Twitter som nyhetskälla

The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate if the news selection in established media and the social media platform Twitter differs from each other. Since more people than ever consume news on social media it’s relevant to study the eventual similarities and differences between the different platforms. With this as our background we aim to answer the following questions: What characterizes the most prioritized news in established media and social media in terms of news value criterias and news categories? Does Twitter in general rehash the same content as established media and to which extent does established media refer to Twitter?

We chose to base this study around two main research theories. The agenda setting theory and the theory of news value. The agenda setting theory is the main argument of ​why ​we made this study. The theory claims that the news we take part of from news media define our worldview. Therefore it’s important to investigate what kind of news that’s the most discussed on Twitter. The theory of news value is coherent since we want to measure what kind of prioritized news that established media and Twitter contains. We’ve used earlier studies about what factors make an event newsworthy. We applied those factors on today’s media climate and created variables based on them. The news stories we coded also got divided into fifteen different categories based on theme. For example politics, sports and culture.

The results showed that Twitter in general is rehashing the same content as established news media. However this study also shows that Twitter to some degree has its own agenda. There were some news that appeared in the Twitter trends that established media chose to dismiss. Furthermore the results showed that established media in our coding didn’t refer to Twitter once.