Social media has emerged as a mechanism for online news propagation. This in turn has changed the competitive landscape of news providers, a landscape that was previously partitioned based on the traditional channels of news dispersion. The channels of news distribution refer to - television, newspaper, magazine, radio, news agency and online only. In this paper, we examine similarities and differences in news propagation patterns on social media based on the primary channel of a news provider. We collected news article propagation activity data from Twitter for 32 news providers over a three-week period and analyzed their propagation networks. Our analysis shows that the structural properties of the propagation networks are statistically different based on the type of primary channel. Our study has useful implications for understanding the competition between news providers in an online environment.
['Devipsita Bhattacharya', 'Sudha Ram']
Understanding the Competitive Landscape of News Providers on Social Media