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The Top Ten Most Twitter

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Journalists can see which topics the audience is interested by looking at this information and continue to report on these hot topics.
The top ten most followed twitter users are not media organizations or corporations, but individuals. Researchers and Cornell and Yahoo analyzed how information spreads from media to the masses. They found that a new class of semi-public individuals consisting of authors, bloggers, journalists, and subject matter experts have become part of an important niche on twitter. Opinion-leaders are more exposed to the media than their followers and are part of the intermediate layer. Around half of the information originating from the media passes to the masses indirectly through the opinion leaders (Wu, Mason, Hofman, & Watts, 2011). Automated journalism is an important way technology will change reporting. Algorithms have been able to automatically produce news from structured data. Currently, algorithms can generate news for earthquake alerts, company earnings reports, and crime reporting. The Los Angeles Times used an algorithm to provide comprehensive coverage of homicides and not just focus on sensational cases. Another Los Angeles Time project, Mapping L.A., uses algorithms to automate news generation regarding crimes and generates warnings when crime reports surpass a predefined threshold. If the number of crimes reported that week is significantly higher than the weekly average, the system will trigger a crime alert for that neighborhood.

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