How do college students combine social media and news?

In the last five years, social media has exploded onto the scene as a viable way for media outlets to spread news much faster than they could previously, such as on their websites. With Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, the distribution of news has a brand new face. One result of the boom in social media's relation with news is that people in the 18-24 range are more involved with the reading and redistributing of news at a much faster pace than they used to be.

I talked with Kelly Rowe of the University of Maryland, who was part of a team researching the social media habits of college students. Rowe investigated the tendencies of college students using social media to interact with news online. Rowe wanted to use the results of her survey to try and create the profile of the average college student using social media as a way to access news.  Although the results of her survey didn't show overwhelming numbers in terms of college students using social media as a primary news outlet, the development is still there.

Rowe's survey was sent out to University of Maryland students, who were asked a series of questions relating to their social networking habits and how they interacted with news stories online. 123 participants started the survey, and 121 finished it. Of those respondents, 31 said they used those networks to acquire "information." (For this survey, information was defined as news, events, and profiles.) 9 respondents said that they used the networks primarily to obtain news, and 5 said they used social media to share links and news.

A result from the survey that may have been misconstrued showed that, when asked whether they'd rather read a full news article or a tweet/Facebook post about that news, 88 would have picked the article while 27 would have picked the short-form information. However, social media offers much easier ways to access full articles. Twitter and Facebook links lead directly to articles, and major sites such as the Washington Post and Yahoo now have 'social reader' applications on Facebook. These social readers allow Facebook users to go directly to an article while remaining in the Facebook interface, and these applications have seen a lot of use in their early days.

There was a statistically significant relationship between respondents when it came to a comparison of what the respondents used social networks for and how often they posted news links to their social networks. This confirms the thought that the two activities are intertwined in at least some fashion. In terms of the social networks where respondents did acquire news, Facebook was the leading choice, with Twitter coming in a distant second and Google+ an even more distant third.

At the time of the interview, Rowe hadn't yet finished analyzing the data from both her own survey and the rest of the team's surveys, but was confident that she'd be able to create a profile. Rowe was pleased with the results of her survey. Although the results didn't show a monumental shift towards social media having a major use when it came to news aggregation and distribution, that movement is still trending upward.

Anti-Americanism in Indian Media After 9/11

In the United States, media outlets will often try to spin a story in a pro-American fashion, as consistent reporting of anti-American sentiments can doom the reputation of a newspaper or radio station. International media outlets aren't bound by a sense of patriotism when reporting about the United States, and thus, a trend in anti-Americanism can clearly be seen in global media, especially in countries that have strained relations with the United States.

One country that has had an up-and-down wave of feeling for the Americans is India, a nation embattled in military controversy of its own that lends a hand to the way it feels about America. To get a better idea of how Indian media portrayed the United States in the few years following the September 11th attacks, I spoke with University of Maryland professor Dr. Kalyani Chadha, who took part in research on the subject.

Dr. Chadha stated that India has typically always had rocky relations with the United States from a global media aspect, adding that America's apparent position of support for Pakistan will always damper progress between the two nations, something not helped by the lack of knowledge about America within India. A survey of the Indian electorate conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in 1999 showed that 10% of respondents saw the United States as an enemy, 27% saw it as a friend, 30% saw it as neutral, and 36% had either not heard of the country or simply did not have an opinion. Clearly, the United States doesn't have a major footprint beyond the upper middle class and above in India.

Consequently, while the rural communities in India may not have residents who could point at the U.S. on an unlabeled map, they constantly deal with the turmoil with their neighbors to the west, Pakistan. Indians from all walks of life are able to relate to the country's issues with Pakistan, but few outside of the urban population even know enough about the United States to form an opinion on the country beyond whatever can be read in newspapers or weeklies that make it to those underprivileged areas. Despite the major global influence the U.S. has, it has yet to make deep inroads to rural India.

Although the previous poll showed that the majority of India's opinion on the United States comes from the upper crust of the Indian population, a fact confirmed by Dr. Chadha, that doesn't prevent pro-American sentiment. Since the Cold War, tensions have cooled between the two nations, with India's opinion of the United States growing more positive. The September 11th attacks brought a wave of sympathy and compassion from the Indian media, with newspapers calling the attacks "vicious," "terrible," and an attack on the "civilized world." However, this sentiment was short-lived.

As George W. Bush brought the United States into Afghanistan and Iraq in the months and years following 9/11, the Indian view of the nation changed dramatically. After the start of the Iraq War, a poll from weekly newsmagazine Outlook showed that 86% of respondents opposed the war and 69% saw Bush as a "warmonger." The sympathetic feelings that the U.S. had garnered had been lost in India almost as fast at the had come around the first time. Dr. Chadha noted that Indians saw the American plan of action as hypocritical, suggesting that India should withhold attacking Pakistan in retaliation for terror while the Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The level of anti-Americanism has since leveled off from that point, but it could have remained more positive had Bush not been so caustic in India's eyes.

The research shows that although the Indian media's depiction of the United States has improved over the last 30 or so years, individual events such as the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the Iraq War can have drastic effects on the portrayal of the United States on a global media scale.

Introductory Post

I'm Eric Garment. I'm a junior broadcast journalism major at the University of Maryland, College Park.
I aspire to be a sportscaster, with my dream job being an announcer for the New York Mets, my favorite team growing up and now. Part of the reason that the Mets are able to keep their fans tuning into broadcasts is their announcers. Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez have won multiple New York Emmy awards for their television game calls and Howie Rose is a mainstay on WFAN radio.
One of the questions I have in regards to personalities and broadcasts is - how important is the talent in retaining viewers? This doesn't apply to just baseball, many news broadcasts can gain or lose notable viewers based on the reporters they have on camera.
For example, after Dan Rather's departure from CBS' evening news broadcast made way for Katie Couric, CBS executives were hopeful that the first woman to anchor a major television network's nightly news would cause major ratings boosts. Instead, CBS lagged behind NBC and ABC, actually hitting a ratings low for a 20-year period. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/03/cbs-evening-news-pelley_n_917494.html)
My goal in trying to understand news audiences is to get a better grasp of what makes a successful broadcast. What things can be done outside of traditional advertising to bring more people to a certain station? How can Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media improve or detract from news? Hopefully those questions and any others that may arise will be answered not only this fall, but in years to come.