News Categories in Mainstream and Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Daily Dawn and Twitter

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the coverage of different news categories in daily Dawn and Twitter. For comparative content analysis of news coverage, the researcher drew upon two news categories: econo-political news, and socio-cultural news. The econo-political news category was further divided into three subcategories: national politics, international politics, and economics. The socio-cultural category was divided into five sub-categories: health, education, arts, sports, and environment. The ‘priming’ in agenda setting theory paved the way for the researcher to explore the dominant news categories. For daily Dawn, the headlines of news stories published in February were selected. For twitter, all top trends in the month of February between 11am to 8 pm daily were recorded; they were accessed via an online website. The data was divided into four weeks. The comparative analysis supported both hypotheses: the results indicated that mainstream media gives more coverage to econo-political affairs than social media; whereas, social media is better at highlighting socio-cultural issues than mainstream media.