Transnational News Sharing on Social Media: Measuring and Analysing Twitter News Media Repertoires of Domestic and Foreign Audience Communities

Abstract

In digitized media environments, users can access news from all over the world. The internationalization of news consumption is intensified by social media like Twitter, as users share news from different countries. In our study, we combine the two strands of research about media repertoires as well as transnational news consumption. Switzerland is a compelling case with regard to transnational news consumption as media outlets in the three official languages, German, French, and Italian can reach audiences in the larger neighbouring countries of Germany, France, and Italy. To investigate transnational news consumption, we tracked URL shares of Swiss online news media websites for two months on Twitter. We then combined this data with the users’ followee structures in the Twitter network (n = 355,197 tweets, n = 64,170 unique users) and inductively detected domestic and foreign audience communities with social network analysis. Thus, we were able to identify and compare the Twitter news media repertoires of domestic and foreign audience communities. Regarding transnational usage patterns, we show that especially quality media brands continuously reach audience communities in neighbouring countries.