, especially in large-scale disasters during which the authorities struggle to generate a picture of the local situation that is at once detailed and comprehensive. Social media users share a great deal of situationally relevant information – as text updates, photos, and videos – from disaster areas, so much so that the US Geological Survey has begun to explore the use of social media data as another tool for the early detection of earthquake events. We have yet to develop reliable tools and methods which enable us to evaluate and fully incorporate social media data into the range of information sources used by emergency services during times of crisis, however.

Two years after the first such event, which discussed the experience of the south east Queensland floods, a national conference on Social Media in Times of Crisis will be held at the State Library of Queensland on 4 April. Organised by the Eidos Institute in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, and kicking off a three-year research project which also involves the Queensland Department of Community Safety, the event brings together leading practitioners and researchers to current strategies for using social media in crisis communication and map out the road ahead. More information is available from http://eidos.org.au/.

The latest fortnightly instalment of our Australian Twitter News Index arrives at the end of a tumultuous week in Australian politics, but of course whatever resonance the Labor leadership shenanigans have found on Twitter during the current week will only be revealed in the next ATNIX update. For now, we may – if anything – see some of the build-up to whatever actually happened in Canberra over the past few days.

ATNIX Weeks 10-11/2013: 4-17 Mar. 2013

As this is another two-week update, I’ll begin with the week-to-week figures on link sharing for our basket of Australian sites. For the most part, sharing activity for the news sites has been steady – but this also means that the ABC’s historically unusual lead over the Sydney Morning Herald continues for a sixth and seventh straight week, for no real reason that I can identify. It’s not that the SMH is doing so poorly – since we started ATNIX in mid-2012, it’s usually tracked in the 25,000-30,000 tweeted links/week band, much as it is now. But so had ABC News – and that site has now surged ahead to remain steadily above 30,000 tweets, usually by some margin.

As we move to the opinion and commentary sites and sections, I need to make a correction first: in my last ATNIX update, I didn’t pick up on the fact that since 24 February, the Fairfax sites have now bifurcated their opinion sections into ‘opinion’ (by staff writers) and ‘comment’ (by members of the public). These exist under different site paths (e.g. smh.com.au/opinion vs. smh.com.au/comment). From now on, we’ll count tweeted links to articles under both these paths to the opinion and commentary link sharing total for Fairfax publications.

Even with the ‘comment’ links now added to the total, though, the two Fairfax flagships are faring comparatively poorly in this count, too. There’s a notable drop for the SMH and Age opinion sections over the past couple of weeks, allowing The Conversation to regain its traditional place as the second most linked to opinion site in the Australian media landscape, and to even put up a credible challenge for first place. It will be fascinating to see whether and how the gradual roll-out of Fairfax’s paywall access system (which comes online for overseas readers next week, as Mumbrella reports) will further affect these trends. (We did see a marked effect of The Australian’s paywall when it was switched on for opinion articles in October 2011.)

The day-to-day link sharing patterns bear out these differences in the relative performance of our news sites in even greater detail. Except for the weekends (when the newspapers’ specially targetted weekend reading features boost their numbers), the ABC outperforms its competitors by some margin; on an average day, it is usually linked to in tweets at least 1,000 times more than its nearest competitor, the Sydney Morning Herald.

Over the course of week 10, some of its most widely tweeted articles referred to the gunman in Brisbane’s Queen St Mall (370 tweets), Ted Baillieu’s resignation as Premier of Victoria (260 tweets), Julia Baird’s piece on International Women’s Day (220 tweets), and claims of policy brutality at the Sydney Mardi Gras parade (220 tweets) – a useful reminder, perhaps, that breaking news and controversial topics appear to have especially strong resonance on Twitter.

During week 11, the ABC’s three most tweeted news stories covered the attempts to de-extinct the gastric brooding frog, a story so strange that I’m willing to bet it also received plenty of tweets from outside of Australia (360 tweets in total), the subpoena of a Fairfax journalist as part of Gina Rinehart’s ongoing court battle with her children (interestingly, here it’s a news video sans accompanying text which received some 300 tweets), and the passing of the federal government’s National Disability Insurance Scheme by the House of Representatives (280 tweets). (As there weren’t any particularly major spikes in news activity during these two weeks, I won’t go into further detail for the other leading sites.)

As usual, opinion and commentary sharing is somewhat more fluid across the two weeks: here, it’s the Sydney Morning Herald and The Conversation which are battling for supremacy, while in week 11 Crikey also puts in a good showing.

The SMH’s spike on 6 March is largely due to a piece by economics editor Ross Gittins, who takes federal Labor to task over its criticism of the Coalition’s election promises (250 tweets). Two days later, The Conversation takes the lead, but without a major story of its own – several of its articles gain between 40 and 100 tweets that day. And in between, even the Brisbane Times’ usually sedate opinion section rises to temporary prominence, thanks to a strongly worded opinion piece from author John Birmingham which encourages Tony Abbott to rein in immigration spokesman Scott Morrison, if not quite in such civilised language (400 tweets).

Over the course of the following week, the Sydney Morning Herald records a strong result on 13 March, led again by Ross Gittins who warns us that “we worship materialism at our own peril” (130 tweets), while that same day it’s Crikey’s resident cartoonist First Dog on the Moon who raises that site’s profile with a cartoon that lampoons News Ltd.’s hysterical reaction to the proposed new media regulation regime (160 tweets). The Conversation’s strong performance two days later is once again due to a range of factors, on the other hand: star recruit Michelle Grattan’s article about the lessons Tony Abbott should learn from John Hewson’s defeat in the unloseable 1993 election gains her some 80 tweets, but several other stories also come close to that mark.

Given what we know has transpired in the meantime, however, do these two weeks simply constitute a period of treading water as Australia’s Twitterati waited for the supposedly inevitable Labor spill – or have they stopped caring altogether? Hopefully, the next ATNIX update will be able to provide an answer to those questions.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

I’m still struggling to return our Australian Twitter News Index to a weekly schedule – so for now, I’m afraid it remains condemned to a fortnightly existence. Hopefully this will be able to change in coming weeks. This update, then, covers weeks 8 and 9 of 2013, which saw a range of significant events in Australian and world politics – from the continuing build-up towards the federal election in September (and the associated opinion polls and leadership rumblings) to the first papal retirement in 600 years. Except that Twitter users didn’t really seem to care that much.

ATNIX Weeks 8-9/2013: 18 Feb. to 3 Mar. 2013

Before we turn to the day-to-day fluctuations in the index: now that we’re two months into 2013, let us take a first look at the weekly volume of tweets sharing links to the leading sites. This reveals the overall trends in the distribution of Twitter users’ attention across the sites, and points to a remarkable performance especially by the ABC’s news sections:

ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald have traditionally been quite closely matched in their prominence in the Australian Twittersphere, as our ATNIX round-up for the second half of 2012 has documented – so the substantial gap which the ABC has opened up over the past five weeks is unusual. For now, its lead peaked in week 8, when it received some 9,000 tweets more than the SMH; we’ll see later in this update whether there are any obvious reasons for this very strong performance. The spike in ABC links in week 8 is also largely responsible for the very substantial total volume of links to news and opinion sites being shared that week: we captured some 175,000 such tweets, compared to just over 151,000 in week 9.

The patterns for opinion and commentary sites and sections are somewhat more mixed, as usual – here, the Fairfax flagships retain their customary leadership, but The Conversation has now also joined the battle for second place, and manages to pull ahead of The Age’s opinion section at least in week 8. From here, a substantial gap of some 2,000 tweets per week has opened to the remaining field.

In fact, week 8 was also a strong week for opinion sharing: we captured nearly 28,000 such tweets that week, compared with just under 23,000 tweets in weeks 7 and 9. That’s still somewhat below the totals for weeks 3 and 4, however.

The day-to-day link sharing patterns shed some further light on exactly what caused these fluctuations. We’ll start again with the links to news sites, which further document ABC News’ towering performance during the past two weeks:

What emerges from a closer look at these patterns is not entirely unexpected. We’ve seen in the past that many of the largest spikes in the sharing of links to Australian news sites emerge when a domestic news story gains the attention of an international audience – this has happened frequently with stories relating to Julian Assange (which are distributed widely by the supporters of WikiLeaks), and occasionally with celebrity stories and other virally distributed content (such as Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech in parliament). During week 8, then, the most tweeted ABC News story by some margin related to news about the apparent halt to this year’s whale hunt by Japanese ships (2,400 tweets, and more for additional follow-up articles) – a piece which would have been shared widely by supporters of Sea Shepherd and other anti-whaling organisations.

Interestingly, a handful of science and technology pieces also performed well for the ABC that week – a piece about the differences between the National Broadband Network and the alternative options outlined by the federal opposition was always likely to be widely shared on Twitter (350 tweets), but an article about the evolution of tooth decay bacteria in humans over the millennia was a somewhat more unlikely winner, receiving more than 250 tweets and placing fifth for the week. But as the numbers for these individual articles also demonstrate, they alone did not receive enough tweets to create the substantial gap which opened up between ABC News and SMH in week 8 – there’s a much larger number of articles receiving between 100 and 200 tweets per day that added up to put the ABC in top spot.

Quite why this should be the case I am really not sure – there is no sign of major Twitter spam campaigns that use ABC links to make their tweets look more legitimate, nor are there any abnormally active users who would artificially boost the ABC’s numbers; even its own accounts contribute only a few hundred tweets to the weekly total through their news update activities. We’ll have to track this a little longer to see if any obvious explanations emerge.

The same is true for week 9 as well. ABC News performs well above the SMH from Monday to Wednesday, but there is no one widely shared story which explains this lead. There is a piece about the amusing gaffe over the anti-drink driving slogan on New South Wales police vans which receives some 420 tweets during those days, and articles about the Coalition’s mixed messages about carbon pricing compensation and the lack of funding for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research facility which are mentioned in some 320 and 220 tweets, respectively, but even a 7.30 report about the latest clashes between Sea Shepherd and Japanese whalers only just gains some 200 tweets during these days. There’s no obvious reason why ABC News should be the subject of some 2,000 more tweets than the Sydney Morning Herald on 27 February, for example.

Daily patterns for the opinion and commentary sites and sections are comparatively easier to explain, by contrast; here, due not least also to the generally lower volume of tweeting activity, single articles often make the difference between peaks and troughs. Over the past few weeks, it’s The Conversation and the Fairfax papers which particularly stand out:

The Conversation, in fact, records a very strong spike on 18 February: that Monday, John Keane’s article on his lunch and dinner with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is the latest in a long line of WikiLeaks-related pieces from Australian sites to be distributed widely through the site’s international network of supporters, gaining some 600 tweets. On Wednesday, on the other hand, an article by The Age’s editor-at-large which explains why Kevin Rudd is “Labor’s last chance” for the election puts that publication in top spot (180 tweets). The following week, the long-term pecking order is restored, however – not least also with the help of the 600 tweets received on Thursday by artist Ben Quilty’s article in the SMH on the need to rethink the HECS-exempt status of the Australian Institute of Sports, and the 440 tweets the same article gained for The Age.

Remarkably, then, still no significant presence during these weeks for the column miles already devoted to covering the fake election campaign which will be with us until September, or to the leadership rumblings in the ALP (except for the one Age article). Has the coverage to date not been worth sharing, or are the electorate simply not that interested in the latest tealeaf readings yet?

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

I’m afraid our Australian Twitter News Index still hasn’t quite returned to its normal weekly rhythm – so here is another multi-week round-up of how Twitter users shared links to Australian news sites. By now, we’ve moved well clear of the slow news period of the summer holidays, and with the September election already hanging over us, we should see plenty of news-sharing activity.

ATNIX Weeks 5-7/2013: 28 Jan. to 17 Feb. 2012

Given the multi-week nature of this ATNIX update, let’s dispense with the marketshare graphs once again and jump straight into the day-to-day activity. As I’ve said, the holidays are certainly over: over these past three weeks, the total number of links to Australian news Websites being shared has hovered around a very solid 160,000: week 5 saw 165,000 tweets, week 6 matched that figure to within 200 tweets, and week 7 came in at 158,000 (but we missed some tweets due to a brief server outage on 13 Feb.). Most remarkable in any of this is the performance of ABC News, however: while the long-term market leader, the Sydney Morning Herald, maintained a weekly average of around 28,000 tweets linking to its site, ABC News rose from 28,000 in week 4 to a remarkable 36,000 in week 6 – its highest weekly total since we started ATNIX in mid-2012. (The 33,000 tweets it received in week 7 are the second highest result.)

The daily graph shows this clearly – while earlier in the year, ABC News and SMH shadow one another closely, the ABC detaches notably from its closest rival during week 6. A substantial element in this result is the widespread sharing of ABC newsreader Jeremy Fernandez’s article on his reaction to being subjected to a deeply racist tirade on a Sydney bus. Posted on 8 Feb., that piece alone received more than 1,500 shares during the rest of the week, while additional reporting about the incident picked up another 280 tweets. A second major story during the week concerned the earthquake and tsunami in the Solomon Islands, articles about which were linked to in nearly 1,000 tweets on 6 Feb. alone.

But while this explains substantial spikes on the Wednesday and Friday, the significant lead of the ABC over the SMH throughout the rest of the week is less obviously explicable. The Monday of week 6, for example, features no such standout pieces, but is marked rather by a range of stories which receive between 100 and 300 shares – ranging from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton to police errors in the arrest of controversial MP Craig Thomson. There’s nothing here which would inherently explain a difference of almost 2,000 tweets between both sites during that day. Curious.

Links to opinion and commentary sites and sections fluctuate considerably more from day to day, as usual – and at much lower levels of activity. Here, the two Fairfax flagships continue to rule the roost, if not without challenge from some more minor sites. Overall, opinion and commentary sharing has been down over the past few weeks, in fact: while weeks 5 and 6 nearly reached 27,000 tweets linking to such sites, week 7 struggled to reach 23,000. It should be noted that these numbers remain above the long-term average of 20,000 tweets per week, though – perhaps election speculation is making its presence felt already.

Opinion and commentary sharing in week 5 is necessarily dominated by the Prime Minister’s announcement of the federal election date as 14 September – but at The Age, this is somewhat overshadowed by Julian Assange’s own announcement that he will run for the Senate (some 350 shares for this article, as well as another 90 for a 12 Dec. article which flagged this possibility). Another complication arises the following day, in the form of Craig Thomson’s arrest, with a related article netting the SMH some 260 tweets – it’s difficult not to see our figures for this week as symptomatic of the various issues which emerged this week to undermine the PM’s make-or-break attempt to change the political conversation by announcing the election so early. Also notable in this context is another big day for Independent Australia, whose article on the Craig Thompson saga receives some 200 tweets on 31 Jan., boosting its numbers for the day to double its long-term average; the site continues this comparatively strong performance in week 6.

In week 6, at least one of the major spikes at the Sydney Morning Herald is related (and this almost seems a rarity these days) to actual policy matters: economics editor Ross Gittins’s piece on “the four industries that rule Australia” receives some 210 tweets on the Wednesday. The following day we’re back to Julian Assange: Elizabeth Farrelly’s piece on the conditions of Assange’s exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London picks up some 250 tweets. Meanwhile, Independent Australia’s strong run – by its standards – continues: its examination of Tony Abbott’s new look receives some 300 tweets during the week, closely matched by a further update on the Craig Thomson saga. New Matilda, too, receives a boost: its criticism of Tony Abbott’s taxation plans accounts for some 260 tweets on the Monday of week 4 – that’s more than 70% of all tweets to the site that day. As we (slowly) move closer towards election day, perhaps these smaller, independent opinion sites will gradually take on a more important role in the national conversation?

Finally, while week 7 is less remarkable overall, two spikes amongst the minor sites are also worthy of attention (the Age spike on 13 Feb. is due to another update about Julian Assange’s senate run, and accounts for some 450 tweets). The ABC’s The Drum tends not to feature very strongly in our index, also due to the fact that Drum articles by ABC staff are published under a different URL path and cannot reliably be included in the total. On 14 Feb., though, it manages to cut through nonetheless, boosted by a well-timed piece on the reasons for why women would not want to change their name after marriage (150 tweets). On the Saturday, finally, it is The Global Mail which briefly becomes the most-linked opinion and commentary site in the country: its confronting piece about ‘witch’-hunts and other acts of extreme violence against women in Papua New Guinea received some 360 tweets that day.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Our Australian Twitter News Index still hasn’t quite returned from holidays, so what follows in this post is another multi-week round-up, covering the four weeks of January 2013. We’ll get back into our regular rhythm soon, especially now that there’s the dank smell of electioneering in the air, but for the moment, let’s have just a quick look at how January unfolded.

ATNIX Weeks 1-4/2013: 31 Dec. 2012 to 27 Jan. 2013

Since we’re dealing with a four-week period, let’s skip straight to the day-by-day overview of activity. Here, we’re seeing a definite post-New Year’s lull in news sharing on Twitter (with a brief break for server maintenance on 12/13 Jan.):

Remarkably, none of our major news sites received more than 4,000 tweets per day during the first week of the year; except for ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald, they even struggled to pass the 2,000 mark. Indeed, for all 30 sites combined, we captured only just over 122,000 tweets that week. By week 3, that number had risen to 171,000, however – which is the strongest weekly result we’ve had since ATNIX started in mid-2012. As the graph above shows, this is driven especially by strong mid-week results for the SMH, ABC News, and The Age. At 163,000 tweets, week 4 also remains very strong, if somewhat below this peak.

Of the week 3 spikes in activity, ABC News’s Wednesday win is driven largely by its report about Paarthepan, an baby born in the Sydney immigration detention centre (530 shares), and a story about The Guardian’s plans to launch an Australian edition (200 shares) – which we will track in ATNIX as soon as the site launches, of course. At the Sydney Morning Herald, the same day sees major stories about Julia Gillard’s commitment to religious lobbies that they will continue to be able to discriminate on religious and sexual grounds (460 shares), and another piece covering The Guardian’s announcement (210 shares). Clearly, these numbers alone do not full account for what is a very strong day for both publications, though, and there are many more stories which received upwards of 100 shares; quite why we’re seeing such an increase in overall sharing activity this week remains unclear to me, therefore. Perhaps everyone is facing the new year’s news with renewed energy after an extended break?

A second major spike for both publications, on Friday, is due to an ABC News report about a massive gold nugget find near Ballarat (430 shares) and its coverage of the growing bushfire threat in Victoria and New South Wales (240 shares), while the SMH’s total is somewhat inflated by an opinion piece (600 shares) which we’ll get back to below. Its second most linked-to item, strangely enough, is an image from a 2011 piece, of a concept design for what planes may look like in 2050 (340 shares) – due to a single, very widely retweeted message which linked to this image. I’m afraid I can’t explain this one, as the original tweet was in Arabic.

Our opinion and commentary sites and sections show a somewhat more jittery day-to-day pattern, as usual; the daily volume of links to opinion pieces depends so much more on a handful of articles which cut through to a larger audience, as we know. None of them managed to do so during week 1, clearly: remarkably, none of our sites even reached 800 tweets per day, and the total volume of opinion tweets barely made it past 14,000 that week.

Here, too, things pick up by week 3, which records almost 30,000 tweets linking to opinion pieces. The two Fairfax sites show particular spikes in week 3: on 16 Jan., this is something of a false dawn for the SMH as it once again badges a political news story (about religious discrimination rights, as outlined above) under its National Times banner, but economics editor Peter Martin also contributes with a genuine opinion piece about smart shopping (250 shares). Over at The Age, the discrimination story picks up another 380 shares, while smartly accompanying this with a syndicated op-ed by former US President Jimmy Carter, criticising any form of discrimination due to religious prejudices (260 shares). This turns out to be something of a slow burner: two days later, it’s still leading The Age’s opinion links (with 190 shares that day), followed by 150 shares for a Richard Ackland piece on the James Ashby affair.

The Age also shows a significant spike on the final day of our four weeks, but this, too, is a National Times-badged piece of political reporting – covering Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi’s membership in a far right US lobby group (300 shares) – which really shouldn’t be counted as an opinion piece. Remarkably, if we ignored this article, Jimmy Carter’s op-ed would still lead this day for The Age, by the way – if with a much less impressive 40 additional shares.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that The Conversation had a particularly slow start to the year – perhaps the type of content it covers was especially unlikely to be shared during the post-Christmas lull. By 21 Jan., however, it was back in business again, and even leads the opinion and commentary field on that day. The leading story: a piece on how the NRA and other US gun lobbyists distort Australian crime statistics, which alone received some 370 shares.

So much for now, then – we return in February with more regular updates.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

My previous post rounded out our weekly observations of the ebbs and flows in Twitter newssharing during the second half of 2012. This means it’s time now to review the overall patterns which our Australian Twitter News Index has shows us since ATNIX began in mid-year. Started in week 25, we now have data for just over half a year – a solid basis to evaluate the overall performance of Australian news and opinion sites on Twitter, and to identify particular moments during this time which captured Twitter users’ attention.

ATNIX Weeks 25-52/2012: 18 June – 30 Dec. 2012

Over the course of these six months and two weeks, we captured a total of over 3.9 million tweets which included links to Australian news sites – an average of some 140,000 tweets per week. Those numbers would have been slightly higher still in the absence of a number of temporary server outages which led us to miss some data in a number of weeks; at any rate, they constitute a very solid basis for our analysis. Sadly, there’s very little international research to date with which we might be able to compare our figures – we’re unable to say whether Australian Twitter users are especially engaged with or disengaged from the news, therefore.

(We’re working on such comparisons, though – we’ve started tracking Twitter-based newssharing in Germany, where we seem to see some 240,000 shares per week, on average. Given that Germany’s population is close to four times that of Australia, this appears to indicate that Australians have taken to Twitter much more enthusiastically than Germans, and/or that Australian Twitter users are more interested in sharing news items than their German counterparts.)

In Australia, we’ve seen a very stable distribution of attention across the sites we track: the Sydney Morning Herald and the news-related sections of the ABC Website clearly lead the pack, between them accounting for well over a third of all tweeted links. The Age and news.com.au constitute a second tier of sites, each commanding some 10% of the total volume of tweets; in other words, these four sites alone receive nearly 60% of all Australian news links being shared by Twitter users.

This is symptomatic of a number of well-known factors: first, it demonstrates the considerable concentration of the Australian news industry on a handful of major operators – flagship sites for Fairfax (twice), News Ltd., and the ABC are all represented in this top four. We might expect News Ltd.’s national broadsheet The Australian to figure strongly here as well (and it does appear in fifth place, but closer to the other also-rans than to the top four), but remember that its site has implemented a partial paywall system which is likely to impact on Twitter users’ ability to read and share articles in The Australian.

Second, these patterns also reflect what we understand the demographics of the Australian Twittersphere to be at this point in time. The strong performance of Fairfax’s two metropolitan broadsheets, and of Australia’s leading public service media organisation, suggests that Twitter user demographics remain skewed to the traditional audiences for relatively quality, broadsheet news, rather than for tabloid content as provided, for example, by News Ltd.’s papers Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph. Again, there is a dearth of reliable research into Twitter’s demographics in Australia, but we do believe its overall userbase to be somewhat skewed towards relatively urban, educated, affluent users aged between 25 and 55 – matching the typical audience for quality news content.

The three-tier structure of Twitter news sharing in Australia becomes more evident when we examine its weekly ebbs and flows:

Here, we see the SMH and ABC News shadowing one another closely throughout the year, trading the lead from time to time. What generally puts the SMH over the top is its stronger weekend performance, driven most likely by the content produced for the paper’s weekend edition; the ABC doesn’t have any similar weekend fare to offer, and drops off more substantially on Saturdays and Sundays.

The Age and news.com.au form another fairly closely-matched duo; news.com.au might even have come out in third place for the year, except for a form slump in the final weeks of 2012. Below them we find the rest of our sites, led by The Australian and the two major tabloids; none of these sites manage to advance well beyond 10,000 tweets per week on a regular basis, and the majority struggle even to reach the 5,000 tweet mark – a far cry from the 25,000 to 30,000 tweets which the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC News regularly command.

While we’ve explored the specific spikes and troughs in news sharing in much more depth on a week-by-week basis in past ATNIX updates, a few overall observations are nonetheless useful. The two major dips on weeks 28 and 46 are due to server maintenance, and should not concern us overly much; the six-week slump in volume between weeks 35 and 40 (27 Aug. to 7 Oct.) is more interesting, however. Weeks 38-40 coincide with the spring school holidays in several states, which may explain the slump for those weeks; I can’t find a particularly convincing explanation for the drop-off during the preceding three weeks, however. We do see a similar drop in the last week of the year, as Christmas apathy takes hold; this seems to be especially pronounced for the Australian Financial Review, incidentally.

Turning to the spikes, week 33 and 34 stand out especially, and are driven by a combination of factors. One of them points to a phenomenon which is familiar to us by now: the international distribution of Australian stories, which we’ve observed this past year especially in the context of the unfolding saga around WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. In week 33, it’s Assange’s flight to the Ecuadorian embassy in London which is the subject of a range of Australian news articles; these articles are picked up and widely retweeted by the worldwide WikiLeaks support community on Twitter, boosting the numbers especially of the Fairfax broadsheets.

But there are also major domestic events which add to these spikes: in week 33, independent MP Tony Windsor’s scathing attack on federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in federal parliament is covered in a series of news articles and posts of the full video which receive a substantial number of links from Twitter. In week 34, Leigh Sales’s confrontational 7.30 interview with the Opposition Leader drives major traffic to the ABC site, as links to the full video are shared widely.

After the mysterious spring slump, the pressure on Abbott is renewed in week 41 by Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s now famous ‘misogyny’ speech in parliament, which constitutes a rare case of a domestic political story making major international headlines. Here, it’s the ABC which gains the most additional attention, as its full-length post of the video receives some 6,300 tweets over the course of two days.

Finally, the one notable spike amongst the minnows occurs for nineMSN in week 30, essentially doubling its normal tweet count. This, too, is an example of a domestic story gone viral: it relates to a group of four Australian fans of teen band One Direction who feel the band no longer cares about its fans, and decided to burn their concert tickets. Outrage amongst One Direction’s remaining fans was swift and contagious, resulting in some 4,500 tweets which linked to the story.

In addition to the tweeting of general news reports, ATNIX also specifically tracks the sharing of opinion articles, both from the opinion sections of our major news Websites and from the major Australian opinion and commentary sites. Compiled over the second half of 2012, the distribution of attention to such sites and sections shows a similarly multi-tiered picture for the nearly 580,000 tweets we captured:

Once again, we find the Sydney Morning Herald in pole position – and a strong response to its commentary on Julian Assange’s Senate bid in week 50 has meant that the opinion section of Fairfax stablemate The Age managed to beat independent academic opinion site The Conversation into second place, by a margin of fewer than 2,000 tweets over the past six months. Another independent, online-only opinion site, Crikey, rounds out the top four.

In this context, it should be noted that numbers for the Fairfax sites will be slightly inflated: we identify Fairfax opinion articles by their URL paths (e.g. smh.com.au/opinion/politics/…), but the sites have a tendency to file fairly straightforward political reporting from their Canberra correspondents under such URLs (and under the on-site imprint National Times) as well; I’ve noted this in several past ATNIX updates. Short of checking each article manually, there’s nothing we can do to remove such non-commentary articles from the count. However, even a reduction of SMH and Age tweet numbers by 50% would still see them in third and fourth place, respectively – so while the total count might be somewhat inflated, the overall importance of these sites as sources of opinion articles for Twitter-based discussion is not.

Again, then, the distribution of attention to opinion and commentary sites and sections shows a considerable focus on the broadsheet content provided by the Fairfax papers, mixed with the major independent commentary sites; the top four sites alone account for over 60% of all shared links. Against this, the ABC and News Ltd. sites are comparatively absent: blogs.news.com.au (home to notable commentators such as Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, or Miranda Devine) commands only 7% of the total volume of tweets, and the ABC’s The Drum manages 5%. (Here, however, there will be some systematic undercounting: while we are able to identify general Drum articles by their abc.net.au/unleashed URLs, Drum articles by ABC journalists are not filed under the /unleashed path, and cannot be identified reliably.) The Australian, finally, captures only 4% of the Twitter attention share – it’s here where its paywall has the greatest impact, as it specifically prevents direct access to most opinion articles from Twitter links.

Given the ephemerality of political opinion and commentary, and the substantially lower volume of tweets which link to such content, compared to ‘straight’ news articles, the week-by-week overview necessarily shows much more pronounced fluctuations:

Overall, we see the Sydney Morning Herald well above the rest, as a consistent leader throughout these six months, while Age and Conversation battle for second spot. There is a notable rise in the number of tweets referring to blogs.news.com.au from week 43 onwards, but News Ltd.’s columnists should not read this as a particularly widespread popular vindication of their views: rather, this rise is due almost entirely to the activities of a single Twitter user who began to tweet links to the blog posts – with a particular focus on Andrew Bolt – with a considerable degree of dedication (or obsession, perhaps). As I noted, for example, in week 44, this user would sometimes tweet the same link several dozen times a week, usually under the #auspol hashtag, resulting in well over 1,000 blogs.news.com.au tweets for the week. And no, I won’t name that user.

Overall, spikes in commentary activity match what we’ve already seen for news: Assange and commentary on Tony Abbott’s performance as Opposition Leader drive the spikes before the spring slump; Gillard’s misogyny speech is responsible for the major spike after it. Otherwise, Julian Assange and his international network of supporters are to blame: in addition to week 34, they drive spikes in weeks 39 and 50 (the latter is founded mainly on National Times-branded Fairfax news articles, however).

What’s more remarkable about the opinion and commentary field, however, is that – contrary to the mainstream of news reporting – it is possible for minor commentary sites to break through with a major story at times. New Matilda and Independent Australia both reached Crikey and even Conversation territory at least for a couple of weeks each during the past six months: in week 34, New Matilda published an interview with Noam Chomsky about Julian Assange which boosted its link total by more than 1,000 tweets; in week 48, Independent Australia published Margo Kingston’s exposé on Tony Abbott’s slush fund “Australians for Honest Politics” and received some 1,750 tweets for its troubles. That piece was republished in New Matilda in turn, two weeks later, where it resulted in another spike, while Independent Australia was using forensic IT analysis to test Abbott’s statements on the James Ashby affair.

In spite of the pronounced underdevelopment of the Australian news market as a result of stifling media ownership concentration, the fact that these and other minor voices in the media landscape can make themselves heard at least from time to time on Twitter is an encouraging sign: new entrants – and we might still count Crikey and The Conversation amongst this list, too – can establish themselves at least in the field of political commentary, if not necessarily in general news.

Last week’s announcement of an Australian edition of British newspaper The Guardian has added another potential challenger, whose introduction we’ll track with interest in 2013’s ATNIX. At least as far as Twitter is concerned, The Guardian’s profile should suit the demographics of the Australian Twittersphere well – it will be interesting to see how this new entrant shifts the distribution of attention which we’ve observed in 2012.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

The Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) took a break from weekly updates over the summer, but we’re spinning up again for 2013 now. Before we get to the most recent developments, though, it’s time to check what happened in the final few weeks of 2012, and to review what the past six or seven months of ATNIX data gathering have shown us. I’ll do so in separate posts over the next few days.

ATNIX Weeks 48-52: 26 Nov. – 30 Dec. 2012

The most recent ATNIX update took us through to the end of November 2012. Here’s now the following weeks unfolded (as always, click the images for a closer look):

The final five weeks of the year show a gradual decline in link sharing on Twitter as the summer holidays take hold; this is especially pronounced, of course, for week 52, which started on Christmas Eve. Indeed, there is an especially sharp dip in activity on 25 December; on the other days of this final week of 2012, the volume of sharing activity remains roughly comparable to that normally experienced on weekend days.

A few notable spikes in activity during these last few weeks deserve further attention, too. During week 47 (26 Nov. to 2 Dec. 2012), while the strong performance of ABC News is driven by a wide range of stories, the Sydney Morning Herald’s position is partly due to a major story on the thawing of Arctic permafrost, which picked up some 840 links in tweets during 27 and 28 Nov. The following week starts with another strong SMH story on global warming, receiving around 320 tweets.

Less immediately visible in the graph, but just as notable is a Saturday spike in SMH activity on 8 December, which lifts the number of tweets referring to the Sydney Morning Herald site well beyond its weekend average. On this day, more than 1,000 tweets refer to its various articles covering the suicide of UK nurse Jacintha Soldanha in the aftermath of a prank call by 2DayFM DJs; once again, Twitter users also demonstrate a long memory by connecting this case with a major controversy around Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O in 2009, also covered in the SMH.

The following week sees a number of spikes for SMH, ABC News, and The Age – and we’re back to one of our recurring themes in 2012: the continuing saga around Julian Assange, now holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Throughout the year, we’ve seen Assange- and WikiLeaks-related stories generate substantial Twitter attention, especially if they are shared through the international network of WikiLeaks supporters; this looks to be the case again here. On Wednesday 12 December, a Radio National Late Night Live interview with Assange leads the list of most tweeted ABC News links (with some 520 tweets); the same day, The Age’s story on Assange’s intention to contest the next Australian Senate election picks up some 850 tweets. Republished in the Sydney Morning Herald, the same story gains another 800 tweets the following day.

Surprisingly, by the end of the week it is the Daily Telegraph which records its biggest spike since ATNIX started in mid-year. On Saturday 15 Dec., this is due to the more than 1,050 tweets linking to a piece about a missing Sydney teenager, demonstrating Twitter’s role in spreading urgent news throughout the community. By now, we’re also already starting to enter the news-free zone otherwise known as Christmas, however. Symptomatically, a piece on boy band The Collective’s re-recording of Wham! hit “Last Christmas” is the Daily Telegraph’s success story on Sunday, resulting in some 800 tweets.

The link sharing patterns for opinion sites over the same period are somewhat more dramatic (but also represent substantially smaller numbers). Weeks 48 (26 Nov. to 1 Dec.) and 50 (10-16 Dec.) stand out especially strongly:

The Sydney Morning Herald’s strong showing during the former of these periods is somewhat misleading, however, and stems largely from the SMH’s insistence to badge some of its reports on federal politics under the National Times imprint; mostly, the ‘opinion’ articles shared this week deal with Julie Bishop’s increasingly ineffective attacks on Julia Gillard over the AWU controversy, and a change to Australia’s UN vote on Palestinian statehood as a result of Labor backbench lobbying. A genuine opinion piece on the Swedish ambassador’s undiplomatic comments about an earlier pro-Assange SMH piece leads the list, though, with some 320 tweets referring to it.

Overall, though, this is a week dominated by the federal opposition’s last-ditch attempt to score political points over the AWU case; Crikey’s spike on the Monday is driven by a Bernard Keane piece on this issue (280 tweets), while The Conversation’s leading story for the week turns to question the Australian media’s ethics in reporting unsubstantiated allegations (140 tweets).

Even the otherwise relatively lowly-ranked opinion site Independent Australia scores a major win: Margo Kingston’s exposé on Tony Abbott’s own slush fund, Australians for Honest Politics (directed against Pauline Hanson during her 1998 heyday), was linked to in some 1750 tweets during the week – a runaway success for a site which usually receives an average of just over 500 tweets per week for all of its articles. On 30 November, because of this article, Independent Australia was briefly the most widely tweeted opinion site in Australia.

Week 50, by contrast, is largely dominated by two issues: the death of prank victim Jacintha Saldanha, and the continuing mudslinging in Australian politics. On Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion piece on the prank call leads with some 550 tweets, while a republication of Kingston’s Independent Australia article from two weeks ago in New Matilda gives that site a substantial boost in reader numbers as well: some 460 tweets referred to the piece during the week.

Meanwhile, Independent Australia gains another 260-odd tweets for an attempt to use forensic IT techniques to suggest that Tony Abbott’s office was involved in orchestrating James Ashby’s accusations against former Speaker Peter Slipper. The major spikes in SMH and The Age activity during the week must largely be ignored, however; they result largely from the National Times-crossbadging of Fairfax’s coverage of Julian Assange’s Senate bid.

So much for these final weeks of the year, then. In a follow-up post, we’ll review overall trends through the year.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

We start this week’s ATNIX with a brief detour – please bear with me, or just skip down to the next section if you’re only interested in this week’s results.

The approach to researching the uses of Twitter which we’re taking with the Australian Twitter News Index is a somewhat unusual one. Much recent Twitter research – including plenty of the work we’ve been doing in the Mapping Online Publics project – has focussed on hashtag datasets. Such datasets are useful because they’re essentially self-selecting: users mark their tweets as relating to certain topics by including hashtags, and this makes those tweets as easy to find for other users as they are easy to track and analyse for researchers. Hashtag datasets are topically unified and generally well-behaved, therefore.

Our ATNIX datasets, on the other hand, represent a very different cross-section of Twitter activity. Here, we’re dealing with a collection of all tweets that happened to link to a particular news site, across a wide range of topics and from users who are for the most part almost certainly unaware of one another. Posting to a hashtagged conversation, you’re already aware that the hashtag exists, and can easily see what other users have posted to the hashtag. Posting a link to, say, the ABC News site, you’re not usually aware at all of how many other Twitter users may be doing the same at any one point, and you don’t have an easy way of finding out.

This is why the daily and weekly patterns we find in ATNIX are so interesting – they represent a more or less instant response to the news of the day across the Australian Twittersphere which isn’t usually driven by the unifying forces of hashtags; for the most part, ATNIX tracks genuine reactions to the news of the day, which aren’t artificially orchestrated or coordinated.

My point in spelling this out is this: the comprehensive, whole-of-Australia nature of the ATNIX data means that when we do see significant short-term spikes or longer-term movements in the level of activity around particular news sites, they tend to be meaningful. Week by week, I have been able to highlight the key news events on Twitter in this column by pointing to the most widely shared stories and reactions. In turn, this has made it all the more perplexing that – once we filtered out the hair growth spam and dogged oversharing of columnists’ critiques of the PM – we haven’t been able to find a meaningful explanation of the inexorable growth in the number of tweets linking to news.com.au.

Until now.

Regular readers of my ATNIX updates will recall that a few weeks back, there was an unusual spike in news.com.au links because they were used by spammers promoting hair growth products to mask their posts with legitimate-looking content. We filtered out those tweets. More recently, one very active anti-Gillard campaigner took it on themselves to tweet about every last article by blogs.news.com.au columnists which was critical of Julia Gillard, often multiple times a day, thereby substantially boosting the number of links received by that opinion section. This week, that account posted some 1,200 such links (and is the most active account linking to that site) – but obsessive as they may be, those tweets are legitimate, and we’ve retained them in the blogs.news.com.au count. They don’t much affect news.com.au itself, at any rate.

And still, this week’s numbers are the best for news.com.au yet. At just over 20,000 tweets linking to it, the site received its best-ever result, well above its long-term average of 14,000 links per week. A closer look reveals that there’s a substantial number of links to news.com.au which redirect to the site via news.com.au.feedsportal.com (8,200 of the 20,000 this week). In itself, that’s legit – it’s just another redirection service, in essence; plenty of the Sydney Morning Herald links come in via sites like feedproxy.google.com or feeds.feedburner.com as well. Feedsportal does display interstitial ads before redirecting, though.

What’s very odd, though, is that in the feedsportal.com links, we very frequently get blocks of tweets from different users, who each link to the same story within a few seconds of each other. Not retweets, but original tweets, e.g.

Firebrand who renamed Bombay dies: BAL Thackeray, founder of the right-wing Hindu party Shiv Sena, was a firebra… http://t.co/[…]

(so, not exactly breaking news). The t.co link (which is different in each of the tweets in the block) resolves to a bit.ly short URL which is identical across the whole group – but as the tweets are from different users, made at the same time, that makes no sense. I’ve further spotchecked a few of the accounts which appear frequently in these tweet blocks – and of the five I checked, three had been suspended already. And the size of these tweet blocks is largely consistent as well – this week, we get several blocks of 16 tweets at first, then we go up to several blocks of 20, and several blocks of 26, then that drops back down to several consecutive blocks of 23 (probably as a few accounts are banned), and so on.

There’s only one conclusion: we’re dealing with yet another case of spam, if a little more sophisticated than the hair growth spammers; this lot appear to be looking to make money from the interstitial ads at Feedsportal. The issue for me now is that some other users (though not a lot, by comparison) are using feedsportal.com legitimately – so while I can exclude any feedsportal.com redirects from the dataset from now on, that will also undercount legitimate links to news.com.au to some extent…

Yeech, spammers.

ATNIX Week 47: 19-25 Nov. 2012

But let’s move on to the weekly numbers, then. Having removed the Feedsportal links from the news.com.au data, what’s left this week are some 147,000 tweets linking to our Australian news Websites: a result which is just slightly above the long-term average. Most notably, the news sections of the ABC Website come out ahead of the Sydney Morning Herald this week, and news.com.au is back a its more realistic fourth place. The remaining sites are relatively unchanged from the previous week.

Amongst the opinion and commentary sites and sections, by contrast, the Fairfax flagships are back in the lead, pushing The Conversation into third place; overall, too, at close to 22,000 tweets, the number of links to opinion articles has increased by some 3,000 tweets. blogs.news.com.au is in a strong fourth place, but again it must also be noted that a good half of its links come from a single, very committed right-wing Twitter account – if and when that user goes on summer holidays, blogs.news.com.au should fall back to a level which would be just above that of independent opinion site New Matilda.

While the ranking of opinion sites always tends to fluctuate slightly, here, too, there’s a certain amount of stability in the overall picture; for the long-struggling Global Mail, I’m afraid that’s bad news, incidentally, as it seems to have returned to its pre-redesign baseline of some 500 tweets per week.

On to the daily patterns, then: for the news sites, we clearly see how ABC News has pulled ahead of the usually closely-matched Sydney Morning Herald this week, at least on the weekdays. Oddly, however, there’s no obvious driver for this lead: major weekday stories cover the discovery of a fire tornado in Australia (560 tweets), an Amnesty International report on the detention camp in Nauru (470 tweets), the death of author Bryce Courtenay (320 tweets), as well as, very oddly, a 2004 piece on the health of gladiators in Ancient Rome. Leading stories in the Sydney Morning Herald, by contrast, cover the strange disappearance of a Pacific island (470 tweets) and the eruption of a New Zealand volcano (420 tweets).

The daily volume of tweets linking to opinion and commentary sites and sections shows a greater level of fluctuation, as usual. The overall lift in links to blogs.news.com.au, courtesy of a lone fan, is plainly evident over the past five weeks, while the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age score some notable wins late in the week.

The Saturday spike for the Sydney Morning Herald is caused by a strongly-worded editorial on the nation’s policy on asylum seekers, which boldly notes that “Australia does not have an asylum-seeker problem; Australia has a political leadership problem.” Syndicated across the Fairfax titles, it is nonetheless the SMH which picks up the majority of the links, with more than 430 tweets referencing the article.

The Thursday spike for The Age is less obvious, driven as it is by a range of stories (of which a good number are related either to the Opposition’s continuing attack on Julia Gillard, or the government’s hardening policy on asylum seekers). No clear frontrunner emerges here, however.

But this, in itself, is a notable story, too: what’s largely absent from ATNIX this week is any indication that Australian Twitter users care about, nor feel compelled to share with others, the column miles which have by now been devoted to the allegations about the PM’s conduct in her previous career. Recent opinion polls seem to provide little indication that other Australians think any differently.

The latest edition of our Australian Twitter News Index arrives in a somewhat more timely fashion than the previous one did. Unfortunately, though, our data are somewhat compromised by the fact that regular scheduled maintenance on our Twitter data servers took place on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week – which means we missed a good chunk of the debate around the Royal Commission into child abuse in institutions, and particularly around Catholic Cardinal George Pell’s press conference about the matter. Very unfortunate, but there’s little we can do about it, I’m afraid.

ATNIX Week 46: 12-18 Nov. 2012

Because the Twitter API makes it easier to backfill missing data on minor than major tracking terms, such outages tend to affect our data on the most widely linked-to Australian news sites more strongly than those on the minor sites. Despite the major stories about the Royal Commission, therefore (which would usually boost the numbers of the leading sites disproportionally), the overall distribution of links across our news sites remains little changed from last week.

Notwithstanding the server outages, we captured some 133,000 tweets linking to these news sites during week 46; that’s down 17,000 from last week, and gives us a rough estimate of the volume of tweets we missed during the outage. With those caveats, the tweets we did capture distribute across the leading sites in a nonetheless familiar pattern:

The comparatively small share of tweets pointing to the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC News is an artefact of our outage; by contrast, the comparatively strong showing of news.com.au this week is genuine, as the persistent hair growth spammer which had plagued our dataset over the past few weeks has finally moved on.

The distribution of tweets across our opinion and commentary sites may also underestimate the marketshare of major sites, and chiefly the SMH. The total number of opinion tweets we captured this week is down slightly from last week, at 18,500, but it is very likely that without the outages we would have captured a substantially larger number of such tweets, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Given these limitations, then, our analysis this week must necessarily focus on the days for which we do have good data – starting with Monday. Here, we see a strong spike in sharing activity for several leading sites (including the SMH, ABC News, and news.com.au), which would most likely have carried through into the following day; by 8 a.m. AEST on Tuesday (before our servers were shut down), at least, Twitter news sharing had already well surpassed the activity levels set that time on the previous day.

While Monday is too early in the evolution of the child abuse crisis to be exclusively dominated by that story, there nonetheless is substantial focus on the issue. Some 270 links to the Sydney Morning Herald reference an article about calls for Cardinal Pell to close the religious order St John of God because of the scandal, while ABC News articles about Tony Abbott’s and Tony Windsor’s support for a Royal Commission receive some 140 and 130 tweets, respectively. A further 200 tweets link to the live stream of ABC News 24, which provided live coverage of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of the Royal Commission. Pieces on Gillard’s consideration of an inquiry, and subsequently on her announcement of the Royal Commission, also serve as the most linked stories at The Australian that day.

The following days’ data are too problematic to examine in any detail; by Friday 16 Nov., however, we can trust our data again, and see another pronounced spike in activity especially for SMH and ABC News. By this time, however, the Royal Commission has already been announced, and even Cardinal Pell’s press conference is no longer at the centre of Twitter discussion. Instead, the SMH spike is driven by the reaction to a tweet by well-known Crikey psephologist blogger Possum Comitatus, which was widely retweeted on the day:

Tony Abbott just said this on Gardasil http://t.co/Sb5SKHcx Meanwhile, the reality was actually this http://t.co/2FXVbk8T

The tweet juxtaposes an SMH article from 2006 (which has then-PM John Howard overruling his Health Minister Tony Abbott about Abbott’s intended delay to the start date of the government’s cervical cancer immunisation programme) with Abbott’s tweet on Friday morning, taking the credit for the immunisation programme. It’s highly unusual to see such a comparatively ancient link trouble our weekly news index – but it demonstrates the potential of social media for fact-checking the statements of politicians. Some 260 of the tweets pointing to the Sydney Morning Herald site on Friday pointed to the 2006 article, turning it into an unlikely lead story by a substantial margin.

The simultaneous spike in ABC News links, on the other hand, continues to focus on its Royal Commission coverage: here, the leading Friday story is a piece about the support which police whistleblower Peter Fox had received on Twitter, following his Lateline interview. This also continues a long-term trend which sees articles with relevant to social media being shared especially widely on social media, of course.

The patterns for opinion sites and sections are less pronounced; the minor spikes on Monday and Friday are due for the most part simply to the server outage-induced lull in between. There is, however, an unusual spike in links to the otherwise fairly underrepresented opinion section of The Australian, and this spike provides a final postscript to the Abbott story: a 2006 opinion piece in The Australian, which describes Abbott as ‘a national dill’ over his opposition to the cervical cancer vaccination programme, was shared by several Twitter users – including prominent blogger Grog’s Gamut and Health Minister Tanya Plibersek – and accounted for some 250 of the 450 tweets referencing The Australian’s opinion section on Friday.

Message to politicians: sometimes Twitter users have very long memories.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

This week’s ATNIX arrives with some delay, due to other work commitments, to the point that it’s almost time already to begin work on ATNIX 46/2012. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in and examine the Twitter link sharing trends for the week that was.

ATNIX Week 45: 5-11 Nov. 2012

Overall news sharing figures for week 45/2012 are essentially unchanged from the previous week: we recorded just under 150,000 tweets which reference our basket of Australian news sites – that’s just 800 more than last week. Those links are distributed across the news sites as follows:

This week, then, the Sydney Morning Herald pulls ahead again of the news sections of the ABC Website, into its accustomed first place – but only just: the difference in the number of tweets referencing either site remains below 2,000. news.com.au also continues its recent ascendance, taking third place – and I’m happy to report that the hair growth spammer which had included news.com.au links in its tweets in order to make them appear more authentic appears to have moved on now; this week, I’ve had to remove only a few hundred such tweets from our dataset, and these were concentrated in the first days of the week. Otherwise, the improvement in news.com.au’s positioning on the leaderboard appears to be genuine, unless those spammers have become a whole lot more sophisticated since ATNIX started.

The sharing of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections, on the other hand, is down somewhat from week 44/2012: at just under 20,000 tweets, we recorded some 2,000 fewer links to such sites being shared this week. The distribution of these links across our sites remains generally stable, however: the order and relative placing of the five leading sites is the same this week as it was last time around. In the minor places, New Matilda and The Punch recorded unusually strong weeks, however – but it must be noted that both remained below 1,000 shares nonetheless.

The comparatively average nature of week 45 becomes obvious also from the daily patterns. As they do so often, ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald shadow each other closely across the week, with a substantial advantage for the SMH only emerging over the weekend; the longer-term growth in news.com.au shares over the past seven weeks, and its rise above The Age, also becomes apparent from this graph.

Monday and Friday stand out as the key news days on Twitter this week; in fact, Friday sees the number of tweets linking to the ABC News and SMH sites surpass the 5,000 mark for the first time in two weeks. Of these, the Monday remained a general news day for the most part: user attention and engagement is distributed across a wide range of articles, even if at the ABC, its Four Corners exposé of inhumane livestock treatment in Pakistan (broadcast on Monday night) and an accompanying news article eventually emerge as frontrunners, with some 350 links in total pointing to both articles.

Friday, by contrast, sees a mixture of two major stories: the first is the federal government’s abandonment of its euphemistically named ‘Cleanfeed’ Internet filter, which is the subject of the Sydney Morning Herald’s two leading stories that cumulatively account for just under 500 tweets (a related story on the ABC News site receives some 180 tweets). But it is the second story which I suspect will remain with us through several further editions of ATNIX: the allegations about a systemic cover-up of sexual abuse in the Australian Catholic church which were aired by NSW police officer turned whistleblower Peter Fox in a Lateline interview on Thursday 9 Nov. and have now led to the establishment of a Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse.

The Lateline interview with Fox itself received more than 100 tweets on the Friday, and a follow-up article on the ABC News site, which outlines the case, leads the day with some 330 links. Several other articles (on the calls for a Royal Commission, and pressure on the Catholic church to release its internal files) add further to the total. At the Sydney Morning Herald, it is this follow-on coverage which is most widely shared: an article on the NSW Premier’s decision to order an inquiry into the sex abuse claims receives some 190 shares, one on the calls for Catholic Cardinal George Pell to quit his post (whose URL now redirects to the article about the inquiry, suggesting that the former is an expanded update of the latter), is shared some 130 times, while a piece on federal shadow treasurer Joe Hockey’s and Employment Minister Bill Shorten’s opposition to a Royal Commission adds another 110 links (the same piece also contains a reader poll which by now indicates a 94% vote in favour of the Commission, incidentally).

Comparatively absent from this picture, on the other hand, is Tuesday’s U.S. Presidential election, which was decided during Wednesday 7 Nov. Australian time. That day, the ABC News live blog from the election receives some 420 tweets, while its interactive election map is shared some 200 times and 190 tweets point to the ABC News 24 livestream – but notably, this activity does not manifest in any tweeting spike in the overall weekly timeline. If Australian users did discuss the election on Twitter, they did so without referring to Australian news sites to any extraordinary degree.

It’s a somewhat different story for the opinion and commentary sites and sections, however: the SMH election live blog (published in the site’s ‘opinion’ section) receives some 160-odd tweets on Wednesday, and is thereby largely responsible for that day’s spike in shares; Thursday’s spike, on the other hand, is driven entirely by the 250 tweets which columnist Paul Sheehan’s strange and somewhat creepy paean to Seven’s Melbourne Cup TV host Francesca Cumani received. (There’s something of a pattern emerging here: several others of Sheehan’s recent articles – especially his response to Julia Gillard’s attack on Tony Abbott for misogyny – have also generated significant puzzlement on Twitter, as we’ve noted before.)

Otherwise, the opinion sharing patterns are more mixed, and distributed across a range of minor stories which do not result in any notable spikes in activity. We may well see ATNIX depart from the holding pattern of the past two weeks as we examine week 46/2012, during which the controversy about sex abuse in church institutions erupts in full, and a Royal Commission is announced.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Last week’s Australian Twitter News Index turned out to be relatively quiet once we filtered out the blatant spam for a hair growth product, which unfairly boosted the number of news.com.au links shared. That spamming campaign still continues – and so I’ve once again filtered out any tweets that link to news.com.au articles and contain mentions of a product whose name rhymes with lame-o.

In principle, week 44/2012 should be interesting enough without the help of such spam: superstorm Sandy slammed into the US east coast on Tuesday Australian time, and this was also the last full week before the US election; both events, as we now know, created all-time spikes in global Twitter activity. That said, there’s always the question of how much such overseas events affect the sharing of news stories published by domestic Australian sources; there’s a strong likelihood that what gets shared the most originates from sources much closer to the scene of the action – in this case, then, especially from US media.

ATNIX Week 44: 29 Oct. – 4 Nov. 2012

First, to the overall figures. The total amount of Australian news links shared on Twitter this week is down by a few thousand links, compared to week 43, but at close to 150,000 tweets remains just above the long-term weekly average. Interestingly, for a second week running, the news-related sections of the ABC site manage to just beat the Sydney Morning Herald into second place, by just over 1,000 tweets; the rest of the leaderboard remains largely static. Even the relative marketshare percentages of the different sites have generally remained the same.

There’s usually more movement amongst opinion and commentary sites and sections, but even here there’s relatively little change this week. Overall, it’s been an average week for sharing Australian opinion articles on Twitter: the 22,000-odd tweets we captured are just above the long-term trend, and down 2,000 from last week.

Here, the most significant shift is the continuing rise of blogs.news.com.au, which surpasses Crikey to move into fourth place. But as with parent site news.com.au’s newfound popularity with spammers, there are some irregularities here: a single very active and highly partisan Twitter account is responsible for just under 1,300 of the 2,400 tweets which linked to blogs.news.com.au content; without its help, the site would be placed below The Australian’s opinion section.

I’ve refrained from excluding these tweets (and indeed from naming the account), because here we’re not dealing with a case of outright spam – as we did with the hair growth promotion – but a genuine, if hyper-active, form of engagement with the site. While the obsessive promotion of blogs.news.com.au articles which this account engages in might well be spamlike in style, it’s an attempt to make a political point (which, incidentally, is highly critical of the Labor government).

Of the blogs.news.com.au writers, the blogger most popular with this account is Andrew Bolt; almost 150 of Bolt’s articles are promoted in this way (one of them, in fact, is the subject of no fewer than 31 separate tweets). Piers Akerman (14 stories), Miranda Devine (12), Tim Blair (5) and Simon Benson (4) receive considerably less love. Let it never be said that the political commentariat in Australia doesn’t have some very committed fans!

To the daily trends, then – and on the news front, things look comparatively quiet, with no notable spikes:

In fact, it’s only in the weekly aggregate that the key stories emerge. ABC News’ gallery of before-and-after photos from Sandy received some 1,150 links over the course of the week, and a link to the online livestream of ABC News 24 was shared some 400 times – indicating the significant concerns about the impact of the storm on the eastern seaboard, and the key role of the ABC as the go-to station for the liver coverage of major breaking news events. Further ABC stories relating to Sandy also featured highly. Over the same period, the major story in the Sydney Morning Herald was about revelations of hazing at Sydney University’s St. John’s College, shared more than 650 times; by contrast, Sandy figures only as a minor story.

What we’re seeing here, it seems to me, is an indication of the fact that in spite of their use of the Internet as a common medium for news dissemination, real differences in their approaches to reporting, and in the public perception of their journalistic focus, still persist between ABC and SMH – when live news breaks, its the public broadcaster that audiences turn to; when social and political scandals are revealed, it’s the newspaper.

The corresponding graph for the opinion and commentary sites and sections shows the impact of blogs.news.com.au’s newly-acquired fanboy: the orange line has lifted considerably from its long-term average:

There’s much less to say about the other sites. The Conversation has a strong day on Monday, but its close to 650 incoming links are shared across a range of stories of which none receive more than 80 tweets; what we’re seeing here is simply the usual ‘Monday effect’ which routinely causes an especially strong level of news sharing at the start of the week. The Age emerges in a strong position on Friday, led largely by a piece by Waleed Aly who questions the federal government’s plans to excise the entire Australian mainland from the migration zone which received some 350 tweets. On the weekend, finally, it’s the Sydney Morning Herald whose commentary is most widely shared – but here, too, Twitter-based audience engagement is spread widely across a broad range of stories. As far as opinion is concerned, this has been a very quiet week.

Stand by for this to change quite substantially as we move into week 45, though. No doubt the US election will generate plenty of local interest, and commentary, as well.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

This article, authored by Jean Burgess, Farida Vis, and Axel Bruns, first appeared in The Guardian’s “Data Blog”, and is reproduced here by kind permission.

Crisis events today (from wars and uprisings to natural disasters) are highly mediated – it is through iconic images that we experience and remember them. With the development of social media, such events have seen the production and sharing of vast amounts of user-generated content, including photographs and videos.

Images snapped and shared by ordinary people on their mobile phones can form part of the official information stream, be picked up by the mainstream media, or simply serve to document personal experience. In fact, our team’s research on Twitter use during the 2011 Queensland Floods showed that images and videos were shared more than any other category of content – including official emergency information and mainstream news reports.

Hurricane Sandy was no different, except perhaps for the controversies surrounding the circulation of fake or photoshopped storm images, an issue widely covered in the media, as social media users raced to question and debunk the fakes. Storyful editor Fiona McCann highlighted how to spot a fake, advising Google image searches, the use of TinEye, and to take care when retweeting.

Katie Rogers asked readers to use the #fakesandy hashtag to help to weed out and alert people to the fakes. The following days produced similar pieces exposing fakes (Snopes), asked if people had shared such images (Forbes), and considered the potentially serious implications of them circulating at such critical times (NYT). Popular images included a mix of photoshopped fakes, screen grabs from Hollywood movies (like the epic NYC disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow) has well as real images, albeit not taken during Sandy (examples include a shot of a darkened Manhattan skyline with a storm approaching, soldiers standing steadfastly to their duties in the pouring rain at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier).

Tom Phillips’s Tumblr Is Twitter Wrong? did considerable online forensic work to identify fakes, as did Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, work which was also supported by Phillips.

Curious to see how these compared to a wider selection of images shared during the peak of media interest in the storm, we took a closer look at the Twitter data. During the four-hour window between 18:00 and 22:00 US East Coast time on 29 October, we collected just under 250,000 tweets containing the #sandy hashtag using the Twitter API.

This period covers the two hours before and after the hurricane made landfall on the East Coast of the United States. Although this is a narrow window, it is likely to be a peak time frame for both the global media covering the storm and Twitter activity. Although Twitter is also used for the local coordination of direct emergency response, in these peak periods it is working just as much as a channel for a global media audience – many of whom will be geographically and in some ways emotionally removed from the event, however temporarily engaged they may be.

Looking at the top 50 most tweeted images, we can see that these are tweeted 19,447 times in total during this four-hour window, coming from 39 different users (including celebrity accounts attributed to Josh Groban, Diane Sawyer and other well-known journalists). You can see a selection of the top tweeted images in The Guardian’s gallery.

The top two most tweeted images are both from accounts now closed down: @SandysHurricane and @sandyhuricane_. A quick search for these accounts (using TOPSY) shows that @SandysHurricane was a fake account (bio: ‘Destroying the East Coast’), tweeting in character as the storm herself, expressed in full CAPSLOCK glory. @SandysHurricane seems to have been the more successful of these two, according to TOPSY analytics: at its peak it received 11,374 replies on 29 October (at 9:54pm), before dropping to 17 replies on 3 November (at 9:55pm) and then disappearing altogether. Due to complaints?

Nine different unique images were questioned in this top 50 (using Tom Phillips’s and Alexis Madrigal’s work as a guideline). This included an image of the Brooklyn Park submerged with a close-up of the carousel; images of lower Manhattan submerged, the partial building collapse in Manhattan; an image of a backyard trampoline caught in a set of overhead wires; water rushing into Hoboken PATH station; and water pouring into that most iconic of New York disaster locations, the Ground Zero construction site. Posted at several different URLs, though, was the now-notorious image of a shark supposedly swimming in a front yard in Brigantine, New Jersey; and another shark apparently swimming happily along a submerged highway.

Of the 19,447 tweets containing the top 50 images, 8,327 tweets contained images that were questioned (43%), but of these only two (2,854 tweets) were exposed as fakes. We note that the closed down fake Sandy accounts were most likely also spreading fake images at the time.

So: no sharks in New Jersey front yards after all, folks – but most of the other frequently-tweeted images were either legit or not even trying to look real. In fact, in the top 50 we did not find any of the other popular fakes that had been discussed and debunked in the news media. There were, however a range of other images that were clearly humorous fakes and needed no questioning, including various well-known characters from popular culture, such as Sandy from Spongebob squarepants, shown in the middle of NYC; or the Statue of Liberty hiding behind her own platform.

Of the images that were not questioned, these were often of a darkened Manhattan skyline, including well-known New York visual markers, such as the Empire State building and the NYPD. This highlights the fact that almost all images in this top 50 were of New York City, mainly Manhattan, thus reproducing mainstream news values by preferring highly iconic, even stereotypical visual representations of place, rather than other locations and victims of the hurricane.

It’s important to remember here at that we have only looked at the very ‘fat head’ of an extremely long tail of shared images; and we have only looked at a snapshot in time during which the vast majority of Twitter activity would have come from a peripherally engaged global audience, rather than from affected residents. In further analysis, it will be interesting to see how widely circulated these fake images were overall. Our next task will be to examine a much larger sample of less frequently tweeted images and see how the patterns compare.

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns work in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, based at Queensland University of Technology. They research the uses of social media like Twitter for public communication, including in times of crisis. See the Mapping Online Publics project Website for further details. Farida Vis is a Research Fellow at the InformationSchool at the University of Sheffield, working in the area of social media and crisis communication, and worked on The Guardian’s Reading the Riots.

Before we get to the core of this week’s Australian Twitter News Index, a small excursion into the grubbier regions of the Twittersphere is necessary, I’m afraid. Every week, we track all the tweets which contain URLs that point to our basket of some 29 Australian news and commentary sites, and for the most part, the attention paid to those sites by their Twitter audiences is relatively stable. You can imagine my surprise when this week, I found a massive spike in links to news.com.au, therefore:

A few ups and downs in the total weekly number of links pointing to any one site are normal. Even substantial jumps aren’t out of the question if there are major events generating widespread coverage, as we saw with the significant number of international users linking to the ABC’s video of Julia Gillard’s anti-misogyny speech in week 41. But 27,000 tweets linking to news.com.au in one week – double the site’s long-term average – at a time when none of the other sites are similarly picking up substantial extra tweets? Something’s not right here.

And indeed: as it turns out, some 14,000 of the tweets we captured for news.com.au this week (exactly the margin by which the site surpassed its usual average) contain the hashtag #leimo, and often also additional links to the hair regrowth product www.leimo.com. What we’re seeing here – and I stress that I’m not suggesting that the company itself initiated this – is an organised Twitter spamming campaign to get the #leimo hashtag trending. The spammers do so by hijacking genuine news tweets: they pick out random stories, in this case from news.com.au, and tweet their headlines and URLs, but additionally also include their own hashtags and URLs; further, they draw on a whole network of fake accounts to widely retweet those news tweets. News.com.au wouldn’t have known what happened, and couldn’t have stopped it, either.

The ultimate aim of the exercise is to get the #leimo hashtag into Twitter’s list of trending topics. By using a variety of news headlines, the spammers hope to fool Twitter’s spam detection mechanisms, such as they are – the headlines and news URLs are real, after all, so the spam tweets may look real enough to get past the detection algorithms. It’s only when we compare the sudden spike in news.com.au activity with the site’s long-term average that those numbers begin to look as fake as a retired cricketer’s haircut. Lame-o…

In the following discussion of this week’s Australian news trends on Twitter, therefore, I’ve removed any tweets containing the term or hashtag ‘Leimo’ from the news.com.au dataset.

ATNIX Week 43: 22-28 Oct. 2012

Despammed, this week’s ATNIX numbers are roughly comparable to week 42: we captured some 153,000 tweets containing links to Australian news sites this week, down 9,000 from last week. Unusually, though, the news-related sections of the ABC site just manage to beat the Sydney Morning Herald to first place; they may well have been helped in this by the temporary site outage due to an electrical fault which affected Fairfax sites this week. The rest of the leaderboard is virtually identical to last week’s:

The corresponding patterns for our opinion and commentary sites and sections are also relatively stable. At 24,000 tweets linking to these sites, we’re down a modest 2,000 from the previous week, and the top five sites retain their positions. Interestingly, the recently redesigned Global Mail has moved slightly backwards once again; this may indicate that the audience honeymoon with the new look is coming to an end. We’ll see how things track from here.

As always, though, the day-by-day patterns point us more specifically to the key stories of the week. For both ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald, week 43 was a relatively uneventful one, with news sharing patterns showing the usual strength on weekdays and decline during the weekend. The minor ABC spike on Wednesday which shows up in our daily news patterns is actually due to the 470 tweets about an article by Annabel Crabb at The Drum, on what she describes as Tony Abbott’s “foot-in-mouth problem”, which would be better counted towards the opinion numbers – but due to the ABC Website’s somewhat inconsistent URL scheme, Drum articles by its own staff will always show up here.

Meanwhile, the Friday bump for The Age is largely due to a piece by former professional cyclist Bradley McGee, writing about his reaction to the Lance Armstrong scandal. It’s quite likely that this article would also have picked up a number of international readers as part of the 700-odd tweets which linked to it.

The daily trends for links to opinion and commentary articles show a much more mixed picture, as they do so often. The Conversation starts us off with a strong Monday performance, but for no real reason – links to the site are distributed across a wide range of stories, led by some 100 tweets linking to the live stream of the symposium on the future of higher education. But it’s the Sydney Morning Herald which dominates the later parts of the week – leading especially with its republication of a piece by TV news anchor Tracey Spicer which first appeared in The Hoopla, in which she details the sexist treatment of female presenters in the news industry. Clearly, the public furore might have dissipated somewhat, but the Australian debate about sexism and misogyny still has some way to run – at the SMH, Spicer’s article picked up some 570 tweets, while a version of the same piece on the Age Website added 640 tweets.

Finally, there’s also been a notable growth in the number of tweets which link to blogs.news.com.au (the site which hosts the columns of a number of well-known commentators in the News Ltd. stable, including Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, and Tim Blair). Interestingly, though, much of that increase has been due to a single user, who has been sharing the posts published in these and other News Ltd. blogs with great dedication, usually under the #auspol hashtag and in a tone that is sharply critical of the Gillard government: some 720 of blogs.news.com.au’s total of 2200 links this week were from tweets made from a single account (and no, I won’t name the account here).

Which almost brings us back to where we started – the basic principles and practices are more or less the same, but when is high-volume, one-track tweeting a form of legitimate political expression, and when is it simply spam?

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Much has been said about the national and global response to Julia Gillard’s extraordinary attack on Tony Abbott, which dominated the Australian Twitter News Index for week 41/2012 – but sooner or later, we had to return to the day-to-day business of ‘normal’ news. That time is now – so let’s see what made news on Twitter this week.

ATNIX Week 42: 15-21 Oct. 2012

To begin with, while week 42 wasn’t dominated by any single story in the way previous weeks had been (before the Abbott/Gillard stoush, we also had the Alan Jones saga, after all), it nonetheless registered as the week with the greatest overall number of links to Australian news sites being tweeted – at 162,000, week 42 narrowly surpassed the previous record set in week 33. Coming off a respectable 145,000 tweets last week, this reverses the pronounced slump in link sharing which we saw during weeks 36 to 40, when numbers dropped to less than 110,000.

It’s also obvious that the ABC Website’s news section had a particularly strong week: at more than 30,000 tweeted links, it came within a few hundred tweets of surpassing the Sydney Morning Herald in audience attention for a second week running – but this time, without benefitting from the added boost of thousands of tweets linking to its full-length posting of the Gillard speech. The rest of the leaderboard remains relatively steady.

There’s more movement amongst the opinion and commentary sites and sections, however. The total number of such links being shared on Twitter is down to 26,000 from last week’s record of over 29,000, unsurprisingly – but even this is still the second best result for this category since we started ATNIX in week 25/2012. Week 42 sees the Sydney Morning Herald continue to dominate opinion shares, while Fairfax stablemate The Age advances to second position. In sixth, The Australian also has an unusually strong week, while The Global Mail continues its post-redesign honeymoon. For the second week in a row, more than 1,000 tweets linked to the site – the weekly average before the site design was revised was less than 500.

A look at the weekly news sharing patterns reveals that we’re largely back to business as usual this week: ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald are neck-and-neck, at least on weekdays, and while the overall volume of tweets is unusually high, there are no particularly pronounced spikes in activity on any one day:

An exploratory look at the sharing patterns for the ABC site demonstrates this: attention is split across a range of stories, with no particular frontrunner. On Monday, a Four Corners story about Lance Armstrong leads the way with 300 tweets; on Tuesday, that piece adds 500 more. But even such numbers account for only a small part of the total of over 5,000 tweets which linked to ABC news content on each of these days.

Wednesday sees more than 300 links to a report that the Macquarie Dictionary will revise its definition of ‘misogyny’ following the Gillard speech; on Thursday, the leading story is that Alan Jones will be made to take basic journalism training (but even that piece gets less than 200 tweets); on Friday, Australia’s win of a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council leads with over 300 tweets. I highlight these numbers only to show how thoroughly mixed and unexceptional week 42 turned out to be – but perhaps it’s precisely this ‘something for everyone’ nature which resulted in such a high level of audience engagement?

There’s slightly more to be said about the sharing of opinion and commentary articles: here, as on many weeks, we do see a much more pronounced fluctuation in attention to specific sites. And once again, some of these spikes are driven by the overseas take-up of domestic stories: the SMH opinion section’s strong performance during 17 and 18 October is due to over 520 links to a piece which reveals how Australia and the US shared intelligence on Julian Assange.

The more purely domestic story about Jones’s remedial journalism training gains another 230 tweets for the site, while political editor Michelle Grattan’s article about how the Prime Minister lost her shoe during a visit to India was cited in 170 tweets linking to the Sydney Morning Herald, and in as many tweets which linked to the same piece at The Age – quite a few of which, it has to be said, questioned the wisdom of having a seasoned political journalist report about footwear malfunctions.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

This week’s ATNIX was always going to be centrally about one thing: Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s extraordinary, sustained, and (it seems?) largely unscripted attack of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s misogynistic worldviews (as she describes them).

The fact that, as I write this from a Copenhagen hotel room, the 15-minute video of what can only be described in modern language as her pwning of Abbott is listed as the second most prominent video even on the Danish version of YouTube speaks volumes about the extent to which footage of the speech has gone viral throughout the world. As has been reported, even supporters of President Obama in the US are now imploring him to take the fight to Mitt Romney in the next election debate with the unrelenting ferocity that Gillard had shown in her speech.

So, let us turn to our Australian Twitter News Index to see just how much domestic and international traction articles related to the speech have received – and to examine whether any other stories managed to cut through the noise.

ATNIX Week 41: 8-14 Oct. 2012

First off: with the video and related stories going viral, this was one of the bigger weeks for ATNIX to date. With some 145,000 tweets linking to Australian news sites, the volume of shared news links jumped by more than 30,000 since last week – and as is often the case, we can assume that a significant proportion of these will have been shared by international users. The result is extraordinary: for the first time in seven weeks, links to the ABC Website’s news sections managed to outnumber those to the Sydney Morning Herald – and for the first time since we’ve been running ATNIX, they do so by several thousand tweets.

Opinion links are also up, and by almost 50% compared to last week – as a result, the more than 29,000 tweets which linked to Australian opinion and commentary sites and sections constitute an all-time record for ATNIX, well above the record of 24,000 such tweets which we set in week 34. Here, the SMH retains its dominant position, although the ABC’s The Drum (at abc.net.au/unleashed) puts in a particularly strong performance as well.

The real surprise here, however, is non-profit long-form journalism site The Global Mail: for as long as we’ve been running tracking ATNIX, the site had been languishing in the very minor placings – largely as a result of its stylish but badly overwrought design. Last week, only some 300 tweets shared links to the site, for example – but following a comprehensive redesign for better accessibility, that number has increased by a factor of more than five: more than 1,550 tweets linked to The Global Mail during week 41/2012. It remains to be seen, of course, whether this is will be more than a blip in the site’s otherwise dismal ratings as prospective users express their relief at the redesign – but GM staff should feel cautiously encouraged by this result.

But the real story of ATNIX for week 41/2012 is in the daily numbers, of course – and the star performer (next to Gillard herself) is ABC News. On two consecutive days, it receives a record level of more than 8,000 links from tweets – and the main target of these links, included in some 6,300 tweets over the course of 9 and 10 October, is the full, 15-minute video of Gillard’s attack on Abbott. Other stories pale by comparison: at some 600 links, the next highest ranked story during those two days receives less than ten per cent of the Gillard video – but all but two of the top ten ABC links during these two days deal with Gillard and/or Abbott. The only exception are two stories relating to a 7.30 piece on self-immolation as a form of political protest in Tibet.

We should note that the carryover of such heightened levels of activity into a second day is very rare – and in this case clearly indicates the global virality of the story: as Twitter users in other timezones continued to share the video, its popularity (and the incidence of links to the ABC site) continued through a whole 24-hour news cycle. In fact, while only adding a little less than 400 more tweets to its tally, the video remained the most tweeted item on the ABC News site even on 11 October.

But while the ABC clearly wins the news race – with a simple post which does no more than present the Gillard video itself, incidentally –, amongst the opinion and commentary sites and sections the week is more of a free-for-all. Most of the leading sites squeeze in a sizeable spike or two, but it’s the Sydney Morning Herald which leads the pack and records its second best one-day performance in the time we’ve run ATNIX.

Indeed, the SMH spikes work well as a documentation of the rapid pivot in the Australian misogyny debate, from Alan Jones to Tony Abbott: while on Monday, Mike Carlton’s “Prissy Shrieks of Fear and Loathing”, a portrait of Jones, adds to its performance from the previous Saturday by picking up another 350-odd links, by Wednesday Jones is ancient history, and the Gillard/Abbott stoush is front an centre.

Columnist Paul Sheehan’s rather oddly written piece which criticises Gillard for playing the ‘gender card’ leads the day, receiving some 700 tweets; a second article, by political editor Peter Hartcher, takes the same line, and picks up some 300 more links. Many of them, it’s worth noting, are far from supportive, so tweeting about them cannot be seen as endorsement – indeed, many readers took issue especially with a line in Sheehan’s piece which pointed out that Abbott had “raised three daughters, something [Gillard] was unable to do” which was subsequently excised from the article.

By Saturday, though, the wind had turned even at the SMH, and author Julia Baird provides a counterpoint to the senior editors’ attempts at ‘mansplaining’ away Gillard’s attack: her spirited defence of the speech is linked to by close to 600 tweets that day.

The discussion in the Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion pieces is emblematic of a wider debate which would quickly become the second(ary) story of the week: the Canberra press gallery’s almost unanimously negative reaction to Gillard’s speech, which appeared well out of step with the highly positive reviews which it received in media coverage around the world, and from many everyday Australians.

What also appears to emerge here, as the SMH coverage itself already hints at, is a substantial disconnect especially between many senior Australian editors and journalists on the one side, and more junior, often independent, opinion writers on the other. If charges of ‘groupthink’ are to be levelled at the press gallery in the future, their coverage of this week’s events are likely to take pride of place as Exhibit A from now on.

And the criticism has been widespread. Much as Baird’s article in Saturday’s SMH provides a counterpoint to the prevailing post-speech media narrative, so is the Wednesday spike for the ABC’s The Drum section driven by journalist Anne Summers’s positive response to Gillard’s speech (some 720 links), and by independent columnist Tim Dunlop’s critique of the Australian news media’s coverage of both the Jones/Gillard and the Gillard/Abbott debate (some 610 links). Author Susan Mitchell adds her views on Crikey, driving its spike on the same day by drawing some 220 tweets which linked to her article.

Something tells me this debate isn’t over yet. What’s next?

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

As I write this, the controversy over Alan Jones’s indefensible remarks about the Prime Minister’s late father continues – fuelled by Jones’s belligerent apology, the withdrawal of advertisers from Jones’s show, and radio station 2GB’s embarrassing attempts to portray Jones and itself as the victims of cyberbullying, or even of cyberterrorism. News of Jones’s remarks at a Sydney University Liberals fundraiser broke during the final days of September, and made an impact only on the final days of last week’s Australian Twitter News Index – this week’s edition is where we’d expect to see any real activity related to the issue, if we are to see any at all.

ATNIX Week 40: 1-7 Oct. 2012

The first observation we must make for the new week, though, is that Alan Jones is no Julian Assange: however much outrage his comments may have prompted in Australia, they remain a purely domestic issue. The total number of tweets containing links to the Australian news sites we track, therefore, is down, not up: as last week’s Assange bump washes out of the system, some 112,000 tweets remain, and the day-to-day news sharing patterns on Twitter return to comparative normality.

So do the lead sites, for the most part: the Sydney Morning Herald and the news sections of the ABC maintain their usual share of the total volume of links exchanged this week, and only news.com.au moves into an unusually strong third place ahead of The Age. All of this points to the observation that political controversies such as Jones’s comments may shift the focus of the links which Australian Twitter users are sharing – but they do not necessarily increase the overall volume of links being shared in this way. We don’t consume more information: what changes is which information we consume.

As a result, we will always see greater fluctuations in the volume and distribution of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections. During weeks without major controversies, the relative prominence of such articles within the total volume of links being tweeted will be smaller; at times when major points of contention are being discussed by Australian Twitter users, on the other hand, a greater number of links to further commentary will be shared.

So, even in spite of the comparatively lower volume of news links being shared this week (in the absence of new Assange articles or other material of international interest), the number of commentary links managed to increase slightly, to a six-week high of just over 20,000 – and as usual, it’s the SMH opinion section and The Conversation which command the majority of the attention (at a combined total of just under 50%). Crikey has a good week as well, moving into third place for now.

Given these patterns, there isn’t a great deal to say about the day-to-day sharing of news links: it’s a relatively quiet week on the news front, with the ABC’s strong Tuesday performance led by articles on the dire state of Barrier Reef corals (some 200 tweets) and John Laws’s critical assessment of Jones’s comments (175 tweets). The relatively small contribution which even these leading articles make to ABC News’ Tuesday total of just over 4000 tweeted links already points to the comparatively wide spread of what news articles Australian Twitter users shared this week, however.

The spike in links to news.com.au, also on Tuesday, is somewhat more interesting by comparison, mainly because the most tweeted link to the site (some 150 tweets) points to a photo of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop, and Sophie Mirabella in front of a poster reading “Juliar…. Bob Brown’s Bitch” – pointing out that incivility in the political arena has been far from limited to Alan Jones in recent years.

But the real story, once again, is in opinion and commentary, and takes some time to materialise. Ignore the Assange-related mid-week spike in week 39: as far as domestic issues are concerned, it’s once again the weekend which sees the most significant sharing of opinion and commentary links by Australian Twitter users. It may be an exaggeration to say quite categorically that weekdays are for news, and weekends for opinion – but the Jones story, at least, has been one centred on weekends so far. (The one exception from that rule, for week 40, is Crikey, where First Dog on the Moon’s cartoon about Jones’s apology was responsible for one third of the tweets which pointed to the site on Monday.)

Central to that story, once again, is the Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion section: Mike Carlton’s inimitably titled portrait of Jones, “Prissy Shrieks of Fear and Loathing”, received some 920 tweets that day, accounting for well over half of all tweets linking to the SMH opinion section. For The Conversation, the balance of tweets is even more lopsided – but here, they point to an article which relates to the Jones saga, if at all, only in a very roundabout fashion: Patrick Stokes’s article “No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion” accounted for some 1,120 of the 1,300 tweets which linked to the site that Saturday.

So, while much will continue to be made of the social media response to Jones’s comments, to his half-hearted apology, and to his employer’s glass-jawed “cyberbullying” complaints (which serve only to undermine the important campaign against actual cyberbullying), it turns out that these debates affect the ongoing process of news sharing on Twitter only to a limited extent. The Jones controversy manifests mainly in the opinion articles which are being shared, and even there the focus is squarely on a handful of key pieces; at the same time, other news is still getting through as well.

Australian Twitter users aren’t quite as rabidly obsessed with Jones as 2GB might like to imagine (because that, at least, would mean he’s still relevant to Australian political discourse) – most of us, I suspect, just wish he’d finally finish digging that hole for himself.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Those of us who follow the Australian media don’t need ATNIX to tell us that it’s been an eventful week, driven towards the end especially by the coverage of Alan Jones’s indefensible comments about the Prime Minister’s late father. But what our Australian Twitter News Index can do is to provide us with quantitative evidence of how that story compares with other recent controversies, and to document which news and opinion Websites have gained the most from covering these events.

ATNIX Week 39: 24-30 Sep. 2012

Given the substantial amount of dismay and anger expressed in response to Jones’s comments – not least on Twitter – and the extensive media debate which followed, the distribution of links to the major news sites this week looks almost unexpectedly normal. The top-ranked sites are in their usual positions, though the ABC is putting in a particularly good showing this week – its 19% share of tweeted links is up from 16% last week. It’s not until place nine that we see any change to the status quo, in fact: here, the Australian Financial Review is in an unusually strong position, with nearly 3,400 tweets referencing its articles; that’s over 50% more links to the site than last week. What is notable overall, though, is a significant increase in the total number of links to Australian news sites which were tweeted this week – with about 125,000 tweets, we’re still a fair way from the levels we recorded earlier in the year, but we’re clearly up from the lacklustre levels of the past fortnight.

As is so often the case, though, it’s the tweeting of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections where the most significant changes are evident. Week 39/2012 marks an all-time record for the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section, which clearly cements its position as the go-to section for political commentary in Australia; a stunning 36% of the 19,000 links to opinion and commentary sites and sections which were tweeted this past week pointed to material on the SMH. For the most part, this result does not reflect a weakening of the other sites, though: The Conversation also increased its total number of incoming links, for example, and the ABC’s The Drum (or the articles at abc.net.au/unleashed) manages to reverse its slow decline, moving back into fifth place from tenth position in week 38. Rather, then, the fact is that the total number of opinion links has increased this week, and the SMH opinion section has captured a disproportionate share of those additional links.

The daily patterns bear this out. For the news sites, we see that the week started out much like previous ones did – but then there’s a sharp spike on Thursday 27 Sep. Notably, all the major news sites shown in the graph below benefit from this increase in activity at least to some extent – but proportional to their long-term prominence as news sources for the Australian Twittersphere, it is the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News, and The Age which spike most strongly.

But wait: news about Jones’s remarks about the PM’s father broke later in the week – so something else must be driving the Thursday spike. Indeed, it’s Julian Assange, not Alan Jones, who is responsible for the substantial spike in Sydney Morning Herald links: a National Times-cobranded report on declassified US documents which describe Assange as an “enemy of the state” received some 3,000 tweets. Once again, it’s the distribution of a domestic story to a global audience, with the help of the well-organised international network of WikiLeaks supporters, which takes SMH links to a higher plane.

The simultaneous spike in activity around ABC News is less clearly driven by any one story. Three articles relating to the disappearance and murder of Jill Meagher account for some 500 tweets; stories about the mistreatment of sheep exported from Australia to Pakistan, and to the dramatic disappearance of Arctic sea ice, add another 300 tweets. In turn, the sharing of stories on Jill Meagher (650 tweets) and Julian Assange (300 tweets) also explains the spike at The Age. Spikes in the minor Australian news sites are also likely to relate especially to news of an arrest in the Meagher case.

Meanwhile, the Australian Financial Review (not pictured here) follows a different pattern, with spikes on 25 and 27 September. The first of these relates mainly to a (non-paywalled) story about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who has declared that he likes the NBN so much that he wishes to become an Australian citizen (some 430 tweets that day, with more on following days); the second relates largely to a piece by former Labor leader Mark Latham which criticises The Australian’s double standards as it reports on Gillard and Abbott (some 250 tweets). Small numbers by comparison, perhaps – but significant for a niche publication which normally fails to generate much excitement on Twitter.

But what of Alan Jones, then – did the major controversy over his remarks, which clearly also resulted in a substantial level of debate and anger in Australian social media spaces (witness the successful campaigns on Twitter and Facebook to encourage companies to pull their advertising from Jones’s show), find no echo in the volume of links shared? In short: yes, it did – but less so than the other major stories of the week.

The timing of the Jones controversy must also be considered here. The story broke late on Saturday 29 September – and we already know from our longer-term observations that weekends are traditionally slow days for news sharing on Twitter; we may expect to see more activity on this story in next week’s ATNIX, therefore. The gradual build-up of outrage over Jones’s comments is already evident on the Sunday of week 39, however, and becomes most visible if we single out links to opinion and commentary sites and sections in Australia:

While the Sydney Morning Herald opinion spike on 27 Sep. is entirely the result of the 3,000 tweets to a National Times-cobadged article about Julian Assange (and marks by far the most significant case of a story going viral which we’ve observed since ATNIX started in mid-year), there’s another unusual rise in tweeting activity for the SMH and The Age on the final day of the week.

Of the SMH tweets, some 600 link to a piece by sports columnist Peter FitzSimons which draws the connection between Alan Jones and Tony Abbott, while another 200 share a National Times-cobadged article which reports the details of Jones’s speech. The same articles also account for the lion’s share of links to the opinion section of The Age, but here a third article by political editor Michelle Grattan, suggesting that Jones’s statements are “low-rent comments a decent man would not make”, adds another 70-odd links.

Remember that this is only Sunday, though. As the graph above shows, the spike in opinion links to the SMH that day already surpasses the number of tweets which we’ve recorded for almost any other controversy since ATNIX started, except for global issues such as Assange and WikiLeaks. I’d be willing to bet that the following Monday will see yet greater levels of Twitter activity and outrage surrounding this story – especially as discussion of Jones’s belligerent apology and calls for an advertiser boycott of his show and station build up. But for that, we’ll have to wait another week, until ATNIX 40/2012.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

The last couple of weeks of our Australian Twitter News Index have been somewhat underwhelming: overall levels of news sharing on Twitter have been comparatively low, even in spite of a small blip at the tail end of week 37 which was caused by the reporting and commentary which covered the Sydney riots around the Innocence of Muslims film. In terms of total activity, week 38 picks up a little, but still fails to move past the long-term average – and that’s in spite of some notable spikes in the sharing of opinion articles from leading news sites.

ATNIX Week 38: 17-23 Sep. 2012

Overall numbers for this week provide a poor point of comparison, as – due to scheduled server maintenance – most of Friday 21 Sep. is missing from this week’s dataset. Given that this incomplete dataset contains some 108,000 tweets linking to Australian news Websites, and that we would usually expect to see at least another 15,000 such tweets on a Friday, though, we can assume that the total volume for this week would be somewhere upwards of 120,000 tweets – which would be at least a small improvement on the preceding week’s 115,000 tweets linking to news sites. Here’s how they are distributed across the sites we track: the main mover in the leading group is The Age, which surpasses news.com.au by some margin this week, after a virtually dead heat last time around.

The situation for the opinion and commentary sites and sections is particularly interesting this week, as the day-to-day patterns below will also demonstrate. First, the total number of tweets linking to such sites has actually declined a little (from around 17,600 to 16,700), while the Fairfax sites have substantially increased their dominance: the Sydney Morning Herald maintains a remarkable 26% share of all Australian opinion links shared this week (unchanged from the similarly unusual result last week), but The Age now joins it by adding another 17%. This once again pushes it past the long-term runner-up The Conversation, which received roughly the same amount of links as last week, but was clearly outperformed by the substantial spike in The Age shares. There is further shuffling of positions on the minor places (the ABC’s The Drum loses another place, continuing its decline of the past few weeks), but these represent fairly small numbers in the first place.

These patterns are further illustrated by the day-to-day comparisons (ignore the drop in numbers on 21 Sep. due to server maintenance, obviously). Links to the news sites remain below the long-term average, but are generally improved from the previous week; this is especially notable for The Age (in green), which is now well above news.com.au’s purple line. At the same time, there are no obvious spikes in activity – as weeks go, this is a sedate one.

That’s not the case for the opinion and commentary sites and sections, on the other hand: here, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and both spiking on 17 and 19 September, and even Fairfax’s online-only Brisbane newspaper site Brisbane Times gets a minor spike (by its admittedly modest standards) on 18 September:

For the Sydney Morning Herald, the new week continues a trend which the preceding Sunday’s comparatively more minor spike around a piece by sports commentator Peter FitzSimons about the Sydney riots already foreshadowed: a substantial amount of tweets sharing links to commentary about the Innocence of Muslims film and its aftermath. On the Monday, it’s a more considered argument by Waleed Aly which is shared in more than 700 times.

By Wednesday, however, attention is split between this issue and a new political controversy: while another opinion piece on the Sydney protests, by Mohamad Tabbaa, gains some 140 additional shares, the majority of the 19 Sep. spike is driven by opinion articles which discuss the parliamentary debate about same-sex marriage. National Times-cobadged articles about Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi’s hysterical fear campaign and his subsequent resignation as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s personal parliamentary secretary are shared in some 260 tweets, while pieces about NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell’s intention to allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage in state parliament and Finance Minister Penny Wong’s fight for the recognition of same-sex relationships each added another 100 tweets.

Similar patterns apply at The Age. Waleed Aly’s piece was published here as well, and receives some 375 tweets on Monday, and a (pre-bestiality) Cory Bernardi also enters this debate, if only as a sideline. At the same time, a piece about the erosion of Australian Internet users’ privacy rights through the government’s proposed data retention laws also receives some 150 tweets. Wednesday, on the other hand, is all about Cory Bernardi: articles discussing his contributions to the same-sex marriage debate account for more than half of all Age links shared on Twitter that day.

By contrast, the smaller spike in Brisbane Time_s links on the Tuesday is purely about state matters, incidentally: some 165 tweets linked to a piece by author John Birmingham on what’s wrong with Queensland Premier Campbell Newman. This makes sense in the overall context of the Fairfax setup, with SMH and Age as the national flagships, and the Brisbane Times as a secondary, local platform which syndicates much of its national coverage from those newspapers – so Fairfax readers who are interested in following the national coverage should be expected to be more likely to link to those sites in their tweets than to the Brisbane Times_.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Here we are again with the latest weekly instalment of the Australian Twitter News Index. As it turns out, this week is yet another quiet one – so much so that I’m starting to wonder whether there’s some kind of underlying trend here. Is it the approaching footy finals season? Spring holidays? Or a general news fatigue this deep into the year? Whatever the reason, with only 115,000 tweets linking to Australian news sites, we’ve reached a new low, down substantially again from last week’s already rather paltry 128,000 tweets.

Strangely, it’s been ABC News which has taken an especially big hit this week. The Sydney Morning Herald retained its position (in fact, it received a few hundred more links than last week) – but the ABC’s share of Twitter links declined by more than 5,000 tweets, which strikes me as very odd. Such troughs are difficult to explain: for spikes in activity, it’s usually easy to identify the stories which caused them, but – assuming the ABC didn’t publish a substantially smaller number of news stories than usual last week – what causes the Twitter userbase to just stop linking to a given site? Very curious.

Otherwise, the ranking and relative distribution of Twitter links across the major Australian news sites has remained more or less stable this past week; it’s simply the total volume of activity which has declined:

On to the opinion and commentary sites and sections – and interestingly, here the total volume of tweets has even increased slightly from last week (from 15,700 to 17,600 tweets linking to these sites). The SMH opinion section puts in another very dominant performance – receiving more than one quarter of these links –, while Crikey and New Matilda also maintain their recent form. The ABC’s The Drum (at abc.net.au/unleashed), meanwhile, continues to slip down the order: from position five in week 35 through eight last week to nine this time around. Something’s going on here:

In other news, it’s also worth noting that the Daily Telegraph’s grandly announced anti-trolling campaign – addressing a technology and social media topic which we should expect to be of significant interest to Twitter users, which we know was a winner for news.com.au a couple of weeks ago – comprehensively failed to resonate with Australian Twitter users. Presumably, they recognised this exercise in cynical populism for what it was, and declined to provide it with additional oxygen.

On to the daily patterns, which clearly illustrate both the low volume of news sharing activity in general, and the significant decline in ABC News tweets in particular, which we found this week:

In the absence of any marked spikes in activity for any of the sites we’re tracking, there really isn’t much else to say here – except to note the continuous decline in ABC News shares since the (Assange-driven) heady heights of week 33. Even the market-leading Sydney Morning Herald follows a similar pattern, though its attention share hasn’t dropped down quite as precipitously.

For the past week, this is also due to a certain boost in activity which it received from its opinion section, especially on the weekend, as the next graph shows. The spike in activity which we see on Sunday 16 Sep. is due almost exclusively to the sharing of a confrontational ‘open letter’ from sports writer Peter FitzSimons to the participants in sometimes violent protests in Sydney against the notorious Innocence of Muslims video, which was shared over 800 times.

Not pictured here, but also significant, is a spike in tweets linking to New Matilda on 13 Sep., which accounts for the site’s strong performance this week. That spike is driven largely by two pieces: an update on the legal situation of imprisoned WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, and another story about federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s purportedly pugilistic political past. Between them, some 320 tweets linked to these stories – enough to make an impact in an otherwise unremarkable week.

So much for week 37, then. Given the range of major stories during week 38 (from further protests about the Innocence of Muslims film to the unravelling Romney campaign in the U.S.), we might expect the volume of tweets to increase again – but as these are largely international stories, Twitter users may also choose to share links to international rather than domestic news sources, of course. Due to some server maintenance, I’m afraid we’ll also have some gaps in next week’s data – but we’ll make do with what we have.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Finally for this quick burst of ATNIX updates to inaugurate the new column, let’s move on to week 36 – frankly, a pretty average week, as we’ll see in a minute. In fact, as overall patterns go, you’d be hard-pressed to see any significant differences between the news sharing patterns for this week and the previous one!

ATNIX Week 36: 3-9 Sep. 2012

Week 36 is also a very quiet one – only some 128,000 links to Australian news sites were shared on Twitter this week, compared to the 142,000 in week 35 and the whopping 160,000 the week before that. Towards the end of the year, we’ll have a look at the weekly cycles of activity, I think – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we’d see some longer-term ebbs and flows in news attention over that timeframe. The distribution of attention across our major sites also matches that from last week almost exactly, give or take a rounded percentage point here or there – the top ten sites are placed exactly as they were.

The amount of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections has also shrunken (from 18,800 to 15,700), and at least here there’s a bit more movement on the leaderboard. The Conversation regains its customary second place, leapfrogging The Age’s opinion section, and New Matilda has an especially good week (in fifth place); ABC The Drum (or more precisely, abc.net.au/unleashed URLs) drops well out of the top five, by contrast.

On to the daily results, then. For the news sites, there’s nothing much to see here: much as last week, a clear illustration of the standard attention patterns (strong at the start of the week, then steadily dropping off towards the weekend), though it’s notable that the Sydney Morning Herald hasn’t been able to maintain its somewhat stronger weekend position (boosted by the weekend magazine’s feature articles, I’d wager) this time around.

Amidst the overall steady-as-she-goes patterns, there is a smallish spike in numbers for The Age, though: its piece on the latest salvo in the Australian ‘Christian’ Lobby’s ugly campaign against same-sex marriage was shared some 530 times. Looking at the comments made by users sharing the Age article, let’s just say that this particular demonstration of fundamentalist rhetoric did not find many supporters on Twitter. At all.

As far as the daily opinion and commentary sharing patterns are concerned, it’s difficult to speak of spikes in activity when for the most part, that activity remained at or below the long-term average.

But for what it’s worth, the small rise in activity around the Sydney Moring Herald opinion section is due largely to an article about Malcolm Turnbull’s call for more honesty in Australian politics, which received some 165 tweets sharing it during 5 and 6 Sep.; another piece, on the question of whether the Prime Minister should attend an ACL function after the organisation’s repeated outbursts against homosexuality, received another 50-odd links.

Finally – not pictured on the graph above (as it’s not normally a leading opinion site on Twitter), New Matilda scored a major hit (by its standards) with an interview with Noam Chomsky about Julian Assange that was shared nearly 200 times on 4 Sep. (accounting for more than half of all links to New Matilda being shared on Twitter that day). We’re back in very familiar territory here, of course – stories about Assange have regularly generated large spikes in Twitter sharing for Australian news and opinion sites in the past, as the international WikiLeaks and Assange supporter community picks them up and passes them on. That day, New Matilda briefly became the second most shared Australian opinion site on Twitter, thanks to this single story.

But we should note, again, that that’s against the backdrop of a very slow news week. Let’s see if next week picks up a bit…

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

Following hot on the heels of our Australian Twitter News Index for week 34, the following week’s edition is turns out considerably more sedate. For the moment, at least, it looks like we’re more or less back to normal…

ATNIX Week 35: 27 Aug.-2 Sep. 2012

Given that weeks 33 and 34 showed some comparatively unusual patterns driven largely by a handful of major (in part also international) stories – the Assange saga, the Leigh Sales/Tony Abbott interview on 7.30 – we’ve got to go back at least three weeks to find a comparably ‘normal’ news week on Twitter. We captured some 142,000 links to our news sites this week (which is actually a comparatively low amount), and the usual pecking order amongst the leading news sites is restored as well – after last week’s very strong performance by ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald returns to the lead, by almost 2000 tweets.

This return to normalcy is felt especially strongly amongst the opinion and commentary sites and sections, though. With 18,800 tweets sharing links to these URLs this week, there are some 20% fewer opinion tweets this week – the vast spike in links to the SMH’s coverage of new data retention laws has washed out of the system, and the SMH’s opinion marketshare has dropped back down to 23%. That’s still somewhat above the long-term average, but leaves substantially more space to its competitors. Interestingly, it’s The Age which benefits more from this than usual runner-up The Conversation: the latter clocks up its usual 2,600-odd tweets per week, but The Age’s opinion section has a particularly strong week this time around (as we’ll see in the day-to-day figures below). Conversely, Crikey falls back from its unusually strong, First Dog on the Moon-driven second place last week to a much more normal fourth position.

On to the daily patterns, then. For news, we see what is a very common trajectory for SMH and ABC News: a strong Monday, and then a slow decline through the rest of the week; both sites are essentially equal throughout the working week. The only slightly interesting feature here is a small spike in news.com.au links on Thursday, 30 Aug. – this is driven by the site’s coverage of TV presenter and model Charlotte Dawson’s attempted suicide following severe bullying on Twitter. The major story on this (a ‘special investigation’ on trolling) was shared some 600 times, while a number of related pieces picked up another 500+ shares, easily accounting for the 1,000 additional tweets mentioning news.com.au that day. (It’s interesting that of the leading sites, news.com.au seems to be the only one receiving additional links from this story – as a more middlebrow news site, compared to SMH and ABC News, perhaps it is the more ‘natural’ place to look for what is at least in part also a celebrity story?)

The daily patterns for opinion and commentary sites and sections look a little more messy this week. There are no major spikes as we encountered them during the previous two weeks; none of the sites make it past 900 tweets per day, in fact. There are minor spikes for the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section on Thursday, and for The Age’s opinion section on Saturday (which is unusual, given that weekends are traditionally low on opinion sharing):

Of these, the SMH spikelet is driven by no one topic in particular, with stories on political gifts, the deaths of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, and Gina Rinehart’s commends on welfare each picking up between 45 and 80 tweets each. The Age spike on Saturday is substantially more pronounced, however – and is driven solely by Virginia Trioli’s opinion article, calling out Peter Reith on his attempts to rewrite history by downplaying the Howard government’s ‘children overboard’ lies. Some 550 tweets, or around two thirds of all tweets linking to The Age’s opinion section that day, referenced this piece. Finally, Crikey also experiences a minor spike on 29/30 August – driven by a combination of multiple stories on the staff cuts at Fairfax (300+ tweets) and a piece on the U.S. ambassador’s assurances, in an exclusive interview, that the country has no interest in extraditing Julian Assange (170+ tweets).

And that’s it for this week – a somewhat quieter one, but we’ll see what the future holds…

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

I’m very pleased to say that we’ve now converted the Australian Twitter News Index into a regular column on The Conversation. To get us started, here are the past few weeks' worth of ATNIX updates now.

ATNIX Week 34: 20-26 Aug. 2012

In terms of volume, week 34 almost reaches the heady heights of the previous one: the news sites alone surpassed the 160,000 tweets mark, only some 650 tweets below the previous week’s mark. There are few surprises at the top of the leaderboard; The Age and news.com.au swap places again, after its Assange coverage briefly pushed The Age into third spot last week, but there’s only a few hundred tweets in it.

For the opinion and commentary sites and sections, the story is a little more interesting: with over 24,000 tweets sharing links to these sites, they’re surpassing even last week’s mark, and the field is led by an impressive performance by the Sydney Morning Herald, which receives more than a quarter of all links to Australian opinion sites shared on Twitter this week. As last week’s Assange boost washes out of the system, by contrast, The Age’s opinion pages fall back from second to fourth. In a somewhat surprising second place (considering its partial paywalling) is Crikey, which surpasses even The Conversation (which is usually our second site). And that’s not because of a bad week for The Conversation (it even gains a handful of links on last week), but because Crikey adds almost 1,000 tweets this week – we’ll see below what stories were responsible for this performance.

But first, to the daily patterns for news. Here, the Sydney Morning Herald is back to its usual weekly pattern, which sees Monday as its best day, and a smaller spike towards the end of the working week. But (similar to last week), it’s ABC News which leads the way on Wednesday and Thursday – and responsible for this peak, for once, is not an Australian-produced story reaching international audiences, but very much a domestic one: the video and transcript of Leigh Sales’s confrontational interview with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on the ABC’s 7.30 programme was shared almost 2,000 times, with a separate link (to the video only) receiving another 400+ tweets.

This strikes me as one of those times when a media moment manages to cut through, even to people who hadn’t watched the interview live on the show, and by way of sharing through social media ends up reaching a much broader audience than it would otherwise have done. Consider the potential reach of each of those 2,400 tweets (the followers of the tweeting user, and the followers of any hashtag used in the tweet), and add similar patterns unfolding on Facebook, and you end up with a substantial number of users who’d have seen that video or read the transcript. (Whether it changes anyone’s opinion of Tony Abbott – or of Leigh Sales – is another question, of course.)

Meanwhile, there’s also a bump in the number of tweets linking to news.com.au, around 21 August – that one is driven mainly by an interview with visiting American Idol judge and pop star Adam Lambert, which received some 400 links that day (more than 100 of these directly to one or another of the photos of Lambert, incidentally). Somewhat more strangely, on 20-22 Aug., there were also some 350 tweets linking directly to this photo of a protest poster in the US – which I think is from the pro-Assange protests in London. Where ABC News’ bump is driven by domestic issues, then, for news.com.au it looks like we’re seeing international drivers once again, much like last week.

The opinion and commentary sites and sections experienced some very significant spikes in activity again, too. First, on 22 August the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section received the single most tweets linking to any one opinion site that we’ve seen since we started ATNIX – but it’s another one of those National Times-cobranded pieces which ostensibly sit in the SMH’s opinion section but actually read more like a straightforward news report: in this case, about the government’s highly problematic new laws enabling federal authorities to retain Australians’ Internet communications data. Whether we call it ‘opinion’ or not, it received more than 1,000 shares on the Wednesday alone – unsurprisingly, Australian Twitter users reacted strongly to laws which seek to govern their use of Internet technology.

The other substantial spike is responsible for the unusually strong performance by Crikey which we’ve already seen in the weekly figures. Here, we return to the 7.30 interview between Abbott and Sales – or rather, cartoonist First Dog on the Moon’s take on the interview, which (notably, posted outside Crikey’s paywall) received some 350 shares. Adding to these figures, another 160 tweets referenced Bernard Keane’s (similarly non-paywalled) commentary on the passing of the ‘Cybercrime’ data retention bill, and the lack of debate (in parliament or in the media) about the introduction of these significant new surveillance powers and their impact on citizens’ privacy.

And there it is – for once, a strong week driven mainly by domestic issues rather than viral stories of international relevance.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

Also see the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.