#ge2015: what's the media tweeting about?: Recent Episodes
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A site looking at which parties are being mentioned on social media by the UK press and broadcasters. Powered by Tableau and maintained by Andy Cotgreave (@acotgreave) .
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The jounralists that love twitter - they loved it MORE during the election! Faisal Islam of Sky wrote/replied/retweeted 2,176 times during the election campaign, compared to just 215 times in the same perdio in 2010.
You can explore the change by organisation by clicking here to see the interactive version.
When we look at all our media coverage (left- and right-leaning press, impartial broadcasters and upstart websites) what do we see as the proportional mention of each party?
Is this a good way to predict the outcome of an election? I highly doubt it. Come back on Friday to see how close we were.
How long are the TV presenters and journalists spending on Twitter? A long time.
Interactive version here.
Corporate accounts don’t deign to reply to anyone - they broadcast. @May2015NS stands out as pretty much the only account that engages with people: 14% of its tweets since March 30th have been replies.
Delving more deeply, the corporation retweets tend to be tweets from their own journalists. This is especially true of @BBCNews.
You can explore an interactive view of this chart here.
Faisal Islam has spent an entire working week using Twitter during this campaign.
Four others have spent over 30 hours composing tweets.
I’ve estimated 120 seconds to write a tweet, 45 seconds to reply and 15 to retweet. If you don’t like my estimates, you can tweak the model in this interactive version.
Today we’re looking at how the Huffington Post is covering the election. The first thing you notice is that they mention UKIP a lot. In fact the mention UKIP almost as much as they mention Labour. This is at a time when UKIP’s poll projection (according to traditional media The Guardian) is only predicted to win a handful of seats.
If we drill into who is mentioning which parties we can see that while the corporate accounts mention UKIP a lot, the individual journalists are less fussed. (maybe UKIP makes better headline tweets?)
Despite mentioning UKIP a lot, then sentiment of those tweets are generally neutral or negative. (check out our earlier posts for more information sentiment)
We’re looking at The Economist today. Out of all the media organisations that we are tracking, The Economist has tweeted about the election the least.
They are mentioning both the Conservatives and Labour much more than any of the more minor parties. The bulk of The Economist’s tweets come from their politic’s correspondent @JeremyCliffe, however for the last two weeks in March the corporate accounts appeared to have gone on a tweeting spree.
@JeremyCliffe tweets in a very similar fashion to The Economist’s overall profile.
I have to start the Daily Telegraph’s profile by looking at Dan Hodges (@DPJHodges). This guy is a tweeting machine. He’s tweeting throughout the day (above). When we look at his cumulative mentions of each party you can even see he’s getting MORE twitter-happy in the last few days.
When we look at the parties he mentions each week, we see that his focus is on Labour and UKIP and also just how prolific he has been each week of the campaign:
His paper, the Daily Telegraph is by nature a Conservative paper. But if you look at how many times it mentions that party, it’s really low in the leagues:
Click here to see interactive versions of these charts.
We’re looking at the New Statesman today. They are mentioning Labour the most, which is not unsurprising as they are a more left-leaning publication.
However they are also mentioning Labour more than any other organisation that we are tracking.
The breakdown between of mentions between corporate and journalist accounts is quite similar. The New Statesman’s dedicated general election account @May2015NS has increased it’s volume of tweets since mid March (just before the official campaign period started).
@stephenkb an Editor at the New Statesman is their most prolific individual tweeter. His high number of Labour tweets account for just over 25% of all the New Statesman’s Labour tweets