Why PA is looking to social media for #GE2015 coverage

Social media is playing an important role in Press Association's coverage of the UK general election, as the news agency partnered up with a number of technology companies to enable social curation and sentiment analysis on Twitter, for example.

"Social media is now a key part of everybody's lives," explained Darren Waters, PA's head of social media.

"It's where people go to discuss, to talk, to complain, to learn things. And we think that just as we should talk to people as a news agency on the street, just as we should use opinion polls, that social data is another tool to understand how people are responding."

PA has teamed up with Adoreboard, who built semantic analysis algorithms to understand how people react to events through the language they are using on social networks.

"We know that lots of people are taking to social media to discuss the election, but we're trying to understand more deeply exactly who is getting talked about and in what kinds of conversations they're being talked about," explained Waters.

PA used the technology during the TV debates, and is currently using it to get detailed insights into which candidates are the most talked about, and the type of sentiment they are most associated with.

Working with this data and Adoreboard are PA's graphics and data teams, putting together a table of the top five and bottom five "political movers and shakers on Twitter".


The popularity table on 10 April, image courtesy of PA.

In the later stages of the campaign, PA also plans to find out through the same technology which emotions Twitter users associate with which candidates.

Waters told Journalism.co.uk that while this type of social data is an important addition to their election coverage, it does have limitations, such as the lack of demographic information available to journalists to determine the political background of Twitter users.

"We would never make any definitive pronouncements about social data because the data is incomplete," he said, "but it's still a very interesting way of looking at how people are talking about this election on social media."

In addition to semantic analysis, PA has teamed up with SAM for social media curation and monitoring, and with NewZulu for access to user-generated content like video livestreams and images.

"You can't ignore UGC," he said, as the election "ultimately is about people's voices being heard".

He explained that the key to PA's social media newsgathering during the election campaign is "comprehensiveness", as the agency has built an extensive dashboard of candidates, parties and official social media accounts, as well as other big names in politics.

"It's a round-the-clock job staying on top of all of that content, but it's an important part of what the parties are publishing every single day. So you have to commit to monitoring that content to look for those stories."

The election serves as a "test bed" for PA to check if the agency has the right workflows in place to find and curate social content.

Waters explained the team is looking to pin down the best tools, resources and the editorial structures needed to be able to break news first.

"Our ambitions are definitely to make much more use of social media as a source of newsgathering," he said.

Related articles:

• 10 ways news outlets are covering #GE2015
  

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