Attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter: A survey

In recent years, news media have been hugely disrupted by news promotion, commentary and sharing in online, social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit). This disruption has been the subject of a significant literature that has largely used AI techniques - machine learning, text analytics and network models - to both (i) understand the factors underlying audience attention and news dissemination on social media (e.g., effects of popularity, type of day) and (ii) provide new tools/guidelines for journalists to better disseminate their news via these social media. This paper provides an integrative review of the literature on the professional reporting of news on Twitter; focusing on how journalists and news outlets use Twitter as a platform to disseminate news, and on the factors that impact readers' attention and engagement with that news on Twitter. Using the precise definition of a news-tweet (i.e., divided into user, content and context features), the survey structures the literature to reveal the main findings on features affecting audience attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter. From this analysis, it then considers the most effective guidelines for digital journalists to better disseminate news in the future.