With our project „Reinventing News on Twitter“, we offer a solution to the flood of information and the lack of access to news on Twitter. Among other things, we want to give users more transparency and control over the content of news that they receive via the social network.

Background

Recent events show how much influence social media platforms have on news consumption and their distribution, but above all what consequences this has. The consumption of news on Twitter continues to grow, but the social network has done little to support the distribution of news on its platform or to meet the needs of its users.

Digital natives in particular often consume their news via social media where relevant reports are lost in the flood of information. Moreover similar and even identical items are displayed excessively. Posts with news articles are rated on social networks like any other content. Users also lack insight into the criteria according to which an algorithm allows posts to appear on their feed.

Topic Clusters

The first area to tackle is the tweet card itself. Instead of having news look like every other content the "News Tweet Card" already previews information like the type of article (is it a coverage or a column?), the reading time and a small preview of the text. To prevent similar news from flooding the timeline (or getting lost in the mass of content), similar articles by followed news channels are collected in, as we call them, Topic Clusters. The goal is to support the conscious consumption of news.

News Page

The independent news page offers the user direct access to news without having to follow the publishers and consists of topic clusters. In contrast to the timeline, the tweets of the publishers are omitted and only focused on the article preview. It is structured into different sections and offers access to news from the world, the region and the world. On demand, users can add topics they want to read about.

Cluster Page

This area offers the user an overview of the coverage of the respective event. The page is structured into articles, opinions and local news from the place where the event took place. In this case, only reports from New York are shown, because Harvey Weinstein was arrested there. Furthermore, similar topic pages are suggested to the user. The timeline gives users the opportunity to inform themselves about the course of events and to quickly and easily acquire additional information which makes it simpler to understand the subject matter. Finally, the user can apply various filters on the articles shown. Through these filters, he is given control over the content and decides what he wants to see.

Feel free to check out our desktop or mobile prototype.

Team

Barbara Schußmann, Marco Pisano

Supervisor

Prof. David Oswald
Prof. Dr. habil Georg Kneer

Date

7th Semester
Summer Term 2018
HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd