Comparing Events Coverage in Online News and Social Media: The Case of Climate Change

Social media is becoming more and more integrated in the distribution and consumption of news. How is news in social media different from mainstream news? This paper presents a comparative analysis covering a span of 17 months and hun- dreds of news events, using a method that combines auto- matic and manual annotations. We focus on climate change, a topic that is frequently present in the news through a number of arguments, from current practices and causes (e.g. frack- ing, CO2 emissions) to consequences and solutions (e.g. ex- treme weather, electric cars). The coverage that these dif- ferent aspects receive is often dependent on how they are framed—typically by mainstream media. Yet, evidence sug- gests an existing gap between what the news media pub- lishes online and what the general public shares in social media. Through the analysis of a series of events, including awareness campaigns, natural disasters, governmental meet- ings and publications, among others, we uncover differences in terms of the triggers, actions, and news values that are prevalent in both types of media. This methodology can be extended to other important topics present in the news.

[1]  S. Donner,et al.  The influence of national temperature fluctuations on opinions about climate change in the U.S. since 1990 , 2013, Climatic Change.

[2]  Edson C. Tandoc.  Why Web Analytics Click , 2015 .

[3]  Amy X. Zhang,et al.  Compare Clouds : Visualizing Text C orpora to Compare Media Frames , 2015 .

[4]  Fernando Diaz,et al.  CrisisLex: A Lexicon for Collecting and Filtering Microblogged Communications in Crises , 2014, ICWSM.

[5]  C. D. Vreese,et al.  News framing: Theory and typology , 2005 .

[6]  John Price,et al.  Signals and noise , 1993 .

[7]  Nicholas Diakopoulos,et al.  Visual Analytics of Media Frames in Online News and Blogs , 2013 .

[8]  Hosung Park,et al.  What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? , 2010, WWW '10.

[9]  Mike S. Schäfer,et al.  Repercussion and resistance. An empirical study on the interrelation between science and mass media , 2010 .

[10]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle , 2009, KDD.

[11]  Jisun An,et al.  A First Look at Global News Coverage of Disasters by Using the GDELT Dataset , 2014, SocInfo.

[12]  in Terrorism Coverage in U.S. and U.K. Newspapers News Frames Terrorism: A Comparative Analysis of Frames Employed , 2008 .

[13]  Amy X. Zhang,et al.  Identifying and Analyzing Moral Evaluation Frames in Climate Change Blog Discourse , 2014, ICWSM.

[14]  Christophe Ley,et al.  Detecting outliers: Do not use standard deviation around the mean, use absolute deviation around the median , 2013 .

[15]  A. Kirilenko,et al.  People as sensors: Mass media and local temperature influence climate change discussion on Twitter , 2014 .

[16]  W. Bennett,et al.  Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests , 2011 .

[17]  Sofiane Abbar,et al.  You Tweet What You Eat: Studying Food Consumption Through Twitter , 2014, CHI.

[18]  A. Hermida,et al.  SHARE, LIKE, RECOMMEND , 2012 .

[19]  T. Harcup,et al.  What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited , 2001 .

[20]  Carlos Castillo,et al.  What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises , 2015, CSCW.

[21]  Frank Esser,et al.  Handbook of comparative communication research , 2012 .

[22]  K. Holmberg,et al.  Climate Change on Twitter: Topics, Communities and Conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 Report , 2014, PloS one.

[23]  Jürgen Pfeffer,et al.  Characterizing the life cycle of online news stories using social media reactions , 2013, CSCW.

[24]  Pablo Boczkowski.  The divergent online news preferences of journalists and readers , 2010, Commun. ACM.

[25]  Luis E. Hestres.  Preaching to the choir: Internet-mediated advocacy, issue public mobilization, and climate change , 2014, New Media Soc..

[26]  Spencer R. Weart,et al.  The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition , 2008 .

[27]  John Beieler,et al.  Improving Forecasts of International Events of Interest , 2013 .

[28]  Ciro Cattuto,et al.  Dynamical classes of collective attention in twitter , 2011, WWW.

[29]  A. Kirilenko,et al.  Public microblogging on climate change: One year of Twitter worldwide , 2014 .

[30]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  Language Matters In Twitter: A Large Scale Study , 2011, ICWSM.

[31]  Henry W. Fischer.  Response to Disaster: Fact Versus Fiction & Its Perpetuation -The Sociology of Disaster- , 1998 .

[32]  L'ubos Steskal,et al.  Structure and Content of the Discourse on Climate Change in the Blogosphere: The Big Picture , 2015, Climate Change Communication and the Internet.

[33]  R. Entman.  Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power , 2007 .

[34]  Paul Baker,et al.  Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999–2005 , 2010 .

[35]  Mike S. Schäfer,et al.  Media attention for climate change around the world: A comparative analysis of newspaper coverage in 27 countries , 2013 .

[36]  Utilizing the social media data to validate 'climate change' indices , 2013 .