Jul
19
Breaking News
Conclusions
Technology changes how news breaks, evolving from stories necessitating an “extra” edition to reach the public, to a service like Breaking News posting one story to two platforms simultaneously, including one which is less than a month old and already has approximately 20 million users.
On the social web, different platforms encourage a variety of posts in both quantity and content as demonstrated by The New York Times’s use of Twitter and Facebook, where the former is a consent stream of information and the latter is a more selective group of stories often posted with additional comments from the publication.
When breaking news platform matters, Facebook’s reputation is as a semi-public social networking site where users share with a select group of connections called “friends,” Twitter alternatively is known as a mostly open network were users post 140 character bursts for the world to read. Although the Facebook pages for both The New York Times and Breaking News are open to the public, the reputation of the platforms persists, and organizations use them accordingly, giving more quantity to the masses on Twitter, but more depth to those who choose to see it on Facebook.
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Methodology
Facebook feeds were printed directly from the page under examination and Twitter feeds were printed from an RSS feed of the account under examination. Both Facebook and Twitter feeds were printed after the examination period concluded and were counted for the total number of postings and the total number of links. On Facebook only links to articles are counted, links to individual photos or calls for reader submissions were not included in the link-count but were counted in the total number of postings.
Link rate was determined by dividing the number of links by the number of posts, and then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.
Front page image links for pre-written op-ed “>The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Baltimore Sun
Tweets shown on in this post remain on Twitter’s servers and are displayed through Twitter’s service Blackbird Pie, check back if the error message “There was a problem connecting to Twitter” is displayed
This post has been updated to reflect appropriate changes