Between the bombshell announcement of further deep staff cuts at Fairfax publications, subsequent strike action by Fairfax journalists, the handing down of the 2017 federal budget, and the much-publicised return of drug smuggler Schapelle Corby to Australia, the news in May was surprisingly strongly focussed on domestic Australian issues. But not all of these matters …
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There seems to be no end in sight to the barrage of breaking, critical news from home and abroad these days, and Australians might be forgiven for trying to switch off during the Easter and ANZAC holidays. Even if they did attempt to do so, however, the Australian Twitter News Index for April 2017 shows …
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For anyone based in Australia – and especially for those of us here in Queensland – the major domestic news story of March 2017 is no doubt the impact of Tropical Cyclone Debbie on the coastal communities of the central coast Queensland. It is not entirely surprising, however, that the cyclone fails to impact strongly …
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It feels as if February 2017 has been a month of permanent crisis. Between the exceptionally controversial first steps of the fledgling Trump administration in the United States, the increasingly fragile relationships between the various factions within the Coalition government, and the renewed hostilities between government and opposition on the resumption of federal parliament, hardly …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, February 2017”
The Australian Twitter News Index has been on hold for the past few months as we’ve adjusted our data gathering approach to address some changes to Twitter’s data gathering frameworks, and unfortunately this period has also included the U.S. election and its immediate aftermath. But we’re back in time to the inauguration of President Trump, …
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As the world turns its attention to the slow-motion car crash that is this year’s U.S. presidential election, September in Australia was a comparatively ordinary, intermediate month for news. A number of continuing scandals and controversies – including the donations affair engulfing Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, the Country Fire Authority pay dispute in Victoria, and …
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As the 2016 federal election campaign recedes into memory, online engagement with the news in Australia has returned to what passes for normality these days. This is also reflected in the news sharing activities we are able to observe in the Australian Twitter News Index for August: the long-term patterns of how Twitter users’ attention …
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This instalment of the Australian Twitter News Index covers the business end of the Australian federal election campaign, which culminated in election day on 2 July 2016 and was followed by a brief period of uncertainty over whether the Coalition government had in fact held on to enough seats in the House of Representatives to …
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As we conclude this very lengthy Australian election campaign, let us review how the candidates fared on Twitter these past two weeks. Our research tracks all tweets directed at or posted by the candidates’ Twitter accounts. This provides a more comprehensive picture than the comparatively more self-selecting election- and politics-related hashtags #ausvotes and #auspol. The …
Continue reading “#ausvotes: A Final Update from the Social Media Hustings”
We’re now well into the federal election season, and of course this is reflected in the Twitter-based news sharing activities captured in the Australian Twitter News Index as well. But – because as in previous elections the general public tends to fully connect with the campaign only in the final weeks before election day – …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, May 2016”
