Those of us who follow the Australian media don’t need ATNIX to tell us that it’s been an eventful week, driven towards the end especially by the coverage of Alan Jones’s indefensible comments about the Prime Minister’s late father. But what our Australian Twitter News Index can do is to provide us with quantitative evidence of how that story compares with other recent controversies, and to document which news and opinion Websites have gained the most from covering these events.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 39: 24-30 Sep. 2012

Given the substantial amount of dismay and anger expressed in response to Jones’s comments – not least on Twitter – and the extensive media debate which followed, the distribution of links to the major news sites this week looks almost unexpectedly normal. The top-ranked sites are in their usual positions, though the ABC is putting in a particularly good showing this week – its 19% share of tweeted links is up from 16% last week. It’s not until place nine that we see any change to the status quo, in fact: here, the Australian Financial Review is in an unusually strong position, with nearly 3,400 tweets referencing its articles; that’s over 50% more links to the site than last week. What is notable overall, though, is a significant increase in the total number of links to Australian news sites which were tweeted this week – with about 125,000 tweets, we’re still a fair way from the levels we recorded earlier in the year, but we’re clearly up from the lacklustre levels of the past fortnight.

As is so often the case, though, it’s the tweeting of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections where the most significant changes are evident. Week 39/2012 marks an all-time record for the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section, which clearly cements its position as the go-to section for political commentary in Australia; a stunning 36% of the 19,000 links to opinion and commentary sites and sections which were tweeted this past week pointed to material on the SMH. For the most part, this result does not reflect a weakening of the other sites, though: The Conversation also increased its total number of incoming links, for example, and the ABC’s The Drum (or the articles at abc.net.au/unleashed) manages to reverse its slow decline, moving back into fifth place from tenth position in week 38. Rather, then, the fact is that the total number of opinion links has increased this week, and the SMH opinion section has captured a disproportionate share of those additional links.

The daily patterns bear this out. For the news sites, we see that the week started out much like previous ones did – but then there’s a sharp spike on Thursday 27 Sep. Notably, all the major news sites shown in the graph below benefit from this increase in activity at least to some extent – but proportional to their long-term prominence as news sources for the Australian Twittersphere, it is the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News, and The Age which spike most strongly.

But wait: news about Jones’s remarks about the PM’s father broke later in the week – so something else must be driving the Thursday spike. Indeed, it’s Julian Assange, not Alan Jones, who is responsible for the substantial spike in Sydney Morning Herald links: a National Times-cobranded report on declassified US documents which describe Assange as an “enemy of the state” received some 3,000 tweets. Once again, it’s the distribution of a domestic story to a global audience, with the help of the well-organised international network of WikiLeaks supporters, which takes SMH links to a higher plane.

The simultaneous spike in activity around ABC News is less clearly driven by any one story. Three articles relating to the disappearance and murder of Jill Meagher account for some 500 tweets; stories about the mistreatment of sheep exported from Australia to Pakistan, and to the dramatic disappearance of Arctic sea ice, add another 300 tweets. In turn, the sharing of stories on Jill Meagher (650 tweets) and Julian Assange (300 tweets) also explains the spike at The Age. Spikes in the minor Australian news sites are also likely to relate especially to news of an arrest in the Meagher case.

Meanwhile, the Australian Financial Review (not pictured here) follows a different pattern, with spikes on 25 and 27 September. The first of these relates mainly to a (non-paywalled) story about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who has declared that he likes the NBN so much that he wishes to become an Australian citizen (some 430 tweets that day, with more on following days); the second relates largely to a piece by former Labor leader Mark Latham which criticises The Australian’s double standards as it reports on Gillard and Abbott (some 250 tweets). Small numbers by comparison, perhaps – but significant for a niche publication which normally fails to generate much excitement on Twitter.

But what of Alan Jones, then – did the major controversy over his remarks, which clearly also resulted in a substantial level of debate and anger in Australian social media spaces (witness the successful campaigns on Twitter and Facebook to encourage companies to pull their advertising from Jones’s show), find no echo in the volume of links shared? In short: yes, it did – but less so than the other major stories of the week.

The timing of the Jones controversy must also be considered here. The story broke late on Saturday 29 September – and we already know from our longer-term observations that weekends are traditionally slow days for news sharing on Twitter; we may expect to see more activity on this story in next week’s ATNIX, therefore. The gradual build-up of outrage over Jones’s comments is already evident on the Sunday of week 39, however, and becomes most visible if we single out links to opinion and commentary sites and sections in Australia:

While the Sydney Morning Herald opinion spike on 27 Sep. is entirely the result of the 3,000 tweets to a National Times-cobadged article about Julian Assange (and marks by far the most significant case of a story going viral which we’ve observed since ATNIX started in mid-year), there’s another unusual rise in tweeting activity for the SMH and The Age on the final day of the week.

Of the SMH tweets, some 600 link to a piece by sports columnist Peter FitzSimons which draws the connection between Alan Jones and Tony Abbott, while another 200 share a National Times-cobadged article which reports the details of Jones’s speech. The same articles also account for the lion’s share of links to the opinion section of The Age, but here a third article by political editor Michelle Grattan, suggesting that Jones’s statements are “low-rent comments a decent man would not make”, adds another 70-odd links.

Remember that this is only Sunday, though. As the graph above shows, the spike in opinion links to the SMH that day already surpasses the number of tweets which we’ve recorded for almost any other controversy since ATNIX started, except for global issues such as Assange and WikiLeaks. I’d be willing to bet that the following Monday will see yet greater levels of Twitter activity and outrage surrounding this story – especially as discussion of Jones’s belligerent apology and calls for an advertiser boycott of his show and station build up. But for that, we’ll have to wait another week, until ATNIX 40/2012.

The last couple of weeks of our Australian Twitter News Index have been somewhat underwhelming: overall levels of news sharing on Twitter have been comparatively low, even in spite of a small blip at the tail end of week 37 which was caused by the reporting and commentary which covered the Sydney riots around the Innocence of Muslims film. In terms of total activity, week 38 picks up a little, but still fails to move past the long-term average – and that’s in spite of some notable spikes in the sharing of opinion articles from leading news sites.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 38: 17-23 Sep. 2012

Overall numbers for this week provide a poor point of comparison, as – due to scheduled server maintenance – most of Friday 21 Sep. is missing from this week’s dataset. Given that this incomplete dataset contains some 108,000 tweets linking to Australian news Websites, and that we would usually expect to see at least another 15,000 such tweets on a Friday, though, we can assume that the total volume for this week would be somewhere upwards of 120,000 tweets – which would be at least a small improvement on the preceding week’s 115,000 tweets linking to news sites. Here’s how they are distributed across the sites we track: the main mover in the leading group is The Age, which surpasses news.com.au by some margin this week, after a virtually dead heat last time around.

The situation for the opinion and commentary sites and sections is particularly interesting this week, as the day-to-day patterns below will also demonstrate. First, the total number of tweets linking to such sites has actually declined a little (from around 17,600 to 16,700), while the Fairfax sites have substantially increased their dominance: the Sydney Morning Herald maintains a remarkable 26% share of all Australian opinion links shared this week (unchanged from the similarly unusual result last week), but The Age now joins it by adding another 17%. This once again pushes it past the long-term runner-up The Conversation, which received roughly the same amount of links as last week, but was clearly outperformed by the substantial spike in The Age shares. There is further shuffling of positions on the minor places (the ABC’s The Drum loses another place, continuing its decline of the past few weeks), but these represent fairly small numbers in the first place.

These patterns are further illustrated by the day-to-day comparisons (ignore the drop in numbers on 21 Sep. due to server maintenance, obviously). Links to the news sites remain below the long-term average, but are generally improved from the previous week; this is especially notable for The Age (in green), which is now well above news.com.au’s purple line. At the same time, there are no obvious spikes in activity – as weeks go, this is a sedate one.

That’s not the case for the opinion and commentary sites and sections, on the other hand: here, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and both spiking on 17 and 19 September, and Fairfax’s online-only Brisbane newspaper site Brisbane Times gets a minor spike (by its admittedly modest standards) on 18 September:

For the Sydney Morning Herald, the new week continues a trend which the preceding Sunday’s comparatively more minor spike around a piece by sports commentator Peter FitzSimons about the Sydney riots already foreshadowed: a substantial amount of tweets sharing links to commentary about the Innocence of Muslims film and its aftermath. On the Monday, it’s a more considered argument by Waleed Aly which is shared in more than 700 times.

By Wednesday, however, attention is split between this issue and a new political controversy: while another opinion piece on the Sydney protests, by Mohamad Tabbaa, gains some 140 additional shares, the majority of the 19 Sep. spike is driven by opinion articles which discuss the parliamentary debate about same-sex marriage. National Times-cobadged articles about Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi’s hysterical fear campaign and his subsequent resignation as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s personal parliamentary secretary are shared in some 260 tweets, while pieces about NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell’s intention to allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage in state parliament and Finance Minister Penny Wong’s fight for the recognition of same-sex relationships each added another 100 tweets.

Similar patterns apply at The Age. Waleed Aly’s piece was published here as well, and receives some 375 tweets on Monday, and a (pre-bestiality) Cory Bernardi also enters this debate, if only as a sideline. At the same time, a piece about the erosion of Australian Internet users’ privacy rights through the government’s proposed data retention laws also receives some 150 tweets. Wednesday, on the other hand, is all about Cory Bernardi: articles discussing his contributions to the same-sex marriage debate account for more than half of all Age links shared on Twitter that day.

By contrast, the smaller spike in Brisbane Times links on the Tuesday is purely about state matters, incidentally: some 165 tweets linked to a piece by author John Birmingham on what’s wrong with Queensland Premier Campbell Newman. This makes sense in the overall context of the Fairfax setup, with SMH and Age as the national flagships, and the Brisbane Times as a secondary, local platform which syndicates much of its national coverage from those newspapers – so Fairfax readers who are interested in following the national coverage should be expected to be more likely to link to those sites in their tweets than to the Brisbane Times.

Here we are again with the latest weekly instalment of the Australian Twitter News Index. First off, I’m happy to say that the index is now also the subject of a weekly column at The Conversation, where I’ll cross-post ATNIX updates as well as other commentary on social media and society in Australia and beyond. More on that as it develops – but for now, let’s get back to the issues at hand.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 37: 10-16 Sep. 2012

As it turns out, this week is yet another quiet one – so much so that I’m starting to wonder whether there’s some kind of underlying trend here. Is it the approaching footy finals season? Spring holidays? Or a general news fatigue this deep into the year? Whatever the reason, with only 115,000 tweets linking to Australian news sites, we’ve reached a new low, down substantially again from last week’s already rather paltry 128,000 tweets.

Strangely, it’s been ABC News which has taken an especially big hit this week. The Sydney Morning Herald retained its position (in fact, it received a few hundred more links than last week) – but the ABC’s share of Twitter links declined by more than 5,000 tweets, which strikes me as very odd. Such troughs are difficult to explain: for spikes in activity, it’s usually easy to identify the stories which caused them, but – assuming the ABC didn’t publish a substantially smaller number of news stories than usual last week – what causes the Twitter userbase to just stop linking to a given site? Very curious.

Otherwise, the ranking and relative distribution of Twitter links across the major Australian news sites has remained more or less stable this past week; it’s simply the total volume of activity which has declined:

On to the opinion and commentary sites and sections – and interestingly, here the total volume of tweets has even increased slightly from last week (from 15,700 to 17,600 tweets linking to these sites). The SMH opinion section puts in another very dominant performance – receiving more than one quarter of these links –, while Crikey and New Matilda also maintain their recent form. The ABC’s The Drum (at abc.net.au/unleashed), meanwhile, continues to slip down the order: from position five in week 35 through eight last week to nine this time around. Something’s going on here:

In other news, it’s also worth noting that the Daily Telegraph’s grandly announced anti-trolling campaign – addressing a technology and social media topic which we should expect to be of significant interest to Twitter users, which we know was a winner for news.com.au a couple of weeks ago – comprehensively failed to resonate with Australian Twitter users. Presumably, they recognised this exercise in cynical populism for what it was, and declined to provide it with additional oxygen.

On to the daily patterns, which clearly illustrate both the low volume of news sharing activity in general, and the significant decline in ABC News tweets in particular, which we found this week:

In the absence of any marked spikes in activity for any of the sites we’re tracking, there really isn’t much else to say here – except to note the continuous decline in ABC News shares since the (Assange-driven) heady heights of week 33. Even the market-leading Sydney Morning Herald follows a similar pattern, though its attention share hasn’t dropped down quite as precipitously.

For the past week, this is also due to a certain boost in activity which it received from its opinion section, especially on the weekend, as the next graph shows. The spike in activity which we see on Sunday 16 Sep. is due almost exclusively to the sharing of a confrontational ‘open letter’ from sports writer Peter FitzSimons to the participants in sometimes violent protests in Sydney against the notorious Innocence of Muslims video, which was shared over 800 times.

Not pictured here, but also significant, is a spike in tweets linking to New Matilda on 13 Sep., which accounts for the site’s strong performance this week. That spike is driven largely by two pieces: an update on the legal situation of imprisoned WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, and another story about federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s purportedly pugilistic political past. Between them, some 320 tweets linked to these stories – enough to make an impact in an otherwise unremarkable week.

So much for week 37, then. Given the range of major stories during week 38 (from further protests about the Innocence of Muslims film to the unravelling Romney campaign in the U.S.), we might expect the volume of tweets to increase again – but as these are largely international stories, Twitter users may also choose to share links to international rather than domestic news sources, of course. Due to some server maintenance, I’m afraid we’ll also have some gaps in next week’s data – but we’ll make do with what we have.

I think I’m running out of snappy opening lines for ATNIX posts – and I’m not sure this one particularly deserves one, either: it’s a pretty average week, as we’ll see in a minute. In fact, as overall patterns go, you’d be hard-pressed to see any significant differences between the news sharing patterns for this week and the previous one!

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 36: 3-9 Sep. 2012

It’s also a very quiet one – only some 128,000 links to Australian news sites were shared on Twitter this week, compared to the 142,000 in week 35 and the whopping 160,000 the week before that. Towards the end of the year, we’ll have a look at the weekly cycles of activity, I think – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we’d see some longer-term ebbs and flows in news attention over that timeframe. The distribution of attention across our major sites also matches that from last week almost exactly, give or take a rounded percentage point here or there – the top ten sites are placed exactly as they were.

The amount of links to opinion and commentary sites and sections has also shrunken (from 18,800 to 15,700), and at least here there’s a bit more movement on the leaderboard. The Conversation regains its customary second place, leapfrogging The Age’s opinion section, and New Matilda has an especially good week (in fifth place); ABC The Drum (or more precisely, abc.net.au/unleashed URLs) drop well out of the top five, by contrast.

On to the daily results, then. For the news sites, there’s nothing much to see here: much as last week, a clear illustration of the standard attention patterns (strong at the start of the week, then steadily dropping off towards the weekend), though it’s notable that the Sydney Morning Herald hasn’t been able to maintain its somewhat stronger weekend position (boosted by the weekend magazine’s feature articles, I’d wager) this time around.

Amidst the overall steady-as-she-goes patterns, there is a smallish spike in numbers for The Age, though: its piece on the latest salvo in the Australian ‘Christian’ Lobby’s hate campaign against same-sex marriage was shared some 530 times. Let’s just say that this particular demonstration of fundamentalists rhetoric did not find many supporters on Twitter. At all.

As far as the daily opinion and commentary sharing patterns are concerned, it’s difficult to speak of spikes in activity when for the most part, that activity remained at or below the long-term average.

But for what it’s worth, the small rise in activity around the Sydney Moring Herald opinion section is due largely to an article about Malcolm Turnbull’s call for more honesty in Australian politics, which received some 165 tweets sharing it during 5 and 6 Sep.; another piece, on the question of whether the Prime Minister should attend an ACL function after the organisation’s repeated hate speech against homosexuality, received another 50-odd links.

Finally – not pictured on the graph above (as it’s not normally a leading opinion site on Twitter), New Matilda scored a major hit (by its standards) with an interview with Noam Chomsky about Julian Assange that was shared nearly 200 times on 4 Sep. (accounting for more than half of all links to New Matilda being shared on Twitter that day). We’re back in very familiar territory here, of course – stories about Assange have regularly generated large spikes in Twitter sharing for Australian news and opinion sites in the past, as the international WikiLeaks and Assange supporter community picks the up and passes them on. That day, New Matilda briefly became the second most shared Australian opinion site on Twitter, thanks to this single story.

But that’s against  the backdrop of a very slow news week. Let’s see if next week picks up a bit…

After the somewhat delayed Australian Twitter News Index for week 34, this week’s edition is significantly more timely – though it must be said that after the two very exciting weeks we’ve had, week 35 turns out considerably more sedate. For the moment, at least, it looks like we’re more or less back to normal…

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 35: 27 Aug.-2 Sep. 2012

Given that weeks 33 and 34 showed some comparatively unusual patterns driven largely by a handful of major (in part also international) stories – the Assange saga, the Leigh Sales/Tony Abbott interview on 7.30 – we’ve got to go back at least three weeks to find a comparably ‘normal’ news week on Twitter. We captured some 142,000 links to our news sites this week (which is actually a comparatively low amount), and the usual pecking order amongst the leading news sites is restored as well – after last week’s very strong performance by ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald returns to the lead, by almost 2000 tweets.

This return to normalcy is felt especially strongly amongst the opinion and commentary sites and sections, though. With 18,800 tweets sharing links to these URLs this week, there are some 20% fewer opinion tweets this week – the vast spike in links to the SMH’s coverage of new data retention laws has washed out of the system, and the SMH’s opinion marketshare has dropped back down to 23%. That’s still somewhat above the long-term average, but leaves substantially more space to its competitors. Interestingly, it’s The Age which benefits more from this than usual runner-up The Conversation: the latter clocks up its usual 2,600-odd tweets per week, but The Age’s opinion section has a particularly strong week this time around (as we’ll see in the day-to-day figures below). Conversely, Crikey falls back from its unusually strong, First Dog on the Moon-driven second place last week to a much more normal fourth position.

On to the daily patterns, then. For news, we see what is a very common trajectory for SMH and ABC News: a strong Monday, and then a slow decline through the rest of the week; both sites are essentially equal throughout the working week. The only slightly interesting feature here is a small spike in news.com.au links on Thursday, 30 Aug. – this is driven by the site’s coverage of TV presenter and model Charlotte Dawson’s attempted suicide following severe bullying on Twitter. The major story on this (a ‘special investigation’ on trolling) was shared some 600 times, while a number of related pieces picked up another 500+ shares, easily accounting for the 1,000 additional tweets mentioning news.com.au that day. (It’s interesting that of the leading sites, news.com.au seems to be the only one receiving additional links from this story – as a more middlebrow news site, compared to SMH and ABC News, perhaps it is the more ‘natural’ place to look for what is at least in part also a celebrity story?)

The daily patterns for opinion and commentary sites and sections look a little more messy this week. There are no major spikes as we encountered them during the previous two weeks; none of the sites make it past 900 tweets per day, in fact. There are minor spikes for the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section on Thursday, and for The Age’s opinion section on Saturday (which is unusual, given that weekends are traditionally low on opinion sharing):

Of these, the SMH spikelet is driven by no one topic in particular, with stories on political gifts, the deaths of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, and Gina Rinehart’s commends on welfare each picking up between 45 and 80 tweets each. The Age spike on Saturday is substantially more pronounced, however – and is driven solely by Virginia Trioli’s opinion article, calling out Peter Reith on his attempts to rewrite history by downplaying the Howard government’s ‘children overboard’ lies. Some 550 tweets, or around two thirds of all tweets linking to The Age’s opinion section that day, referenced this piece. Finally, Crikey also experiences a minor spike on 29/30 August – driven by a combination of multiple stories on the staff cuts at Fairfax (300+ tweets) and a piece on the U.S. ambassador’s assurances, in an exclusive interview, that the country has no interest in extraditing Julian Assange (170+ tweets).

And that’s it for this week – a somewhat quieter one, but we’ll see what the future holds…

It’s been another stupidly busy week for me, I’m afraid, so ATNIX 34/2012 is running a little late once again. So, let’s jump right in and see whether this week can measure up to the high drama we saw last time around.

Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.

See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Week 34: 20-26 Aug. 2012

In terms of volume, certainly, week 34 almost reaches the heady heights of the previous one: the news sites alone surpassed the 160,000 tweets mark, only some 650 tweets below the previous week’s mark. There are few surprises at the top of the leaderboard; The Age and news.com.au swap places again, after its Assange coverage briefly pushed The Age into third spot last week, but there’s only a few hundred tweets in it.

For the opinion and commentary sites and sections, the story is a little more interesting: with over 24,000 tweets sharing links to these sites, they’re surpassing even last week’s mark, and the field is led by an impressive performance by the Sydney Morning Herald, which receives more than a quarter of all links to Australian opinion sites shared on Twitter this week. As last week’s Assange boost washes out of the system, by contrast, The Age’s opinion pages fall back from second to fourth. In a somewhat surprising second place (considering its partial paywalling) is Crikey, which surpasses even The Conversation (which is usually our second site). And that’s not because of a bad week for The Conversation (it even gains a handful of links on last week), but because Crikey adds almost 1,000 tweets this week – we’ll see below what stories were responsible for this performance.

But first, to the daily patterns for news. Here, the Sydney Morning Herald is back to its usual weekly pattern, which sees Monday as its best day, and a smaller spike towards the end of the working week. But (similar to last week), it’s ABC News which leads the way on Wednesday and Thursday – and responsible for this peak, for once, is not an Australian-produced story reaching international audiences, but very much a domestic one: the video and transcript of Leigh Sales’s confrontational interview with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on the ABC’s 7.30 programme was shared almost 2,000 times, with a separate link (to the video only) receiving another 400+ tweets.

This strikes me as one of those times when a media moment manages to cut through, even to people who hadn’t watched the interview live on the show, and by way of sharing through social media ends up reaching a much broader audience than it would otherwise have done. Consider the potential reach of each of those 2,400 tweets (the followers of the tweeting user, and the followers of any hashtag used in the tweet), and add similar patterns unfolding on Facebook, and you end up with a substantial number of users who’d have seen that video or read the transcript. (Whether it changes anyone’s opinion of Tony Abbott – or of Leigh Sales – is another question, of course.)

Meanwhile, there’s also a bump in the number of tweets linking to news.com.au, around 21 August – that one is driven mainly by an interview with visiting American Idol judge and pop star Adam Lambert, which received some 400 links that day (more than 100 of these directly to one or another of the photos of Lambert, incidentally). Somewhat more strangely, on 20-22 Aug., there were also some 350 tweets linking directly to this photo of a protest poster in the US – which I think is from the pro-Assange protests in London. Where ABC News’ bump is driven by domestic issues, then, for news.com.au it looks like we’re seeing international drivers once again, much like last week.

The opinion and commentary sites and sections experienced some very significant spikes in activity again, too. First, on 22 August the Sydney Morning Herald opinion section received the single most tweets linking to any one opinion site that we’ve seen since we started ATNIX – but it’s another one of those National Times-cobranded pieces which ostensibly sit in the SMH’s opinion section but actually read more like a straightforward news report: in this case, about the government’s highly problematic new laws enabling federal authorities to retain Australians’ Internet communications data. Whether we call it ‘opinion’ or not, it received more than 1,000 shares on the Wednesday alone – unsurprisingly, Australian Twitter users reacted strongly to laws which seek to govern their use of Internet technology.

The other substantial spike is responsible for the unusually strong performance by Crikey which we’ve already seen in the weekly figures. Here, we return to the 7.30 interview between Abbott and Sales – or rather, cartoonist First Dog on the Moon’s take on the interview, which (notably, posted outside Crikey’s paywall) received some 350 shares. Adding to these figures, another 160 tweets referenced Bernard Keane’s (similarly non-paywalled) commentary on the passing of the ‘Cybercrime’ data retention bill, and the lack of debate (in parliament or in the media) about the introduction of these significant new surveillance powers and their impact on citizens’ privacy.

And there it is – for once, a strong week driven mainly by domestic issues rather than viral stories of international relevance.