ABSTRACT
The adoption of mobile devices providing asymmetrical relationships with friends and followers in social networks has provided microblogging services like Twitter with the power to deliver messages of personal relevance in real time anywhere the data network provider has coverage (Copeland, 2011 ; Hermida, 2010a ). As a consequence, access to portable computer mediated communication has in\ uenced journalism’s evolution towards a new information sharing model that is more participatory and collective (Boczkowski, 2004 ; Deuze, 2003 ; Domingo, Quandt, Heinonen, Paulussen, Singer, & Vujnovic, 2008 ). Twitter, which allows 140 character messages to be shared with followers, embraces user friendly data sharing/mining mechanisms organizing topics and issues for chronological analysis; these tools are employed by journalists around the world to gather and cross-reference information to enrich their journalistic endeavors (Ahmad, 2010 ; Bosch, 2010 ; Farhi, 2009 ; Hermida, 2010a ; Perez-Latre, Blanco, & Sanchez, 2011 ). With more than 300 million users, Twitter offers unprecedented real-time access to online trending topics at the local and global level, an invaluable resource in the deadline-driven environment of journalism (Domingo et al., 2008 ; Copeland, 2011 ; Ingram, 2008 ; Stassen, 2010 ). However, the volume of tweets generated by reactions to political and socio-economic events, like the 2009 Iranian elections and the Arab Spring, have the potential to drown vital signals under the noisy unregulated discourse found on Twitter (Copeland, 2011 ; Hermida, 2010a ). Journalists’ Twitter adoption to access a high volume of online trending topics and updates has generated skepticism about crowdsourcing and the overall quality of content
published by the news media industry (Deuze, 2004 ; Dowd, 2009 ; Parr, 2009 ; Wasserman, 2009 ).
