Analyzing News on Social Media
For the past week, I’ve been following ABC news across various platforms online to see just how exactly they go about with posting their news, and what the differences are when they post to different social media platforms.
First off, ABC’s website itself, which is simplistic and easy to scroll through. The biggest news stories of the hour get featured with large photos that take up a good amount of space, with the headlines and article names imposed over the images as to not waste space. There are even some small bullet points included with some of the headlines to summarize the articles. But at the same time, these bullet points feel too small to really include any substantial information.
Besides the main news articles however, all the additional news is either on the side of the page, or down below the main news. They’re also clustered together with much smaller word sizes and images, or with no images at all. It’s cluttered, and makes it feel like certain news stories get much more focus then others. Along with that, the author of any given article isn’t posted on the front page, you’re only able to find out who wrote what when you click on an article.
What the articles themselves contain usually depends on the story, if it was one of the main stories on the front page or not. If it’s a main the story, it’s usually fully featured, with a full newscast video above the actual article available to watch. There’s also captioned pictures featured between every few paragraphs, embedded twitter links that you can click on, and a list of the reporters that worked on the story at the end of the article.
But again, that’s only if it’s a main news article. For the news featured on the side of the page, there’s a lot less to show. At it’s worst, it can be only the article itself. No pictures, no video or links, not even a list of reporters that worked on the story. Simply just a page of plain text to read through. At the very least, every article, big or small, has Twitter, Facebook, and email buttons on the side for you to click on so that you can share the stories with people on those platforms. There’s also a comment section, but instead of simply showing the comments below the article, you have to click a link that opens a separate window for the comments that people have posted.
Speaking of Twitter and Facebook, I followed ABC’s pages and accounts on both of those platforms to see how they shared their news. For both websites, ABC posts a summation of the news in their post, along with either a picture or a video, and a link that directs to the full article. The amount of words they use is different between the 2 platforms. With Facebook on average only using 1 sentence to headline the article. A twitter post headline, on the other hand, is a bit longer then that, maybe using 2 sentences. For both platforms, ABC writes their headlines similarly. Words like LATEST or AFTERMATH catch your attention for some articles, sometimes they do that with the most attention-grabbing words of an article, like DEADLY CAR EXPLOSION. Sometimes they use direct quotes from someone instead of summarizing an article in their own words. They also sometimes include hashtags in their headlines.
Something that I’ve noticed between the two media sites is that for the most part, unless it’s one of the biggest news stories of the day, Facebook and Twitter have different pieces of news posted. Both are updated continuously at all hours of the day, with a new article being posted every 15 or so minutes. In terms of content, it seems Facebook has more lighthearted content posted on average compared to twitter. Facebook will feature more stories about things like kids helping the elderly upstairs, or the birthday of a tortoise. Not to say Twitter is completely devoid of those kinds of story, but just that there’s less of them. Twitter on the other hand is more likely to have posts about more serious stories, whether political or otherwise.
What I find most interesting about ABC’s usage of social media platforms is that they don’t bother to use the headlines they already have on their websites, despite how easy it would make posting their articles onto the internet. In fact, for both Facebook and Twitter, it feels like they have separate people running their pages, creating their own headlines. Besides the different featured news articles on each platform, even the major stories that get posted are posted at different times, with completely different headlines depending on the website posted too.
In conclusion, it seems ABC doesn’t interconnect Facebook and Twitter, treating each completely separately as different news articles with different headlines get posted at different times. However, they both serve the same purpose, to ultimately lure people in with eye catching headlines so that they’re led to the main news website, where they can read their articles in full.
