In a new study, two University of Arizona researchers use Twitter’s emergence as a “serious newswire” to compare the reach and longevity of news stories tweeted by organizations like Reuters, NPR and the Washington Post. Over a three-week period last winter, the researchers looked at tweets containing story links and found that stories from the BBC and the New York Times were the most widely retweeted.

The study’s authors, Sudha Ram and Devi Bhattachary, also looked at metrics like articles’ half-life to determine the popularity and longevity of a news story. They found that articles from BBC, Mashable and the NYT had the longest life span, while the BBC, Mashable and Wired were most likely to publish popular articles — stories on Twitter that exceeded the average article half-life of 5.5 hours (“half-life” is based on a bitly definition that says it’s the amount of time at which a link receives half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak).

The study also looked at rates of engagement — how often a Twitter user is likely to tweet a given news source. On this front, financial publications like the FT and Forbes scored lowest while the NYT, NPR and the BBC scored highest.

The BBC’s prominence can be explained in large part by the fact that is has three major Twitter spigots that frequently retweet each other: “bbcnews,” “bbcbreaking” and “bbcworld.” This means that the BBC has far more of what the study calls “Maximum Level” retweets — Level I is an initial retweet, Level II is a retweet of Level I and so on.

The study, which draws on methods used for epidemics and network analysis, also uses intriguing graphics to display news organizations’ influence. This picture, for example, shows how the NYT and the Washington Post stories produce similar network effects, but the NYT stories are retweeted by more people in isolation:

So what to make of all this? One obvious observation is that the pool of data tied to Twitter gives news agencies unprecedented tools to measure their influence and shape strategy. But, as the study notes, one size may not fit all:

This leads to the question of what constitutes successful news diffusion on Twitter. Bursts of 1st level tweets within the first hour of diffusion (corresponding to instant reach to a large audience) or a high network diameter indicating multiple levels of exchange of news over a period of time (longer lifespan)? This depends on the objective of the news media source.

Another takeaway is that these are still early days for data and news analysis. While the Twitter study is intriguing, it is presented (appropriately) in the language of science — “edge/node ratios,” “ego network details” and so on. This means it may take time for the study’s implications to be translated into everyday guidance for publishers and editors.

The stocks were suspended in morning trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange today after excessive trading had pushed its price up by just over 100 percent from its initial listing at 20 RMB per share last Friday. It is currently at 40.5 RMB, and has now resumed action in the afternoon.

The procedural measure is, says an article on the People’s Daily site, “aimed at reining in speculative manipulation of share prices,” and is temporary. Indeed, the shares were also briefly halted on their debut last week.

But the motives for the bullishness on these stocks is interesting. Li Weidong, research director at consultancy China Venture, told the People’s Daily Online:

“The reason why investors are bullish about the news portal is because of its unique background. In some investors’ eyes, the state-backed media company’s profits are somehow guaranteed given the support it receives from the government’s preferential policies.”

And so its state-sponsored heritage makes the stock, perhaps, a sure-fire winner in the micro-censored media landscape in China where private news websites can be ordered to do anything, and authorities can even demand the removal of articles or key personnel. That makes life tough for web portals like Sina, (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), et al.

Other government-controlled news organisations might list in China soon, including state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), and the official news agency Xinhua.

» This article originally appeared on Tech In Asia, and is reproduced by paidContent with permission.

This article originally appeared in Tech In Asia.

Lunch-stealing?

“Facebook will make north of $3 billion in advertising this year,” FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told the Paley Center For Media’s international council in Madrid on Thursday ”This is not doing anything good for journalism – in fact, it’s destroying it.”

Many news publishers now pipe stories through Facebook, which has also become an important referrer. Guardian.co.uk has made itself available inside a Facebook app. Grimshaw was not criticising such journalism efforts. “We have to engage with social media,” he said.

But Grimshaw is concerned that Facebook is beginning to gobble advertising money from news publishers. “I don’t blame Facebook, but I do blame the publishing industry for being very naive about some of these facts,” he told the gathering of digital news bosses in Madrid.

“Not all distribution is good distribution,” Grimshaw said. “We have to bring people back to FT.com, where we can generate revenue from them. It works very well, we’ve built a profitable model. The idea FT journalism could be freely consumed across all media platforms is not a panacea.

The nauseum of crowds?

Some leading news organisations have also concluded efforts to engage readers in journalism may not be all they’re cracked up to be.

Even The Guardian appears disappointed by Open News List, its effort to involve readers in story planning.

“It’s great that people read it, but they don’t really contribute to it as much as we hoped,” Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner told the Paley’s assembly.

“How much time and effort do people really want to put in to deciding and running their own news agenda?,” BBC News director Helen Boaden asked, suggesting only unemployed people really have the time to engage in that way.

“A lot of people are very happy for an ‘evil’ news editor to run it and to have someone else tell them what’s important in the world that day.”

And, following the call Google and Facebook made at the same conference to invent a better means of communicating news than the traditional narrative story, Wall Street Journal Europe deputy editor Neil McIntosh said that format remains in demand.

“Our readers need us to sift,” McIntosh said. “Readers are often crying out for less, not more. They’re still looking for the nut graf and the sort of stories I was taught to bash out 20 years ago.”

WSJ has, however, recently introduced Streaming Stories, a way of presenting live-updating material alongside conventional narrative.

“Print circulation is at record highs,” Andrew Rashbass told the Paley Center’s international council in Madrid on Thursday.

“We’re holding on to it as long as possible – but my view of what’s possible is more pessimistic than a lot of other people’s…

“It’s not fashionable to say it, but I think, frankly, it will be all digital. I don’t know when that will be exactly, but the idea that mass printing of paper will be around in 25 years is odd.”

Rashbass’ excited realisation at The Economist is, after years of trying to find a viable model for the Economist.com website, it is the linear and packaged “lean-back” experience of tablet publishing – more akin to familiar print magazine publishing – which gives the title its greatest possible digital manifestation and its best shot of online business success.

As titles like The Economist go there, some pure-play digital services like Flipboard go in the same direction, aggregating their content in the same way many publishers complain the web has done. So will publishers be disaggregated on tablets in the same way many have been on the web, I asked Rashbass?

“They didn’t ask me (to include our content) and, if they did, I’d probably have said ‘no’,” he replied.

“It’s not a creative reimagining in some way – it’s a head-on competitor. I don’t think it’s that significant, the (Economist.com) team obviously felt they wanted to do it. Let’s see – I’m happy to see experimentation and change minds later.

“But you’re heading down a route we’ve seen before – giving the opportunity to extract value to somebody else in an area that should be our own – so Flipboard is problematic.”

The Economist has a branded presence on Flipboard, with content taken from Economist.com rather than the magazine. No ads were visible when last checked by paidContent.

Rashbass declared himself “relaxed” about Apple’s 30 percent commission on its iPad edition, however:

“I don’t find the 30 percent problem problematic,” he said. “The majority of people in this room have always worked through third parties – whether through newsstands or other things. Even we have always have a newsstand presence.”

But they nevertheless think they have the prescription for what news media must do next…

First, the disclosures: “We’re not a news company,” Google’s head of news products and Google+ programming Richard Gingras told media executives at the Paley Center’s international council of media executives in Madrid on Thursday. “We’re a platform,” Facebook’s journalism manager Vadim Lavrusik duly followed.

Oh, really… ?

Kill the article

“Do we not deserve to rethink the architecture of what a ‘story’ is, the form of presentation and narrative to meet the needs of people who are consuming, not just by articles?,” Google’s Gingras, who previously led Salon Media Group and pioneering online community The Well, asked at the gathering.

“As Larry Page once said to me,” Gingras relayed, “‘Why don’t reporters do more footnoting?’”

For 15 years, one of the big promises of online journalism is harnessing hypermedia to better present contextual information. Linkages can easily be made between distinct events in ongoing stories, portions of those stories can be elucidated.

But Google tried to show news producers this promise two years ago, with its Living Stories system for exploring story timelines, and canned the project following experiments with leading news organisations. Content production systems are still mostly designed to celebrate the classical narrative story.

Context is king

“People want analysis from journalists,” Facebook’s Lavrusik advised. He showed data from the social network’s recent engagement with news brands suggesting ”posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks (than others).”

“Most newsgathering is still done in a very traditional way,” Lavrusik told me. “In too many places, it’s still ‘this is what’s happening’, not contextualising what’s happening. What needs to change is – there’s a lack of discovering why this is happening, the context.”

SQL at J-school

“We need to rethink how we teach journalism,” Google’s Gingras proposed.

“There will be a day – and it should not be far from now – where we can create persistent forms of stories not written in narrative form but in (Google) Fusion Tables and query strings, status updates and tweets.

“This is a renaissance of media and journalism,” he said, explaining “computational journalism” can amount to “the reinvention of the reporter’s notebook”

Less is more

“Because everyone can publish now, how do you show you’re the person to go to?” Facbeook’s Lavrusik asked.

“Media companies have approached it from ‘we need to chase more eyeballs, we need to create more content’. So journalists who created a few articles in one week are now doing that in one day.

“But content isn’t scarce – it’s the contextualisation and making sense of that content that’s becoming scarce.”

Nevermind the homepage

“Seventy-five percent of uniques are coming from external sources, only 25 percent are coming to the homepage,” Google Gringras warned. “This is significantly higher than it was three years ago.

“That suggests we’re not seeing a reconsideration of the design of the site in the first place.

“You go through your site redesign and 90 percent of your focus is on the homepage, because that’s how you present yourself to the world,” Gringras told the assembled news bosses.

Facebook’s Lavrusik backed him up. “I completely agree (with) this idea of re-thinking the article page design,” Lavrusik said. “The way news pages are designed is still the traditional way. It doesn’t line up with how people are discovering that content.”

Find the niche in the haystack

Amongst the biggest challenges for news media’s adapting to digital is highly specialised competition from disaggregated niche services and outlets to newsgatherers’ big, broad brands.

“Large media organisations need to rethink how they segment,” Gingras professed. “There are many niche products out there.

“Should we not reconsider the validity of that all-things-to all-people brand in favour of a stable of acquired or built brands?”