The usage of al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera news channels of Twitter to disseminate breakdown news

الملخص EN

Social media platforms such as Twitter have become an important tool for the field of journalism.

Twitter plays a major role in both the newsroom and the selection of information process.

This study aims to investigate the type of content used in Twitter feeds, as well as the type of news on Twitter feeds in breaking news from both Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera news channels.

Guided by gatekeeping theory and networking gatekeeping perspective, this study explored the relationship between the type of news and retweeting and the influence of the interaction between editors and audience on the presented type of news to the audience in the Middle East.

The study used a quantitative content analysis to analyze 500 tweets collected from both Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, 250 tweets from each account, from the period of February 1st to February 28th of 2019.

The results indicated that Al-Jazeera posted tweets about political news more than Al-Arabiya and both Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera rely on Twitter to disseminate human interest, entertainment news more than any other type of news.

Also, the results indicated that there is a strong correlation between the type of news and the number of retweets.

Political news gets the greatest number of retweets and more replies than other type of news.