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GENDER, TWITTER AND NEWS CONTENT

Cory L. Armstrong & Fangfang Gao
Available online: 11 Nov 2010

To cite this article: Cory L. Armstrong & Fangfang Gao (2011): GENDER, TWITTER AND NEWS
CONTENT, Journalism Studies, 12:4, 490-505
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GENDER, TWITTER AND NEWS CONTENT

An examination across platforms and coverage
areas

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Cory L. Armstrong and Fangfang Gao

With the continuing disparity between male and female mentions in news content, this study
seeks to compare how news organizations employ men and women in Twitter feeds and how that
connects to portrayals in news stories. In particular, the research examined how mentions of men
and women in tweets may influence mentions in news stories that were linked to tweets. The
study employed a content analysis of national, regional and local newspaper and television
tweets, along with their accompanying news stories to compare media platforms and coverage
areas. The results indicated a positive relationship between male and female portrayals in tweets
and portrayals in news content. Further, male mentions were more likely to appear in national
news stories than in regional or local news stories and more frequently than female mentions in
print media than in television. Thus, it appears as if news agencies have not developed new
dissemination strategies for employing Twitter.
KEYWORDS gender; news organizations; Twitter

Introduction
Numerous studies on representation of women in the mass media have shown that,
compared to men, women have been trivialized, stereotyped, and underrepresented in
media coverage (Armstrong, 2004; Tuchman et al., 1978; Zoch and Turk, 1998). According
to MediaWatch (1995), women were less likely to be the news subjects across different
media platforms including newspapers, TV, and radio; women were especially less likely to
be news subjects for topics such as politics, government, and economy, but most likely to
be news subjects for news about health, social issues, arts, and entertainment; women
were also less likely to be interviewed on television news or cited as sources (see Yun et al.,
2007). Since our society has traditionally been male-dominated (Freidan, 1963; Nelson and
Bridges, 1999), it is not surprising to find out that such gender disparity was reproduced
and maintained within the institutional practice of society in news organizations.
However, news media are in a state of transition. The emergence of the Internet
and the wide adoption of new media technology among the population make it an
important strategy for newspapers and TV stations to connect their audience through
growing online channels. As a result, newspaper websites or TV websites, reader forums,
and blogs were developed to attract an online audience. Now, with the increasing
popularity of social networking sites, traditional news organizations such as the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal are intensifying their use of services like Facebook and
Twitter to circulate stories and attract audience (Schulte, 2009). Newsrooms are
scrambling to adjust their strategies and news-developing skills. Since these innovative
news products represent the future directions for media in the digital age, it is important
Journalism Studies, Vol. 12, No 4, 2011, 490
505
ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online
2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2010.527548

TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

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for practitioners and scholars to know whether the past gender dynamics have been
duplicated in news organizations practice online, especially in social networking sites like
Twitter.
This study was designed to find out how men and women compare in news
coverage in tweets from national, regional and local newspapers and TV stations, along
with their accompanying news stories, exploring how male and female mentions vary
between media platforms and coverage areas. The overall research questions focus on
how the target audience and medium may affect the gender equity within the content. To
provide additional insight into the analysis, the social medium Twitter was used as the
stepping off point into this study. To provide an up-to-the-minute view of technological
ploys used by news agencies, the news stories associated with Twitter were the focal point
for stories chosen.

Literature Review

Media Representations of Women

In news content, portrayals of women have traditionally come up short when
compared with male representations (Hallmark and Armstrong, 1999; Tuchman et al.,
1978; Zoch and Turk, 1998). Current research has replicated and extended this finding,
suggesting that male dominance in media representation continues (Armstrong, 2004;
Everbach, 2005; Freedman and Fico, 2005). For example, Freedman and Fico (2005) found
that male sources dominated news coverage of governors races in 2002, and Everbach
(2005) proposed a masculine culture within newspapers, within which content is
generally produced for a male audience. Finally, Armstrong (2004) found that male sources
and subjects appeared more than double that of female sources and subjects*even
across sections of the newspaper. Cullity and Younger (2009) analyzed the thumbnail
images that accompanied all the news headlines on the News Front Page from the BBC
website in 2007, finding out that there was little, if any, departure from the patterns of
biased and imbalanced gender portrayal in old media*women were depicted consistently less frequently than men.
The lack of media representation has been conceptualized as symbolic annihilation
(Tuchman et al., 1978). The scholars focused on women for their analysis and criticized the
media for promoting stereotypes and ignoring the presence of particular segments of
society. Their research of television coverage from 1954 to 1975 found that onscreen men
outnumbered women by more than a two to one ratio.
Others have followed this same line of research, finding that these disparities,
universally favoring male sources, have also ranged across media platforms. In a content
analysis of three southern US daily newspapers from 1986 to 1996, Zoch and Turk
(1998) looked at international stories and found that males were used as sources
roughly four times as often as females. A 2002 study of governors races in nine states
found that female political experts were 10 percent of all experts used (Freedman and
Fico, 2005). While Tuchman and colleagues focused on the disparity in television, some
news scholars have found that female sources have made progress in the visual
medium. For example, in a study of television news sources, about 20 percent of
women were found to appear as sources on 60 Minutes, while in the less-mainstream

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

news program, Hard Copy, women were used as sources in about 40 percent of
segments (Grabe et al., 1999).
Scholars have attempted to isolate some predictors of the portrayals of men and
women in news coverage by examining both sources and subjects in news content.
Armstrong (2004, 2006) argued that the overall portrayal of women in news content is
determined as much by the number of women quoted as sources as by those individuals
who are discussed in the story although not quoted. She suggested that a more accurate
examination of gender portrayals in media content would be captured by examining all
mentions of an individual within that text*even if an individual has not been explicitly
cited as a source. For example, often sports figures are mentioned with news stories for
the role they play in a sporting event, but those figures may not all be cited as sources in
those news stories. This was supported by some other researchers, such as Len-Rios et al.
(2005), who coded all individuals within a news story, whether or not they were sources, in
their study. For the purpose of this study, the term gender mentions will refer to a
combined measure of sources and subjects.
Generally, when examining news content, research has found that portrayals of men
dominate overall news coverage when compared to their female counterparts (e.g., Zoch
and Turk, 1998). A 1998
99 study comparing news content and photos found that roughly
75 percent of all news sources were male and roughly two-thirds of news photos depicted
men (Len-Rios et al., 2005). Their sample of 1998
99 newspaper stories found that more
female mentions appeared in the entertainment section of the newspaper. Cullity and
Younger (2009) found that in Top Stories section that featured hard political news on
BBC website, men and women were presented in a ratio of 4:1.
Finally, prior work into predictors of news content has found that the gender of the
writer and the genre of the content have some specific influence on gender portrayals. For
example, Armstrong (2004) found that female journalists were more likely to use female
sources in news stories and that stories in the lifestyle section had the smallest disparity
between male and female mentions (although men still appeared significantly more than
women in all types of content). However, women were less likely than men to be in the
position of the highest-level editors of traditional media as well as online publications
(Thiel-Stern, 2006). Through interviews with current and former women senior editors at
national online news publications, Thiel-Stern (2006) found that, although women
journalists expected that online journalism would become a new paradigm with less
gender disparities, new media actually mirror the gendered hierarchies and gender
disparities from the traditional newsroom. Scholars have also found that women TV
reporters were more likely than their male colleagues to use female and minority sources
(Zeldes and Fico, 2005, 2007) and that female reporters, particularly at smaller newspapers,
used a greater diversity of sources that included women and minorities (Rodgers and
Thorson, 2003). In later work, scholars found positive correlations between the genre of
the story and the gender of the source. In particular, when male public officials and
professionals appear in news stories, female public figures and professionals are also likely
to appear (Armstrong, 2006).

Coverage Area and Audience Focus

Many of the studies in media portrayals have focused on a particular medium or a
specific niche of coverage (magazines, newspapers, regional news). The present work

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TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

attempts to replicate and extend this work by comparing gender portrayals across two
media platforms*television and online news*along with news agencies from large and
small circulation areas. Armstrong (2004) examined large and small circulating newspapers but found no significant differences based on circulation. However, it seems likely
that coverage area and medium may have specific influence on gender portrayals, so
perhaps a more encompassing study would help flesh out this idea.
When examining media content, one of the first factors to consider is to whom the
content is addressed. Media organizations generally focus on a target audience within
their circulation area, and content is generally geared toward the organizations
perception of that target audience (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). A study of newspaper
goals by a group of Cleveland State University scholars found that newspaper origin,
advertisers, and local pressures can affect the focus of a community newspaper (Jeffres
et al., 1999). As a result, two newspapers with 25,000 daily readers in two geographically
distinct communities may have vastly different content on a given day, in part because of
different audience segments (McGrath, 1993; Wicks, 1989). These authors, and many
marketing scholars, suggested that the most effective way to sell media content is to
determine which audience segment wants to consume that media and then provide
content that will best satisfy that segment. That is, give the audience what it wants to
meet the needs of the media organization (Coffey, 2008).
In addition to their target audience, journalists work under some basic values*
two of which are particularly relevant to the present work (Stovall, 2002). The first is
proximity, which suggests focusing on people and events close to the coverage area of
the news organization. The second is prominence, which notes that public figures
and other prominent people generally make news. Given these values, it seems
likely variance exists in media content between news agencies with varying coverage
areas.
Other coverage area differences may be exacerbated by media organizations
with a local focus or a national focus. For example, local and national news
organizations have different target audiences and often, different news goals. Local
television news organizations often have less money and fewer resources than network
newscasts, so the quality of the content is likely to be lower in these markets and
geared toward the local community (Armstrong et al., 2005). In national markets,
stories are nationally or internationally focused, often with shorter news stories
spanning a variety of coverage. The same rational holds for local versus national
newspapers. Larger newspapers in the United States (e.g., The New York Times, USA
Today) tend to bill themselves as national newspapers, focusing on larger issues with
nationwide implications.
Because these national newspapers have a larger and more diverse audience, they
may attempt more gender parity to reach their audience. Prior research has defined
content differences depending upon newspaper size and location. For example, scholars
have found that newspapers that focus on enterprise reporting are generally
corporately owned (Demers and Wackman, 1988), have a larger circulation size, and
often employ diverse sources (Hansen, 1991). When examining coverage of women, it
seems important to consider how women may be viewed as a target audience. In one
of the few audience-related studies of women and newspaper content, McGrath found
that newspapers have a male personality (1993, p. 103). She pointed out that men

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

maintain a stronger presence in newspaper content, with more male sources routinely
appearing in content.

Other Influences on News Content

Several theories have been put forth to explain how news content is shaped and
formed (see e.g, McCombs, 2004; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). Gans (2004, p. 79) profiled
five theories that have commonly been used to explain the routines newsgatherers follow
to collect and present news:
1.

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2.
3.

4.
5.

Journalist-centered, in which news is shaped by professionals in the news production field.

This is commonly referred to as journalistic bias.
Organization-centered, where news organizational structures or corporate ownership and
profit margins drive the story selection.
Medium-centered, where the mass medium presenting the news determines what news
will be presented. For example, television news would select more visual stories to present
routinely.
Event-centered news, or the mirror theory, in which journalists merely reflect events and
images as they occur.
Source-centered news, in which the sources on which journalists rely determine what
news is presented.

This study focuses heavily on Gans idea of medium-centered influence. More

specifically, we are comparing male and female mentions between broadcast news
and (online) print news platforms. Prior work has demonstrated that media
platforms often vary in the stories which they emphasize, as, for example television
news is more interested in visual components than textual elements (Kaniss, 1991).
Cho et al. (2003) indicated that television news coverage of the 9/11 terrorist events
had more emotional content than print news coverage of the same events,
suggesting that medium differences can play a role in the presentation of news
content.
Prior work has found that a key indicator of sources appearing in news stories
is the journalist (Armstrong, 2004; Powers and Fico, 1994). Gans (2004) notes that the
relationship between journalists and sources often serves as a starting point for
reporters in determining from whom information is sought. Powers and Fico (1994)
found that reporters personal judgments about sources were most likely to
influence source selection over factors including organizational pressure and the
professional background of the source. Armstrong (2004) found that reporters were
more likely to employ sources of the same gender (as the writer) in their news
stories.
However, Silver (1986) argued that women are the subjects of news stories in
roughly the same proportion that they appear in positions as newsmakers, indicating that
while men are featured in news coverage, it makes sense because they also hold more
positions of authority than women. Similarly, women are often being assigned to more
human-interest news or softer stories than the hard-hitting pieces that male reporters
are writing (Lynch, 1993). Liebler and Smith (1997) found that when men and women are
writing about the same subject, their stories appear very similar. The authors assert that
this is because female writers have been socialized into masculine definitions of

TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

newsworthiness. Even if women have power over their stories, their work looks much like
that of their male counterparts (1997, p. 65).

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Twitter as a News Tool

Twitter is a micro-blogging service as well as a social networking website that allows
users to send messages (termed tweets) about any topic within the 140-character limit and
follow others to receive tweets (Sankaranarayanan et al., 2009). As of July 2009, there were
more than 41 million users in Twitter and it is growing fast (Kwak et al., 2010). Twitter is
analogous to a distributed news wire service (Sankaranarayanan et al., 2009). Researchers
found that the majority (over 85 percent) of trending topics on Twitter were headlines
such as breaking news or persistent news such as professional sports teams, cities, and
brands (Kwak et al., 2010).
News organizations are using the technological application Twitter as a tool of
information dissemination. CNN breaking news and the New York Times were revealed to
rank top 20 in terms of the number of followers, PageRank in following/follower network,
and the number of retweets in the diffusion network in Twitter (Kwak et al., 2010). In
October 2007, during the Southern California wildfires, news organizations such as the Los
Angeles Times and San Diego public radio station KPBS used Twitter to disseminate urgent
bits of information like evacuation orders, shelter locations, and firefighting progress to
large groups of mobile people (Palser, 2009). Similarly, in January 2009, the first close-up
image of the US Airways plane that plunged into the Hudson River was posted and the
information was distributed through Twitter by a user, Janis Krums (Palser, 2009). These
up-to-the-minute breaking tweets allow news organizations to fulfill their public service
and social responsibility functions (see e.g., Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001), by giving
consumers the necessary information they need to function and react in a crisis. Given the
growing influence of Twitter, it is even more interesting to see that the US State
Department asked Twitter to delay its maintenance to facilitate tech-savvy Iranian citizens
to communicate for their protest against the reelection of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinajad, while the official news reporting was restricted by the Iranian government
(Morozov, 2009).
While these events certainly do not represent the norm for tweets, it appears that
the news industry has embraced the use of Twitter as a way to quickly share news and
drive readers to its news sites. Further, Twitter provides for journalists connections to the
communities, to the stories they write and to other people that can offer help (Tenore,
2007). Moreover, Twitter can be a community organization tool for the newsrooms (Farhi,
2009). It can also be a tool for newspapers to build bonds with readers. It was found that a
surprisingly large number of readers showed up in a local bar after they were invited on
Twitter and Facebook by the Colonel Tribune (Adee, 2008). Hermida claimed that the new
broad, asynchronous, light-weight and always-on system such as Twitter enables people
to maintain their awareness of news around them, hence giving rise to ambient
journalism, an awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate,
share and display news and information, serving diverse purposes . . . on different levels of
engagement (2010, p. 301).
Given the emphasis on Twitter, it seems that examining the relationship between
gender mentions in tweets and gender mentions in news stories may shed further light on
the disparity between male and female portrayals. Arguably, individuals mentioned in

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

tweets are going to be emphasized in news stories, as the tweets are highlighting the
focus of the story. For example, some news organizations use automatic Twitter streams
that reproduce the headlines on stories (Palser, 2009). Headlines are generated to bring
attention to the main focus of the story. Thus, if men or women are mentioned in the
tweets, they will likely be emphasized in the story itself. It follows then that a positive
relationship should exist between male and female mentions in tweets and male and
female mentions in news stories.

Hypotheses and Research Question

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Based on the synthesis of literature outlined above, the following hypotheses and
research question will be examined in this study:
H1a: Male mentions will appear more frequently than female mentions in news
organization tweets across platforms and coverage areas.
H1b: Male mentions will appear more frequently than female mentions in news stories
tweeted across platforms and coverage areas.
H2a: The greater the frequency of female mentions in tweets, the greater the frequency
of female mentions in news stories tweeted.
H2b: The greater the frequency of male mentions in tweets, the greater the frequency of
male mentions in news stories tweeted.
H3: Male writers will appear more frequently than female writers in news stories tweeted
across platforms and coverage area.
RQ1: How do mentions of men and women compare across platforms and coverage
areas?

Methods

Sample
The hypotheses and research question in this study were addressed through a
content analysis in the fall of 2009. Tweets from six newspapers and three television
stations were purposefully chosen for the analysis. The organizations were chosen based
mainly on their coverage and circulation area (national, regional and local) to represent a
broad geographic range of the United States. A second criterion was that each
organization had to have a Twitter account that had been in service from the beginning
of 2009. The organizations chosen were (national) the New York Times, USA Today and ABC
News; (regional) the San Jose Mercury News, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune, WSB-TV,
Atlanta, and 9News (Denver, Colorado); and (local) The Anniston Star and Naples Daily News.
While we found several partial lists of Twitter accounts for news organizations,1 none were
comprehensive in July 2009 when this study was conceived and developed. Thus, our
purposeful selection attempted to maximize the difference in location and available
resources to the organization, along with focusing on news agencies who were early
adopters of the Twitterverse for news dissemination.
This study focused on the main Twitter account distributed by each news
organization.2 This was found either through a listing on the news organizations
website or through a search on the Twitter website for the individual account (e.g.,

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TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

www.twitter.com/nytimes). A search of each account found that tweets were available on

the Twitter site for at least four months before being removed from the site, although
some were available for longer than that time period.3 A randomly constructed week was
created from May 1 through August 31, 2009, resulting in the following dates for sampling:
Sunday, May 24; Monday, August 17; Tuesday, May 12; Wednesday, June 17; Thursday,
July 9; Friday, August 14, and Saturday, June 13. All tweets from those dates were collected
and, using a systematic sample, every ninth tweet was chosen from the news organization
tweets, resulting in 40 tweets per organization.
In our final sample of 361 tweets, 115 were from national news, 165 from regional
news and 81 from local news, while 245 tweets came from newspaper sites and
116 came from television sites. Two graduate students, including one author of this
study, conducted the coding of all tweets, and followed the links contained within those
tweets to news stories, videos and other information. The focus of this analysis includes
both the individual tweets and their corresponding news stories. In our analysis, 60.7
percent of the tweets examined were identical to the accompanying story headlines,
while the remaining tweets were originally written. We coded only news stories that
were linked from the initial tweets, and at the time of the coding, 39 links in tweets did
not contain a news story. Individual coding and interceding reliability information will be
discussed below.

Dependent Variable Construction

The main dependent variables in this analysis were male and female mentions in
news stories. We computed the mentions into proportions to allow for easier and more
thorough analytical interpretation (see e.g., Armstrong, 2004; Len-Rios et al., 2005). First,
each story was coded for gender, either through name or other identifying attributes, by
mentions of the featured person or persons in the story, along with each identifiable
source (Krippendorffs a is 0.74 for male mentions and 0.71 for female mentions). Then, the
mentions of men (mean  4.37, SD4.74) and women (mean  1.14, SD2.20) were
summed by gender for each story and divided from the total number of mentions per
story to create a proportion for each gender.
Male and female mentions in tweets (Krippendorffs a is 0.81 for male mentions and
1.00 for female mentions) were coded in the same manner as other gender-related
mentions in news stories, but they were not transformed into proportions, mainly because
of the low tallies. The average for male mentions in tweets was 0.61 (SD2.00) and for
female mentions was 0.14 (SD0.37).

Independent Variable Construction

Coders tallied the topic of the tweet (Krippendorffs a is 0.76) and found that
26.3 percent (N95) of tweets were about crime, 22 percent (N80) were about public
affairs/politics, 16.6 percent (N60) were about lifestyle stories and 10.0 percent (N36)
were about sports. The number of men (mean  0.44, SD0.51 and women (mean  0.26,
SD0.46) contained in the story bylines was tallied (Krippendorffs a is 0.91 for male
writers and 0.85 for female writers). The average number of paragraphs in the story was
14.98 (SD9.46; Krippendorffs a is 0.90).

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

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Results
The first set of hypotheses posited that male and female mentions would appear
more frequently in news stories and tweets, regardless of media platform or coverage
area. Overall, a paired sample t-test of the male and female mentions in tweets found that
men were much more likely than women to be mentioned in tweets [difference of
mean  0.48, SD  2.08, t (360)  4.47, pB0.01] and in news stories [difference of
mean  3.23, SD  4.99, t (322)  11.62, pB0.01]. When the mentions were broken
down by coverage area and platform, male mentions were significantly more likely than
female mentions to appear in all categories (see Tables 1a and Table 1b). Thus, Hypotheses
1a and 1b were supported.
The second set of hypotheses examined the relationship between gender mentions
in tweets and gender mentions in news stories. Using Pearson bivariate correlations,
statistically significant relationships were found between female mentions in tweets and
news stories (r0.21; pB0.001) and between male mentions in tweets and news stories
(r  0.44; pB0.001).
As noted in Table 2, significant positive correlations were found between tweets and
news stories for each gender across platforms and coverage areas, except for mentions of
both genders in local media. Also noteworthy is that all the male mention correlations
were stronger than female mentions, except for television, where the significant female
correlation (r0.41; pB0.01) was stronger than the male correlation (r0.25; pB0.01).
From these results, Hypothesis 2b was supported and Hypothesis 2a was partially
supported.
Results shown in Table 3 suggest that male writers were significantly more frequent
than female writers for newspapers [difference of mean  0.22, SD  2.21, t (221)  3.77,
pB0.01], national media [difference of mean  0.29, SD  0.81, t (106)  3.69, pB0.001]
and regional media [difference of mean  0.18, SD  0.82, t (152)  2.66, pB0.01].
However, no significant differences in the gender of the writer were found for local
media [difference of mean  0.00, SD  0.83, t (64)  0.00, p  1.00] or television news
[difference of mean  0.10, SD  0.74, t (104)  1.32, pB0.19]. Thus, the third hypothesis
was partially supported.
Our final research question compared how male and female mentions compare
across platforms and coverage areas. To examine this idea, two hierarchical linear
regressions were conducted, using male and female mentions as the dependent variables
(see Table 4). The first block of the regressions focused on the media platforms, coverage
areas and number of graphs in the stories. Statistically significant final betas for male
TABLE 1a
Paired sample t-tests of male and female mentions in tweets across platforms and regions

Male mentions

Newspaper (N  245)
TV (N 116)
Nation media (N 115)
Region media (N 165)
Local media (N 81)

Female
mentions

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

df

0.67
0.48
0.70
0.70
0.32

2.38
0.69
3.20
1.20
0.54

0.12
0.17
0.10
0.21
0.05

0.35
0.42
0.32
0.45
0.22

244
115
114
164
80

3.63
4.20
2.00
5.04
4.13

0.000
0.000
0.048
0.000
0.000

TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

TABLE 1b
Paired sample t-tests of male and female mentions in news stories across platforms and
regions

Male mentions

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Newspaper (N 218)
TV (N 104)
Nation media (N 107)
Region media (N 150)
Local media (N 65)

Female
mentions

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

df

4.94
3.16
6.47
3.38
3.20

5.13
3.53
6.34
3.37
2.99

1.21
0.99
1.21
1.19
0.91

2.48
1.43
2.01
2.59
1.37

217
103
106
149
64

9.98
6.52
8.40
7.02
5.57

0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000

mentions were found for national news (b  0.23, pB0.05), media platform (b 0.14,
pB0.05), and length of story (b  0.15, pB0.01). No statistically significant final betas were
found for female mentions of the first block. The second block focused on story topics and
statistically significant findings for female mentions were found for sports (b   0.13,
pB0.05) and lifestyle (b  0.15, pB0.05). For male mentions, sports topics had the only
statistically significant beta (b  0.21, pB0.01).
Finally, the third block added to the analysis the relationship between the gender of
the writer of the story and the gender mentions in tweets. Statistically significant betas for
female mentions were females in tweets (b  0.30, pB0.01) and female writers (b  0.16,
pB0.05). For male mentions, male mentions in tweets (b  0.12, pB0.05) and female
mentions in tweets (b   0.14, pB0.05) were statistically significant in the analysis. The
analysis for female mentions accounted for 19.5 percent of the variance in its model, while
the analysis for male mentions accounted for 17.9 percent of the variance, including 9.3
percent in the first block.

Discussion
This study examined how media platform, coverage area and Twitter tweets
influenced male and female mentions in news stories. Results indicated a positive
relationship between male and female portrayals in tweets and subsequent portrayals in
news content. Further, male mentions were more likely to appear in national news stories
than specific regions and more frequently than female mentions in print media. Finally,
TABLE 2
Bivariate correlations between male/female mentions in tweets and news stories across
platform and coverage area
Female mentions

Male mentions

0.15*
0.41**
0.24*
0.20*
0.08

0.47**
0.25**
0.49***
0.42**
0.24

Newspaper (N 218)
TV (N 104)
Nation media (N 107)
Region media (N 150)
Local media (N 65)
Significance statistics are for two-tailed tests.
*p B0.05, **p B0.01, ***p B0.001.

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

TABLE 3
Paired sample t-tests comparing gender of the author across platforms and coverage area
Male byline

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Newspaper (N 221)
TV (N 104)
Nation media (N 107)
Region media (N 153)
Local media (N 65)

Female byline

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

0.49
0.35
0.46
0.48
0.34

0.55
0.46
0.59
0.55
0.48

0.27
0.25
0.17
0.30
0.34

0.47
0.54
0.40
0.49
0.48

3.77
1.32
3.69
2.66
0.00

0.000
0.191
0.000
0.009
1.000

and perhaps most importantly, it appears from these findings that news organizations are
following the same gendered patterns in their news dissemination tools, which suggests
that they may not be trying to broaden their appeal to attract a female audience. Each of
these findings will be discussed below.
One of the key results of this analysis indicated that the presence of men or women
in news tweets was a significant predictor of the presence of the same gender within news
stories. On the surface this finding may seem obvious, but this relationship underscores
the larger gender disparity that continues in news content. Tweets are generally employed
by news organizations to summarize the particulars of a news story*thus, to highlight the
points of emphasis in the story. Therefore, if the tweets contain female mentions, they are

TABLE 4
Hierarchical linear regression predicting the frequency of mentions by gender across
platforms and coverage area
Female mentions
Independent variables

Final b

Block 1
National news
Regional news
News platform (TV  high)
Length of story
Incremental R2 (%)

0.05
0.05
0.10
0.08

Block 2
Political topic
Sports topic
Lifestyle topic
Crime topic
Incremental R2 (%)

0.01
0.13*
0.15*
0.07

Block 3
Male writer
Men in tweet
Female writer
Women in tweet
Incremental R2 (%)
Total R2

Variance (%)

Male mentions
Final b

Variance (%)

0.23*
0.09
0.14*
0.15**
2.1

9.3**
0.09
0.21**
0.04
0.13$

7.2**
0.02
0.05
0.16**
0.30**

5.3**
0.05
0.12*
0.02
0.14*

10.2**
19.5**

N 361. Significance statistics are for two-tailed tests.

$p B0.10, *p B 0.05, **p B0.01.

3.3*
17.9**

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TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

likely being emphasized in the stories; conversely, if male mentions are in the tweets, they
are likely being emphasized in the stories.
Twitter is a new technological tool of information dissemination. It is the hot
vehicle of news now, in much the same way as special newspaper editions, television news
crawls, the breaking news email, and RSS (real simple syndication) feeds have functioned
previously (and, presently, to some extent). If Twitter is the popular and efficient way to
gather news for an audience, then an examination of its content is important. It appears
from this analysis that even the newest technology follows the path of other media
content, emphasizing men more than women. Or, to spin it another way, news topics
involving men receive more emphasis than those involving women.
What makes this issue particularly significant is that news agencies could be using
Twitter to garner a more female-centered audience. Not only is content more malefocused, but organizations appear to be falling short in employing new media technology.
A study from Harvard Business Review found that women users held a slight majority on
Twitter, representing 55 percent of Twitter users as of May 2009; however, different from
other social networks like Facebook where most activities were women-centered, Twitter
is quite male-skewed, as men and women tweeted at the same rate but men had
15 percent more followers than women (Heil and Piskorski, 2009). Given that our finding
demonstrated there were more tweets and news from news organizations emphasizing
men, it seems possible the news delivery and news consumption on Twitter will be
increasingly male-skewed, providing less space for female perspectives and certainly not
attracting more female followers.
In a nutshell, then, it appears that news agencies are not taking advantage of social
media to attract an audience that traditionally has not been a focus in news content. While
women are certainly employing social media such as Twitter as a means to gather and
share information, news producers are not making strides toward capturing that audience.
Our findings indicated that 60.7 percent of tweets were identical to story headlines, which
means they were likely disseminated through an automatic feed to Twitter. It appears that
instead of creating new content to fit the new technology and audience, the news
organizations are trying to fit the same content into a new dissemination tool, which may
not be the best strategy. This finding supports prior work by Thiel-Stern (2006), suggesting
that the same gender hierarchy existed in online news that existed in traditional news. It
appears that some of the same practices are occurring with Twitter feeds. Future research
should further investigate this idea.
The findings from Hypothesis 1a and 1b indicate that male mentions were
significantly more likely than females to appear in both tweets and news stories across
all platforms and coverage areas. This study then replicates the myriad of prior findings of
male dominance in news content (Armstrong, 2004; Zoch and Turk, 1998), but also
extends knowledge of these findings into a new area*Twitter feeds. We argue that these
findings occur for two reasons: first, male dominance in news content is still a huge
problem, and, frankly, despite the well-documented nature of that disparity, little has been
done to combat the problem. While programs such as Gannett News Co.s All-American
Diversity Award4 reward news coverage which demonstrates racial and gender diversity in
content, these showcases are rare and often not well-supported. The second reason is that
some news organizations have not put effort into developing unique content into tweets.
Some news organizations have their headlines automatically feed into a Twitter stream,
while others have types of automated content that does not factor in any real changes to

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CORY L. ARMSTRONG AND FANGFANG GAO

their traditional news content (Palser, 2009). As a result, the same stark gender disparities
favoring men found in newspaper and television news stories are being simply transferred
to Twitter.
This study attempted to isolate predictors of female and male mentions by media
platform and coverage area. Findings indicated that although male mentions were more
frequent than female mentions in all situations, some differences exist. For example, in
local media, no correlation exists between gender mentions in tweets and gender
mentions in news stories and no difference exists between the frequency of male and
female bylines. Possibly, as noted in prior work, there were stronger socialization pressures
at larger newspapers to promote sameness in journalistic routines, with male and female
reporters showing more similar reporting patterns to conform to the male-dominated
mechanism (Rodgers and Thorson, 2003). Apart from local media, the strongest
correlations between tweets and news stories appeared for male mentions, except
television, where the correlation between female mentions in tweets and stories were
more correlated.
Further, it appears that some platform and coverage area differences exist in terms of
the gender of the reporter as well. Our findings indicated that male bylines were more likely
to appear than female bylines in national and regional media, as well as newspapers as a
group, which is consistent with previous studies showing an overrepresentation of male
reporters and sources in print news coverage (Rodgers et al., 2000). However, no significant
differences were found for local media or for television as a platform. While we cannot
interpret non-significant relationships, it does appear from the results perhaps the gender
disparity may be more contextual than comprehensive. For example, in television, reporters
and anchors are seen, so parity may more noticeable. With local media, perhaps the lower
pay and less available resources keeps the scales pretty balanced. Within our results, we can
note that in all significant relationships, male writers appeared more frequently than female
writers. Since these appeared to be news stories being disseminated through Twitter, these
are the stories being emphasized by the news agencies.

Limitations and Future Directions

A few caveats are necessary for this initial research. First, this study examined nine
news outlets, which certainly limits its generalizability. In addition, we sampled from each
news outlet over a four-month period, so we do not have a full look at how the tweets
looked over other months of the year. Finally, we only examined news stories that were
linked from the tweets that were culled, so our study is not a comprehensive look at news
content in these news agencies.
Despite these limitations, this study replicates and extends prior work in gender
research along with mass communication scholarship. Our findings are one of the first
studies to examine how the use of Twitter by news agencies connects to its overall news
content. We also have been able to expand prior work looking at how women are
portrayed in news content and how the gender disparity shifts in context but
yet continues in mainstream news content. Finally, we believe that because of Twitters
relative newness as a dissemination tool for news content, practitioners will find use
in our content analysis of how news agencies employ it to showcase its overall
coverage.

TWITTER AND GENDER IN NEWS CONTENT

NOTES
1.

2.

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3.

4.

The following sites listed some twitter accounts for news organizations. All were
viewed on March 11, 2010: Graphic Designer: http://graphicdesignr.net/blog/2008/09/
03/newspapers-that-twitter-august-numbers/; Twitter fan wiki: http://twitter.pbworks.
com/NewsServices; Carlos Granier-Phelps: http://red66.com/2008/02/a-list-of-newsorganizations-using-twitter/
The specific Twitter accounts used for the study were: @nytimes, @usatoday,
@abcworldnews, @mercurynews, @MN_News, @9newsdotcom, @WSB_TV, @ndn and
@AnnistonStar.
The four-month tally was found for news organizations which frequently tweet. Tweets
for some accounts were available for up to a year, but for consistency, we focused on the
prior four months.
Details of the All-American Diversity Award, which showcases news agencies who have
outstanding source diversity within their content, can be found at http://www.gannett.
com/go/newswatch/2007/oct/nw1005-1.htm which was retrieved on March 24, 2010.

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JON

Cory L. Armstrong (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), College of

Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118400, Gainesville,
FL 32611, USA. E-mail: carmstrong@jou.ufl.edu
Fangfang Gao, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, P.O. Box
11840-200, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. E-mail: ffgao@ufl.edu

505