Mapping Online Publics

One week is a long time in politics, as they say, and so the thirty days of September 2015 have been packed with more than enough upheavals – none more momentous, of course, than the successful Liberal Party leadership challenge on 14 September, which saw Malcolm Turnbull replace Tony Abbott as Prime Minister on the following day. Much of this month’s Australian Twitter News Index analysis is therefore focussing on the days surrounding that moment.

Curiously, though, for the most part the political drama surrounding the leadership challenge did not result in any particularly pronounced increase in link sharing on Twitter during these days. Sharing for market leader ABC News on 14 September is roughly on trend for any given Monday, and even the brief spike in links to the Sydney Morning Herald on the same day only lifts its figures by about 1,500 tweets compared to the previous Monday. The only truly notable jump in links to any one site being shared on the day is recorded by SBS, which gains some 4,000 more tweets than its usual average – and this is due almost entirely to The Feed’s comedic interventions in covering the leadership spill.

This is not entirely surprising, however. The choreography of the 2015 Abbott/Turnbull spill is notably different from that of the 2010 Rudd/Gillard spill in the Australian Labor Party, for instance: that spill – against a still comparatively popular Prime Minister – came as a considerable surprise to the general public, with rumours first circulating amongst Canberra insiders in the evening of 23 June 2010, ahead of a caucus vote the following day.

The 2015 spill, by contrast, had been anticipated at least since the unsuccessful backbench revolt in February, and Malcolm Turnbull finally declared his hand openly in a press conference just after 4 p.m., well-placed for the primetime news. This resulted in wall-to-wall TV coverage of the vote and its results, throughout the evening, thus requiring much less sharing of news updates on Twitter – what we saw on that platform instead was a great deal of discussion about the spill and its implications, centred on the hashtag #libspill. Updates from the news outlets and journalists covering the event were still widely retweeted, of course – but these largely contained live reports from outside the Liberal Party caucus rooms, rather than the links to articles on news sites that we would pick up through ATNIX.

The most shared news stories during September provide an indication of some of the issues that influenced the public mood about the Abbott government, however. Even in spite of in-depth reporting about the leadership change, the most widely shared ABC News article in September covered Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s gaffe as his cruel joke about rising sea levels was captured on a live boom microphone (3,200 shares), while a story about the Abbott government’s decision to give preference to Christians in its intake of Syrian refugees received some 1,400 shares. That said, articles reporting controversial government activities – such as its linking of environmental activism and alternative music to political radicalisation – continued to be widely shared during the Turnbull honeymoon period, too: an ABC News piece about the issue on 25 September gained some 1,900 shares.

Leading SMH articles during September were even more diverse, possibly also because they represented stories that managed to attract an audience beyond Australia: its most widely shared article during the past month covered its unmasking of a would-be Daesh supporter as a Jewish-American teenager in Florida (2,700 shares), followed by a piece featuring footage of a seal riding on the back of a whale (2,400 shares). Amidst all the political tension, perhaps Twitter users deliberately sought out some diversions?

Independent of what stories ended up being shared on Twitter, however, our Experian data on total visits to the leading Australian news and opinion sites sites provide further detail on what online sources Australian Internet users drew on as they followed the political drama surrounding the spill. Here, we see considerable increases in readership on and after 14 September for a number of the leading news sites: market leaders news.com.au gains some 425,000 additional visits, compared to the previous Monday, while the SMH picks up more than 538,000 additional visits. But the biggest jump in visits is recorded by ABC News: it gains over 720,000 additional visits on 14 September, compared to the previous Monday.

This again demonstrates the importance of the public broadcaster’s Website (and, by extension, of other quality online news sources such as the Sydney Morning Herald) during key national events – and also mirrors the way that Australian viewers flocked to ABC channels during the spill. We observed a similar pattern in our analysis of the #libspill discussion on Twitter: here, too, the accounts of ABC News and its journalists turned out to be central to the ad hoc community that formed around the hashtag as the leadership challenge unfolded.

By contrast, some of the more recent overseas entries to the Australian mediascape lost out on gaining additional visitors: the number of visits to the otherwise popular Daily Mail Australia site on 14 September essentially flatlined in comparison to the previous Monday, and even Buzzfeed Australia – which has tried hard to insert itself into the Australian political discussion through its active and irreverent social media engagement – gained only another 134,000 visits on the day of the spill. Huffington Post Australia, incidentally, has yet to make any significant impact on the Australian media landscape at all – even on the day of the leadership challenge, it failed to reach 75,000 visits.

As the political contest returns to what passes for normalcy in contemporary Australia, and the nation turns its attention to the series of sporting events unfolding in October and November, we should now expect a different set of news sources to come to the fore, however. The next ATNIX instalment should show us, for example, whether sporting success for teams has also translated into additional attention for their hometown news sites.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). 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 the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy ofExperian Marketing Services Australia. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.

Australian public affairs have continued to be turbulent during August 2015 (to say nothing of September, which will be covered in our next update), and the arrival of Huffington Post Australia as the latest overseas entrant has had the potential to disrupt the media market, too. Time then to see how the Australian Twitter News Index for August reflects public attention to the news during this month.

First things first: Huffington Post Australia itself has so far failed to set the world on fire. After a brief opening flurry in the days following its launch on 19 August, the site has received comparatively few tweeted links per day, lagging behind established local entries such as The New Daily or Independent Australia. That said, the total figure of some 3,300 tweets during August which is indicated in the graph below should not be compared to the rest of the competition just yet, since HuffPo only launched mid-month.

If HuffPo take-up on Twitter in Australia has been limited to date, though, my sense is that this may have some thing to do with the comparatively limited online promotion work the site has done itself so far. Unlike other recent entry Buzzfeed Australia, whose Political Editor Mark Di Stefano has quickly become a fixture in the Australian Twittersphere – his Twitter activity played an important role in alerting users to the recent #BorderFarce controversy, for instance – HuffPo editors and contributors seem to have been much less active in promoting their work on Twitter to date.

(Sadly, of course, the lack of a distinct Australian domain name for Buzzfeed Australia means that we have been unable to track tweets linking to the site as part of ATNIX, so this analysis remains anecdotal.)

In this it should be remembered that Buzzfeed has been operating in Australia since early 2014, however, and has had the time to develop its Australian audience – by contrast, with the paint still wet on the Huffington Post Australia logo, the site’s editors may have chosen to wait with any serious online promotion until operations are fully bedded down. As we will see from Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise data below, total visits to Huffington Post Australia are certainly already looking reasonable: more Australian users have visited Huffington Post Australia in its first weeks of operation than went to Crikey during the entirety of August.

Well ahead of these minor players, ABC News has had another strong month, with its stories shared in over 300,000 tweets during August. And the most widely shared ABC News stories this month provide a handy indication of what has exercised Australian political observers this month: from Bronwyn Bishop’s resignation as Speaker at the start of August (1,100 shares) to Border Force’s controversial announcement of Operation Fortitude (1,200 shares) and its swift cancellation following public outrage (1,700 shares), this has been a month of public controversies.

Further, the ABC’s Factcheck unit published a couple of particularly widely shared articles – on Joe Hockey’s claim that the abolition of the carbon tax has lowered electricity prices by $550 (verdict: wrong; 1,500 shares) and a union claim that the China Free Trade Agreement threatens Australian jobs (verdict: true; 1,600 shares) –, and a special feature which tested what personal information could be extracted from reporter Will Ockenden’s telecommunications metadata was unsurprisingly popular with the tech-affine Australian Twitter community (1,700 shares).

The most shared ABC article this month, however, was an opinion piece in The Drum that reflected on the still unresolved implications from the findings to date of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse, focussing especially on abuses committed by Catholic clergy in Ballarat (1,900 shares). Entirely absent from the top ten ABC stories, on the other hand, is any coverage of the controversy surrounding Trade Union Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon (which broke on 13 August and was at least temporarily resolved on 31 August by Heydon’s decision not to stand down as Commissioner), as are any articles relating to Bill Shorten’s performance as opposition leader. The Twittersphere’s eyes, it seems, are trained firmly on the federal government.

Similar patterns can be observed for the most shared Sydney Morning Herald stories in August: here, too, the implications of data retention rank highly as an opinion piece by Quentin Dempster receives more than 1,500 shares, but we also do see more substantial interest in the Dyson Heydon affair. This is not surprising since SMH political journalist Latika Bourke first broke the story, receiving some 1,300 shares in the process; a follow-up report gained another 1,000 shares.

But at the SMH, public attention on a number of opinion pieces criticising the Abbott government is also strong: in addition to Dempster’s article, pieces attacking new initiatives to limit environmental “lawfare” (1,400 shares), highlighting the political implications of the “Border Farce” fiasco (900 shares), and raising questions over Abbott’s own future as PM (800 shares) appeared amongst the top ten this month. Meanwhile, again, as all eyes are on a federal government apparently in permanent crisis mode, the opposition leader appears to enjoy a relatively free ride.

It will be interesting to see how this week’s change of Prime Ministers affects these trends.

Finally, our Experian data on total visits by Australian Internet users to these sites continue point to a fairly stable situation with few surprises. Buzzfeed Australia is now firmly entrenched in the top ten news sites, whatever some of the more entrenched players in the news industry may think about its irreverent attitude and unconventional story styles; Huffington Post Australia has slotted in at a considerably lower spot in the rankings, but again it must be remembered that the site has only operated since 19 August, and would therefore be expected to rank more highly once we have a full month of visits data to work with.

In September, then, we might expect its visitor numbers to come closer to rival competitors like The Conversation and The New Daily, which continue to lead our opinion sites category; The Conversation, in fact, might constitute a particularly valid benchmark, since it has grown from its Australian origins to an international platform and can therefore offer a similarly wide selection of stories as new international entrant Huffington Post. More next month, then!

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). 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 the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.

I must begin this Australian Twitter News Index update with an apology – we’ve had to skip May due to unforeseen server maintenance, and this has also affected part of our data-gathering for June. Consequently, this post covers the period of both June and July 2015, with future updates returning to a more regular monthly pattern again.

It is also worth noting that the Australian media landscape continues to be in flux: in addition to Daily Mail Australia, Guardian Australia, and Buzzfeed Australia last year, we’ve now also seen the launch of Huffington Post Australia (about which I’ve had more to say here), as well as the rebranding of nineMSN as 9 News. Because our approach to tracking the sharing of links to these sites depends on URLs for these Australian publications that are distinct from those of their overseas parents, we are at this stage unable to track Daily Mail, Guardian, or Buzzfeed in Australia. The local spin-off of Huffington Post, on the other hand, is using a distinct .com.au domain, and will be included in next month’s ATNIX.

In spite of these continuing changes to the Australian mediasphere, overall patterns of sharing links to the Australian news and opinion sites that we track through ATNIX have remained remarkably stable. While we are unable to observe directly how many links to sites like Guardian Australia or Daily Mail Australia are being shared, then, the indirect observation is that this is not a zero-sum game: one more Guardian link shared does not necessarily mean one less ABC News or Sydney Morning Herald link shared as a consequence, for instance.

While the long-established two-tier distribution of attention on Twitter – with ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald as clear leaders well ahead of all other sites – is stable, then, a notable feature of these two months’ activity patterns is a marked slump in sharing links (particularly to the ABC) during the first week of July. This is almost certainly related to the winter school holidays, during which attention to the news inevitably flags. The various states’ and territories’ holiday timeframes overlapped for the period of 4-12 July, therefore affecting the national broadcaster most during this time; New South Wales’s holidays covered 26 June to 13 July, and consequently this constitutes a slightly slower phase for the SMH.

Immediately after this holiday slump, however, we are seeing the most pronounced peaks in sharing activity during this two-month period, with the ABC particularly involved. Link sharing during the period of 13-17 July is dominated by an interview with controversial former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on Late Night Live (shared in more than 2,100 tweets), and a comprehensive interactive piece on the latest images from NASA’s Pluto probe New Horizons (over 1,300). From past experience, it seems quite likely that the popularity of these stories would also have been boosted by overseas Twitter users – in the Varoufakis case for example by Greek and other European users.

Significant spikes are also visible for news.com.au, where on 17 July its ‘exclusive’ coverage of new footage from the immediate aftermath of the MH17 downing received some 1,800 links in tweets, and on 26-27 July a story about teen band Five Seconds of Summer was shared a whopping 5,100 times, almost certainly also by users outside of Australia.

By comparison, it is surprising that articles about the festering political crisis which dominated public debate during the second half of July – parliamentary Speaker Bronwyn Bishop’s ‘choppergate’ scandal – do not appear amongst the most highly shared links. Perhaps this is explained by the common but somewhat counterintuitive pattern, which we have observed before, that widely covered issues in the media receive relatively little additional amplification through audience tweets: Twitter users seem to assume, perhaps correctly, that such major stories require no further boost in visibility.

On the other hand, the very ubiquity of this story may also have led to the sharing of many individual articles, rather than a focus on any one piece in particular. On 20 July, for example, an ABC News report about Prime Minister Tony Abbott putting the Speaker ‘on probation’ manages only some 200 tweets, and an opinion piece by Paula Matthewson about the scandal is shared another 280 times.

Counting up shared links to the many further articles about the issue across the Australian media would no doubt reveal ‘choppergate’ as a major controversy on Twitter, as much as in wider political discourse – but in the form of rolling coverage, with no one single update emerging as central. A simple count shows that there were more than 50,000 tweets during July that linked to one of the news and opinion sites we cover in ATNIX and contained the name ‘Bishop’, for example; almost 35,000 that contained ‘Bronwyn’; and 10,000 that contained the word ‘Speaker’ – but none of the individual articles shared in these stories managed 1,000 or more tweets in their own right.

Interestingly, the patterns in overall visits to Australian news and opinion sites as captured by Experian Hitwise do not particularly indicate any impact from the holidays, indicating perhaps that the general population does continue to keep an eye on the news even during the break, but switches off from the more active form of engagement with the news that tweeting and retweeting links to these news stories requires. As expected, we are also seeing no significant increases in Australian-based access to ABC News content during the time of the Twitter spikes around the Varoufakis and New Horizons stories, supporting the thesis that these spikes are largely driven by international users.

However, there is a pronounced spike in visits to sites such as news.com.au, Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News, and The Age on 20 July, declining gradually over the following days. This may indicate the heightened overall news interest triggered by the ‘choppergate’ affair and the PM’s response to it, even if that interest did not result in specific individual stories emerging as widely shared articles in ATNIX.

Elsewhere, the Experian Hitwise data continue to point to a persistent disconnect between The New Daily’s overall readership (netting some 2.5 million visits over these two months) and its Twitter presence. The New Daily receives more than three times as many visits as Crikey, for example, but only about one third of the number of tweets linking to its content. This unusual discrepancy suggests that the site has somehow managed to attract a particularly non-tweeting audience for its content.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). 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 the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.

April has been a very busy month for the Australian media, with the 100th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli and the cruelly drawn-out procedures leading towards the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia on 29 April both commanding very substantial coverage. But in the past we’ve also found that such large-scale mainstream media coverage does not always translate into substantial on-sharing of related articles through social media as well, most probably because the very visibility of these stories on the frontpages of newspapers and news sites, and in the lead pieces in TV news bulletins, means that social media users no longer feel a need to share these stories with their friends. What we should expect to see featured more strongly in our Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), then, are the unexpected, underreported stories.

More generally, ATNIX for April 2015, which tracks the sharing of links to Australian news and opinion sites on Twitter, also reveals the differing impact of the Easter break – and school holidays – on news sharing activities. Usually strong performers, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are particularly clearly affected by the Easter break (roughly during the first three weeks of April, depending on the state), with weekday and weekend link sharing levels almost indistinguishable during that time. ABC News, on the other hand, is barely affected except for a particularly strong weekend slump over the Easter long weekend (3-6 April): where normally the two market leaders, ABC News and Sydney Morning Herald track each other closely (as evident from their virtually indistinguishable lines during the final week of April), they drastically part company in the weeks following Easter. This may be an indication of subtle differences in their audience demographics.

Also evident, by contrast, is the very limited impact which the ANZAC anniversary on 25 April had on social media content sharing, and the similarly limited change in sharing patterns as news of the executions of Chan and Sukumaran broke. The more substantial spikes in social media sharing occurred instead on 10 April, especially for the ABC, as articles marking the passing of cricketing icon Richie Benaud were shared widely, on 6 April for the Sydney Morning Herald, as it reported on the tax avoidance strategies employed by Rupert Murdoch’s companies, and on 7 April for The Age, driven largely by it’s report that missing boy Luke Shambrook had been found alive.

There is also a prolonged period of above-average sharing for The Age during 22 and 23 April, built around a combination of articles on the search for missing toddler William Tyrell, the controversy over the extraordinary funding provided to self-styled ‘climate contrarian’ Björn Lomborg’s planned centre at the University of Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter’s op-ed about the abuse of religious scripture to subjugate women.

Not unexpectedly, the patterns in overall visits to Australian news and opinion sites as determined by Experian Hitwise look considerably different. Here, too, there is perhaps a certain slump over the course of the Easter holidays, but by contrast we certainly do also see a very pronounced spike in site visits across virtually all sites as the dramatic events surrounding Chan and Sukumaran reach their inevitable, ghastly conclusion. Interestingly, that spike is somewhat less notable for tabloids Daily Mail Australia, Herald Sun, and Daily Telegraph than for the other leading sites, reflecting perhaps that Australian Internet users chose somewhat more quality news sources as they sought the latest information about events in Indonesia.

Finally, even in spite of the wall-to-wall coverage of the event, the ANZAC anniversary did not result in any particularly elevated levels of access to the news sites on the 25/26 April weekend. It is possible that many Australians participated in dawn services and other commemorative events during these days, and therefore did not find the time to check the news as regularly as usual – but perhaps more likely, the substantial broadcast coverage of ceremonies in Turkey and at home meant that there was little need to seek out online coverage as well.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). 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 the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.