City Research Online

Abstract

This study examines the publication strategies of legacy news outlets on Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk. We used SCImago Media Rankings to identify the news organizations with the highest online audiences, namely The Guardian, The New York Times, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Data was acquired through the Twitter Academic API v2 and the SEMrush platform at the beginning of 2023 and covers all of 2022. The database includes website audits that monitor the web traffic of a domain, with the aggregate data subsequently processed using R packages and Atlas.ti. Our analyses show that a higher presence on Twitter leads to a substantive increase in social traffic, as seen with The Independent. This is in sharp contrast to the other news outlets. These differences remain irrespective of their topical news coverage, broadly focused on the Russo-Ukrainian war, or compositional feature in their messages, which largely lack typical Twitter features like hashtags and @-mentions. We conclude our analysis by discussing the communication strategies of news organizations on Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article that will be published by Taylor & Francis in Journalism Studies, available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/RJOS
Publisher Keywords:	Legacy news outlets; Twitter; Online traffic; Posting strategies; Musk’s acquisition; X platform.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HA Statistics Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General)
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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