See the posts tagged \u2018ATNIX\u2019 on this site for a full collection of previous results.<\/a><\/p>\n To begin with, it\u2019s been a bumper week: at a total of more than 183,000 tweets to our Australian news sites, the biggest on record since we started ATNIX in mid-June. And there\u2019s another surprise: for the first time this week, ABC News<\/em> has (just) beaten the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> into first place on the leaderboard for news sites. The just over 31,400 tweets this week are ABC News<\/em>\u2019 best result (and the first time it\u2019s cracked the 30,000 mark) since ATNIX started, better even than the SMH<\/em>\u2019s own personal best at some 30,800 tweets:<\/p>\n The Fairfax flagships have their own success story this week, though, on the opinion and commentary front: here, not only does the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> capture a whopping 24% of all tweets to opinion content this week, but unusually, The Age<\/em>\u2019s opinion section moves into second place, and past The Conversation<\/em> (by some margin). In total, the 22,000 tweets linking to opinion sites this week are another record, and the 5,300 tweets with SMH<\/em> opinion links and just under 4,000 tweets with The Age<\/em> opinion links are both well above the sites\u2019 usual levels. So, it\u2019s not so much that The Conversation<\/em> had a bad result \u2013 the 2,600-plus links to its content which were shared this week almost exactly equal its results for weeks 32 and 31 \u2013, but the major Fairfax opinion sites have had a massive week, and the roughly 3,000 extra tweets linking to their commentary this time around are almost entirely responsible for the overall rise in opinion numbers this week. There\u2019s some unusual shuffling of position going on amongst the also-rans as well, though:<\/p>\n All of which begs some obvious questions: what\u2019s going on here? As always, a look at the daily trends provides a somewhat clearer picture. First, to the news: we see a significant three-day spike in tweets linking to the ABC\u2019s this week, along with a smaller spike at The Age<\/em>. Look more closely, and you\u2019ll see that even The Australian<\/em> is performing unusually well on 16 and 17 August:<\/p>\n Responsible for these spikes are words with an \u2018A\u2019 this time: Assange and Abbott. The major ABC News<\/em> spike on 16 Aug. is driven for the most part by its coverage of Julian Assange\u2019s refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London: its story on this matter<\/a> was cited in almost 1,000 tweets. The same is true for The Australian<\/em>: two stories on the UK government\u2019s threats towards the embassy<\/a>, and on Assange\u2019s legal options<\/a>, received some 900 tweets in total. This is a classic case of Australian news content receiving wider than usual circulation \u2013 in addition to the regular readers of the two news sites, many of the additional tweets linking to these pieces would have come from international followers of the Assange\/WikiLeaks<\/em> saga. (Even coverage in some of the more minor news outlets boosted their respective numbers \u2013 Sky News<\/em>, for example, added almost 200 tweets to its tally with its piece on the Anglo-Ecuadorian standoff<\/a>.)<\/p>\n For the ABC, though, a second, domestic story further boosted its content circulation \u2013 in addition to the Assange coverage, two pieces on independent MP Tony Windsor\u2019s scathing attack<\/a> on federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott<\/a> were tweeted about some 600 times in total. Barrie Cassidy\u2019s follow-up piece on the poor quality of the journalistic questioning of Abbott statements<\/a> added another 560 tweets into the mix on 17 Aug. I can\u2019t think of an international dimension to this story \u2013 so I must assume that the significant circulation which this story received was driven purely by domestic factors.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t said much about The Age<\/em>\u2019s own spike on 16 Aug. yet \u2013 that\u2019s because it\u2019s driven almost exclusively by what is badged as an opinion piece, as the next graph makes clear:<\/p>\n To be honest, we\u2019re in something of a grey area here: the piece (an article on the pro-Assange protests outside the Ecuadorian embassy on London<\/a>) is published on The Age<\/em>\u2019s site under a \/opinion path, and co-badged with a National Times<\/em> logo, but its style is reportage rather than commentary. I should note again here that we count all<\/em> links to the major news sites for our headline news graphs above, and then separate out activity around their opinion sections to compare them against dedicated opinion and commentary sites \u2013 a practice which stands us in good stead in this case, as the 950-odd tweets referencing this piece thereby show up as spikes for The Age<\/em> in both the news and the opinion graphs.<\/p>\n But we\u2019re still not done with the Assange story: due to Fairfax\u2019s content syndication strategy, essentially the same article<\/a> also ran in the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>, where it picked up another 300-odd tweets on 16 Aug., alongside another not very opinionated, but National Times<\/em>-cobadged piece on Ecuador\u2019s Assange asylum decision<\/a> which brought in another 150 tweets. The next day sees another story, on Assange\u2019s speech to supporters<\/a>, pick up some 230 tweets more \u2013 while in a brief break with the Assange story, an article by disgraced former Treasury official Godwin Grech<\/a> (yes, the man behind the Utegate \u2018scandal\u2019 which ended Malcolm Turnbull\u2019s days as Opposition Leader) on the impending \u2018golden age\u2019 of Abbott PM and Howard GG adds another 220 tweets or so. (I\u2019m still not sure whether that article was meant as some kind of belated April Fool\u2019s prank.) By Sunday, finally \u2013 WikiLeaks<\/em> cares not for your puny weekends \u2013 yet another Assange-related piece<\/a> generates some 320 tweets for the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> opinion section, delivering it its strongest Sunday since we\u2019ve been running ATNIX.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s that 17 Aug. spike for the ABC\u2019s The Drum<\/em> (still operating from its \/unleashed path on the ABC site). Why yes, that too is a piece on Assange and Ecuador<\/a>, by Greg Barns. I guess we know now what a media frenzy looks like!<\/p>\n Finally, while (as something of a poor performer normally) The National Times<\/em> \u2013 that is, Fairfax\u2019s imprint for its opinion content \u2013 is not included in the graph below, it should be noted that it, too, did exceptionally well on 16 Aug. Not only with the National Times<\/em>-badged pieces in the SMH<\/em> and Age<\/em> (which were published under those papers\u2019 respective domain names, and therefore don\u2019t count towards the NT<\/em> numbers), but with its coverage of the Windsor\/Abbott stoush. Its video of Windsor\u2019s speech<\/a> received some 185 tweets that day, while its politics liveblog<\/a> (which also contains the video) picked up another 100 or so. For a site which otherwise averages less than 100 tweets per day that cite it, the 350 it received that Wednesday were a significant success.<\/p>\n And there you have it \u2013 some week, which demonstrates well what happens when Australian news stories go global, as well as showing the somewhat circuitous routes they take as they do so. Why did the Age<\/em> story on the embassy protests generate nearly 1000 tweets, while the virtually identical piece in the SMH<\/em> only picked up a few hundred? The answer most likely lies simply in which well-connected Twitter<\/em> user posted one or the other first, and how their followers started retweeting it\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I complained about things getting boring \u2013 ATNIX for week 32 came in right on average, and had very few surprises. I finished by hoping that week 33 would turn out a little more exciting \u2013 and it looks like I got my wish. This week\u2019s edition is positively buzzing with unusual stories … <\/p>\nATNIX Week 33: 13-19 Aug. 2012<\/h1>\n
![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/image_thumb12.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/image_thumb13.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/image_thumb14.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/image_thumb15.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n