In early 2020, we substantially updated the underlying ATNIX architecture. Most importantly, we now reduce the various URLs that may lead to the same story to a single canonical URL, in order to arrive at a reliable count for how often a story has been shared (rather than just how often a particular URL variation has been shared). This has become necessary because many news sites incorporate part of the story headline into its URL – but headlines may change after publication, and so multiple different URLs may point to the same story in the end.

ATNIX tracks the sharing of stories from most major Australian news outlets – from ABC News to New Matilda and beyond. We exclude international outlets with an Australian presence (such as The Guardian Australia or Mail Online Australia), because the majority of their content originates from outside of Australia, but we continue to include The Conversation because it remains Australian-based and sources a substantial amount of its content from Australian authors. The data gathered for ATNIX include all tweets, by Australian as well as international Twitter accounts, that link to the domains of these Australian news outlets. From these, we exclude links to their homepages as well as to non-news content.

The ATNIX Twitter account (@_ATNIX_) posts half-daily, daily, and weekly updates on trending Australian news stories, and ATNIX also provides an interactive dashboard with live and historical data on sharing patterns for Australian news, at and above. In earlier years, ATNIX analysis was published in a regular column in The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/columns/axel-bruns-1433).

The Australian Twitter News Index has reported on patterns in the sharing of Australian news content through Twitter for many years; it has documented the overall stability of Australian Twitter users’ preferences for specific news sources (especially ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald), tested the overlap in content-sharing audiences between news outlets with different editorial and ideological orientations, and reported on the most popular news stories during specific timeframes.

Datasets analogous to ATNIX are also being collected for Germany, the Nordic countries, Spain, and a selection of suspected sources of mis- and disinformation.

Key scholarly discussions of ATNIX and its data can be found in:

Bruns, A. (2016). Big Data Analysis. In T. Witschge, C. W. Anderson, D. Domingo, & A. Hermida (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism (pp. 509-527). Sage. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102642/

Bruns, A. (2017). Making Audience Engagement Visible: Publics for Journalism on Social Media Platforms. In B. Franklin & S. A. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 325-334). Routledge. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102644/

For further questions about ATNIX and its datasets, please contact the project leader, Prof. Axel Bruns.

This major new volume is designed as a sequel – rather than simply an updated edition – of my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Picking up where the previous book left off, Gatewatching and News Curation documents how professional and citizen journalism, and news audiences’ everyday engagement with journalism and journalists, has developed over the past decade and more. It shows that the practice of gatewatching is now more central to all of this than ever before (that it has become demotic) – but also that it has continued to transform and adapt to new communicative platforms, most centrally including social media like Twitter and Facebook. As a result, although the fabled ‘random acts of journalism’ might not have eventuated, most social media users now perform habitual acts of news curation instead.

The book covers these changes to news users’ engagement with journalism, both in the context of breaking news and in everyday newssharing practices, and how this has changed the news itself; it then reviews how both journalists and news organisations have attempted to respond to this transformation, variously by proactively embracing change or burying their heads in the sand, and highlights the format of news liveblogs as a key example of the new realities of news in a hybrid media environment. It concludes by reflecting on the impact that our changing, complex social news media system must have on our understanding of the public sphere.

I’m delighted with the advance praise the book has already received, some of which is here, along with a PDF of the book’s introductory chapter. The book itself is available from Peter Lang, Amazon, and other booksellers – and the eBook version comes under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licence! The introductory chapter is available on my Website as a reading sample.

At a time of such intense focus on the intersections and conflicts between journalism and social media, I hope this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate. My sincere thanks to everybody who has helped me refine the thoughts presented here.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past industry responses to just about any new media form and format, seen most recently for example in the ‘blog wars’ of the 2000s –, journalists and news outlets have now gradually and often grudgingly accepted social media as tools of the trade, and as spaces where news producers and news users come together in new and unforeseen configurations. The question now is whether – as with blogs – the journalism industry will be able to normalise and thus tame this new phenomenon, or whether this time around it is journalism and journalists that will be normalised into social media environments.

My sincere thanks for the entire team at Haifa University for the opportunity to present this keynote at the Symposium, and especially to Daphne Raban for her exceptional hospitality – and many thanks also to Nik John, Karine Nahon, and everyone else whom I caught up with along the way.

I’m now getting ready to get ATNIX started up again, though, and hopefully to make some further additions that will prove useful in the longer term. To get us started, I thought it might be useful to post a long-term overview of ATNIX trends since we started the index in mid-2012. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a growing adoption of Twitter in Australia, to a point where there are now more than 2.8 million accounts in the Australian Twittersphere – and it seems logical that this would also manifest in changes to the sharing patterns for Australian news sites on Twitter.

Indeed, the total volume of tweets sharing links to Australian news sites has increased during these two years – as has, it should be noted, the number of news sites we’ve tracked. In total, since mid-2012 (and allowing for a handful of server outages), we’ve captured some 20 million tweets in total, containing more than 24.5 million URLs. And those numbers have increased steadily: while in July 2012, we saw a total of 677,000 tweets linking to our Australian news sites, by July 2014 that number had grown to more than one million. (In fact, 2014 has seen particularly strong growth, perhaps due to the substantial confluence of various domestic and international events and crises.)

Broken down across the 35 Australian news and opinion sites we are currently tracking, these patterns look as follows (click to enlarge, and ignore the obvious drop-outs due to server maintenance in November 2013):

For long-term followers of our ATNIX data, it is immediately evident that the overall rankings amongst the major news sites have remained largely stable: ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald remain the most widely shared news sites in Australia by some margin (and, it seems, by a margin that continues to increase relative to their nearest competitors). In the second tier, The Age and news.com.au are similarly running neck-and-neck. And they are followed, finally, by the rest of the field, with some of those sites occasionally recording major spikes due to the viral dissemination of single stories.

A closer look reveals a few more interesting patterns, however. The SMH appears to have recovered from a lengthy slump in popularity that began in early 2013, which saw it fall back from ABC News’ tail, and since April 2014 has been shadowing its major competitor much more closely once again. Amongst the opinion and commentary sites, The Conversation is the obvious market leader, though this is also boosted by its new-found transnational reach, with strong take-up in the UK and elsewhere – and it should be noted that following the site’s conversion from a .edu.au to a .com address we missed some months of data early this year, so its lead over nearest competitor Crikey would likely be even greater. And overall, the greatest spike in news sharing activity occurred, unsurprisingly, during the last federal election, when we captured more than 50,000 tweets linking to ABC News for the election week alone.

Sadly absent from this chart, however, are Guardian Australia and Daily Mail Australia. Due to their lack of a dedicated Australian domain, or of any other markers identifying their Australian coverage, we’re unable to separate Australia-specific news sharing activities from the global Guardian and Mail brands, and therefore cannot include them here. (We’re choosing to include The Conversation despite its now international audience, however, because it originated and continues to be substantively based in Australia.) Eventually, as we develop our data gathering approach further, we hope to develop the methods to better identify Australian-based sharing of news from these sources.

Introducing Experian Hitwise Data

As we develop ATNIX further, we also hope to place it into a wider context by comparing these Twitter-based news sharing patterns with reading and sharing activities elsewhere. We’ll soon attempt to tackle Facebook, but for now, here’s a glimpse of a very different data source: Experian Hitwise. Experian Marketing Services collects anonymous data at ISP level through opt-in panels about the Web searching and browsing patterns of Australian Internet users, and in the graph below I’ve compiled the site visit statistics for the same sites which we are tracking as part of ATNIX, for the same timeframe:

Total visits to Australian news and opinion sites, July 2012 to September 2014. Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services Australia.

Once again, a significant rise in the total number of visits to news sites by Australian Internet users since the start of 2014 is evident, corresponding to a similar rise in news sharing during this time; we’re also seeing a matching dip in late April/early May, during the Easter / ANZAC Day holiday period. However, the ranking of news sites is markedly different: since early 2014, the market leader in Australian online news is news.com.au, even if such leadership doesn’t result in a similarly strong result in news sharing as we measure it through ATNIX. Conversely, ATNIX leader ABC News ranks ‘only’ fifth amongst the most read news sites in Australia.

Amongst the opinion and commentary sites, The Conversation and Crikey lead the Experian Hitwise rankings, too, but the rest of the leaderboard is structured quite differently. This is probably an indication of the respective positioning of these sites: to attract a loyal readership in their own right, to encourage the viral distribution of their articles, or both. Experian Hitwise records a surprisingly strong readership for The Morning Bulletin, for example, while ATNIX does not show its content to be very widely shared through Twitter; conversely, New Matilda content is widely shared, but according to the Experian Hitwise figures it does not seem to have a very large regular audience.

And finally, the Experian Hitwise numbers also provide us with a glimpse of Guardian Australia’s and Daily Mail Australia’s market positioning: by late September they’ve managed to rise to eight and fifth place on the Experian Hitwise chart, respectively, and continue to trend gradually upwards. We’ll watch their further development with interest.

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”.

With the purpose of trying out some new tools and ideas, I collected tweets about Toronto’s WorldPride festival, which took place this past June. It was a huge shindig and while I wasn’t able to capture every relevant tweet, the 6 hashtags that I tracked* (#WP14TO, #WorldPride, #PrideToronto, #TorontoPride, #PrideTO, #WPTO14) turned up a pretty good dataset totalling 68,231 tweets. This dataset showed some cool trends relating to participation, especially people’s awesome selfies and photo documentation of the WorldPride parade (check out the National Post’s photos if you’re lacking rainbows in your life). I hope to eventually share some of these broader analyses but today I just wanted to look at a little bump that showed up after the festival, circled in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Total WorldPride tweets over time

This little spike of nearly 1000 tweets happened when Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford – fresh out of rehab, as all the latest news stories note – refused to join in the standing ovation at a city council meeting to thank WorldPride’s coordinators. That’s right, everyone else stood up and clapped but Ford, with his history of avoiding Toronto Pride and opposing visible support for LGBTQ people throughout the city, remained seated. Apparently, to add insult to injury, all of this came alongside Ford casting the only vote against launching a study to determine if more homeless shelter space for LGBTQ youth is needed in Toronto.

So what did Torontonians do? Well, when the incident first happened, some of the city councillors tweeted about it. This is reflected in the first bump in Figure 2, when many people retweeted these preliminary expressions of disappointment with Ford’s behaviour. Figure 2 shows the volume of tweets over time for the bump that was circled in Figure 1 but here I’ve also plugged a bit of code into Tableau to show the different types of tweets. You can see that this whole Twitter event was characterized by people retweeting, often using the popular #TOpoli (Toronto politics) alongside the WorldPride hashtags.

Figure 2. Rob Ford incident over time, sorted by tweet type

The mainstream press caught wind of the story and a bit later in the day, CBC News tweeted about it, adding a photo of Rob Ford sitting during the applause. However, the real kicker in terms of momentum happened when media personality Jian Ghomeshi (broadcaster, musician, host of Q) made a tweet that resonated with a bunch of people:

It’s not the drugs/alcohol, it’s this… RT @CBCNews Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doesn’t stand for #WorldPride ovation. pic.twitter.com/Z33MFpYmhx

— jian ghomeshi (@jianghomeshi) July 9, 2014

Okay, so Ghomeshi’s tweet wasn’t an original, he simply added his own opinion to the CBC’s previous tweet. But the combination of celebrity critique with the compelling visual made this the most popular retweet of the whole debacle, raking in nearly 300 retweets in my dataset and gaining even a few more that weren’t captured during my data collection.

What does it mean that retweets dominated the dialogue throughout this whole spectacle? Does it show that mainstream media still has the loudest voice even on social media platforms, which are often lauded as being participatory and democratizing? Perhaps. Does it mean that Torontonians are lazy and would rather just press the ‘retweet’ button than weigh in with their own opinions? I think not.

Retweeting IS a form of participation (boyd, Golder & Lotan, 2010). It serves multiple purposes: it gets the word out by making a conversation more visible, it engages a wider network of participants in the dialogue, and it shows support for a particular viewpoint. Ghomeshi’s tweet hits the important points – it expresses a negative sentiment for Ford’s actions and drives it home with visual evidence of his non-participation. People who retweeted likely felt that this tweet represented their feelings accurately. It’s also likely that a broader range of people feel comfortable retweeting something fairly political when it’s led by a media personality because they may not be ready to make such strong statements independently.

A couple of the participants in my MSc research who weren’t out to their families talked about this. They explained that they wanted to show support for LGBTQ people and did so through political tweets that didn’t reflect their identity as much as personal statements. It seems that retweeting might be a way for a lot of people to get involved and stand in solidarity with a certain viewpoint without their actions implicating them beyond their capacity. Our personal situations may not always allow all of us to be highly vocal activists, but retweeting could add power to those who do speak up so that they speak on behalf of a collective – a collective of Twitter users, at least.

Personally, I might also guess that users mostly retweeted during this incident because, well, is there really anything left to say about Rob Ford?

————

Notes:

• I’ve added Tableau to my blog’s “Assorted tools” page in case you’d like to have a closer look at it. Their website allows a free trial along with some great video tutorials.
• A good resource for what/why/how to work with Twitter data is the book “Twitter and Society” edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt and Cornelius Puschmann.
• You may have noticed that I’ve been talking about ‘big data’ without heaps of numbers and statistics. While this speaks to my tendency toward qualitative research, it’s also a technique from the digital humanities methods that I’ve been learning about. It’s possible to take large sets of data and do a ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2007) of them in their entirety (like Figure 1) and then to drill down into more qualitative types of content analysis. I turned to Richard Rogers’ book “Digital Methods” as inspiration for this.
• Disclaimer: This was just an exercise (with a relatively small number of tweets!) that I’ve presented for discussion – there are of course lots of limitations to ‘big data’ analysis and the use of Twitter data. While I don’t address these here, other people have – start with boyd and Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data” to get a handle on the issues.
• Opinions are my own, as this was cross-posted from stefanieduguay.com

*All of this was done with the gracious help of QUT’s Social Media Research Group, especially with Jean Burgess’ ninja Twitter data collection skills and Darryl Woodford’s crash course on Tableau analysis for Twitter data.

In text references:

boyd, d., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2010.412

Moretti, F. (2007). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.

‘Big Data’

• Jean Burgess: A Decade of ‘Social Media’ and What to Do about It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference pre-conference on Internet Histories, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess: Easy Data, Hard Data? Twitter Research and the Politics of Data Access, presented at the Compromised Data symposium, Toronto, 28 Oct. 2013.
• Darryl Woodford: Slicing Big Data: Gambling, Twitter & Time Sensitive Information, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Darryl Woodford: Lightning Talk: Social Media Methods & Ethics, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference pre-conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Sky Croeser and Tim Highfield: Mapping Movements: Social Movement Research and Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives, presented at the Compromised Data symposium, Toronto, 29 Oct. 2013.

Crisis Communication

• Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns and Avijit Paul: Cumulative and Comparative Social Media Analytics for Crisis Communication, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Social Media Issue Publics in Australia, presented at the IBM Research Colloquium 2013, Melbourne, 12 Nov. 2013.
• Avijit Paul: Extracting Important Information from Social Network Stream during Crisis, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Social Media in Times of Crisis: The Australian Perspective, presented at a Project EPIC symposium, Boulder, 23 Oct. 2013.

News and Politics

• Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield and Theresa Sauter: #ausvotes Mark Two: Twitter in the 2013 Australian Federal Election, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 24 Oct. 2013.
• Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns: Exploring Emotions on #auspol: Polarity and Public Performance in the Twitter Debate on Australian Politics, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 26 Oct. 2013.
• Tim Highfield: Appropriating Breaking News? The Evolving Twitter Coverage of the Lance Armstrong Doping Scandal, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns: Twitter and the 2013 Australian Election, presented at Political Imperatives: Media and the 2013 Election Campaign, Brisbane, 27 Sep. 2013.
• Wilfred Wang: Defending Cantonese Weibo and Geo-Identity Politics in Guangzhou China, presented at ‘The Impact of War on Modern Chinese Society’, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 18-19 Oct. 2013.
• Axel Bruns and Theresa Sauter: Anatomie eines Trending Topics: Retweet-Ketten als Verbreitungsmechanismus für aktuelle Ereignisse, presented at the DGPuk Innovative Methods for the Study of Public Communication workshop, Vienna, 8 Nov. 2013.

Popular Culture

• Ana Vimieiro and Renato Vimieiro: Oscar Pistorius and the Death of Reeva Steenkamp: Mapping Public Opinions Using Frame Analysis and Data Mining, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Katrin Weller and Axel Bruns: Friends or Followers: German Soccer Clubs and Their Fans on Twitter, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 25 Oct. 2013.
• Tim Highfield: News via Voldemort: The Role of Parody and Satire in Topical Discussions on Twitter, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Denver, 23-26 Oct. 2013.
• Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns: #Pontiff-Ex: The Twitter Community’s Reaction to the Papal Resignation, presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver, 25 Oct. 2013.

Platforms

• Kim Osman: Wikipedia as a New Media Institution: Issues of Diversity, Regulation and Sustainability in an Open Encyclopaedia, poster presented at WikiSym & OpenSym 2013, Hong Kong, 5-7 Aug. 2013 (paper at QUT ePrints).
• Wilfred Wang: Identity, Locality and Social Media in Guangzhou China, presented at the Fifth Postgraduate Symposium: Identities, Ideas, Ideologies, Griffith University, Brisbane, 1 Nov. 2013.

That should be enough for 2013! See you next year at a conference somewhere…

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’ at Mapping Online Publics for a full collection of previous results.

ATNIX Weeks 25-52/2012: 18 June – 30 Dec. 2012

Over the course of these six months and two weeks, we captured a total of over 3.9 million tweets which included links to Australian news sites – an average of some 140,000 tweets per week. Those numbers would have been slightly higher still in the absence of a number of temporary server outages which led us to miss some data in a number of weeks; at any rate, they constitute a very solid basis for our analysis. Sadly, there’s very little international research to date with which we might be able to compare our figures – we’re unable to say whether Australian Twitter users are especially engaged with or disengaged from the news, therefore.

(We’re working on such comparisons, though – we’ve started tracking Twitter-based newssharing in Germany, where we seem to see some 240,000 shares per week, on average. Given that Germany’s population is close to four times that of Australia, this appears to indicate that Australians have taken to Twitter much more enthusiastically than Germans, and/or that Australian Twitter users are more interested in sharing news items than their German counterparts.)

In Australia, we’ve seen a very stable distribution of attention across the sites we track: the Sydney Morning Herald and the news-related sections of the ABC Website clearly lead the pack, between them accounting for well over a third of all tweeted links. The Age and news.com.au constitute a second tier of sites, each commanding some 10% of the total volume of tweets; in other words, these four sites alone receive nearly 60% of all Australian news links being shared by Twitter users.

This is symptomatic of a number of well-known factors: first, it demonstrates the considerable concentration of the Australian news industry on a handful of major operators – flagship sites for Fairfax (twice), News Ltd., and the ABC are all represented in this top four. We might expect News Ltd.’s national broadsheet The Australian to figure strongly here as well (and it does appear in fifth place, but closer to the other also-rans than to the top four), but remember that its site has implemented a partial paywall system which is likely to impact on Twitter users’ ability to read and share articles in The Australian.

Second, these patterns also reflect what we understand the demographics of the Australian Twittersphere to be at this point in time. The strong performance of Fairfax’s two metropolitan broadsheets, and of Australia’s leading public service media organisation, suggests that Twitter user demographics remain skewed to the traditional audiences for relatively quality, broadsheet news, rather than for tabloid content as provided, for example, by News Ltd.’s papers Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph. Again, there is a dearth of reliable research into Twitter’s demographics in Australia, but we do believe its overall userbase to be somewhat skewed towards relatively urban, educated, affluent users aged between 25 and 55 – matching the typical audience for quality news content.

The three-tier structure of Twitter news sharing in Australia becomes more evident when we examine its weekly ebbs and flows:

Here, we see the SMH and ABC News shadowing one another closely throughout the year, trading the lead from time to time. What generally puts the SMH over the top is its stronger weekend performance, driven most likely by the content produced for the paper’s weekend edition; the ABC doesn’t have any similar weekend fare to offer, and drops off more substantially on Saturdays and Sundays.

The Age and news.com.au form another fairly closely-matched duo; news.com.au might even have come out in third place for the year, except for a form slump in the final weeks of 2012. Below them we find the rest of our sites, led by The Australian and the two major tabloids; none of these sites manage to advance well beyond 10,000 tweets per week on a regular basis, and the majority struggle even to reach the 5,000 tweet mark – a far cry from the 25,000 to 30,000 tweets which the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC News regularly command.

While we’ve explored the specific spikes and troughs in news sharing in much more depth on a week-by-week basis in past ATNIX updates, a few overall observations are nonetheless useful. The two major dips on weeks 28 and 46 are due to server maintenance, and should not concern us overly much; the six-week slump in volume between weeks 35 and 40 (27 Aug. to 7 Oct.) is more interesting, however. Weeks 38-40 coincide with the spring school holidays in several states, which may explain the slump for those weeks; I can’t find a particularly convincing explanation for the drop-off during the preceding three weeks, however. We do see a similar drop in the last week of the year, as Christmas apathy takes hold; this seems to be especially pronounced for the Australian Financial Review, incidentally.

Turning to the spikes, week 33 and 34 stand out especially, and are driven by a combination of factors. One of them points to a phenomenon which is familiar to us by now: the international distribution of Australian stories, which we’ve observed this past year especially in the context of the unfolding saga around WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. In week 33, it’s Assange’s flight to the Ecuadorian embassy in London which is the subject of a range of Australian news articles; these articles are picked up and widely retweeted by the worldwide WikiLeaks support community on Twitter, boosting the numbers especially of the Fairfax broadsheets.

But there are also major domestic events which add to these spikes: in week 33, independent MP Tony Windsor’s scathing attack on federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in federal parliament is covered in a series of news articles and posts of the full video which receive a substantial number of links from Twitter. In week 34, Leigh Sales’s confrontational 7.30 interview with the Opposition Leader drives major traffic to the ABC site, as links to the full video are shared widely.

After the mysterious spring slump, the pressure on Abbott is renewed in week 41 by Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s now famous ‘misogyny’ speech in parliament, which constitutes a rare case of a domestic political story making major international headlines. Here, it’s the ABC which gains the most additional attention, as its full-length post of the video receives some 6,300 tweets over the course of two days.

Finally, the one notable spike amongst the minnows occurs for nineMSN in week 30, essentially doubling its normal tweet count. This, too, is an example of a domestic story gone viral: it relates to a group of four Australian fans of teen band One Direction who feel the band no longer cares about its fans, and decided to burn their concert tickets. Outrage amongst One Direction’s remaining fans was swift and contagious, resulting in some 4,500 tweets which linked to the story.

In addition to the tweeting of general news reports, ATNIX also specifically tracks the sharing of opinion articles, both from the opinion sections of our major news Websites and from the major Australian opinion and commentary sites. Compiled over the second half of 2012, the distribution of attention to such sites and sections shows a similarly multi-tiered picture for the nearly 580,000 tweets we captured:

Once again, we find the Sydney Morning Herald in pole position – and a strong response to its commentary on Julian Assange’s Senate bid in week 50 has meant that the opinion section of Fairfax stablemate The Age managed to beat independent academic opinion site The Conversation into second place, by a margin of fewer than 2,000 tweets over the past six months. Another independent, online-only opinion site, Crikey, rounds out the top four.

In this context, it should be noted that numbers for the Fairfax sites will be slightly inflated: we identify Fairfax opinion articles by their URL paths (e.g. smh.com.au/opinion/politics/…), but the sites have a tendency to file fairly straightforward political reporting from their Canberra correspondents under such URLs (and under the on-site imprint National Times) as well; I’ve noted this in several past ATNIX updates. Short of checking each article manually, there’s nothing we can do to remove such non-commentary articles from the count. However, even a reduction of SMH and Age tweet numbers by 50% would still see them in third and fourth place, respectively – so while the total count might be somewhat inflated, the overall importance of these sites as sources of opinion articles for Twitter-based discussion is not.

Again, then, the distribution of attention to opinion and commentary sites and sections shows a considerable focus on the broadsheet content provided by the Fairfax papers, mixed with the major independent commentary sites; the top four sites alone account for over 60% of all shared links. Against this, the ABC and News Ltd. sites are comparatively absent: blogs.news.com.au (home to notable commentators such as Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, or Miranda Devine) commands only 7% of the total volume of tweets, and the ABC’s The Drum manages 5%. (Here, however, there will be some systematic undercounting: while we are able to identify general Drum articles by their abc.net.au/unleashed URLs, Drum articles by ABC journalists are not filed under the /unleashed path, and cannot be identified reliably.) The Australian, finally, captures only 4% of the Twitter attention share – it’s here where its paywall has the greatest impact, as it specifically prevents direct access to most opinion articles from Twitter links.

Given the ephemerality of political opinion and commentary, and the substantially lower volume of tweets which link to such content, compared to ‘straight’ news articles, the week-by-week overview necessarily shows much more pronounced fluctuations:

Overall, we see the Sydney Morning Herald well above the rest, as a consistent leader throughout these six months, while Age and Conversation battle for second spot. There is a notable rise in the number of tweets referring to blogs.news.com.au from week 43 onwards, but News Ltd.’s columnists should not read this as a particularly widespread popular vindication of their views: rather, this rise is due almost entirely to the activities of a single Twitter user who began to tweet links to the blog posts – with a particular focus on Andrew Bolt – with a considerable degree of dedication (or obsession, perhaps). As I noted, for example, in week 44, this user would sometimes tweet the same link several dozen times a week, usually under the #auspol hashtag, resulting in well over 1,000 blogs.news.com.au tweets for the week. And no, I won’t name that user.

Overall, spikes in commentary activity match what we’ve already seen for news: Assange and commentary on Tony Abbott’s performance as Opposition Leader drive the spikes before the spring slump; Gillard’s misogyny speech is responsible for the major spike after it. Otherwise, Julian Assange and his international network of supporters are to blame: in addition to week 34, they drive spikes in weeks 39 and 50 (the latter is founded mainly on National Times-branded Fairfax news articles, however).

What’s more remarkable about the opinion and commentary field, however, is that – contrary to the mainstream of news reporting – it is possible for minor commentary sites to break through with a major story at times. New Matilda and Independent Australia both reached Crikey and even Conversation territory at least for a couple of weeks each during the past six months: in week 34, New Matilda published an interview with Noam Chomsky about Julian Assange which boosted its link total by more than 1,000 tweets; in week 48, Independent Australia published Margo Kingston’s exposé on Tony Abbott’s slush fund “Australians for Honest Politics” and received some 1,750 tweets for its troubles. That piece was republished in New Matilda in turn, two weeks later, where it resulted in another spike, while Independent Australia was using forensic IT analysis to test Abbott’s statements on the James Ashby affair.

In spite of the pronounced underdevelopment of the Australian news market as a result of stifling media ownership concentration, the fact that these and other minor voices in the media landscape can make themselves heard at least from time to time on Twitter is an encouraging sign: new entrants – and we might still count Crikey and The Conversation amongst this list, too – can establish themselves at least in the field of political commentary, if not necessarily in general news.

The recent announcement of an Australian edition of British newspaper The Guardian has added another potential challenger, whose introduction we’ll track with interest in 2013’s ATNIX. At least as far as Twitter is concerned, The Guardian’s profile should suit the demographics of the Australian Twittersphere well – it will be interesting to see how this new entrant shifts the distribution of attention which we’ve observed in 2012.