2 Much Txting Bad 4 Teens

Dr. Scott Frank, a physician from Case Western University, presented research at the American Public Health Association conference that shows a correlation between teen hyper-texting (that is sending more than 120 texts a day) and other risky behavior such as smoking, drinking, drug use and having sex. Dr. Catriona Morrison of Leeds University in the UK says that this research suggests that hyper-texting is similar to other addictive behaviors, like gambling, in its co-morbidity with other risky behaviors.

I think it is interesting how this study measures hyper-texting in only quantitative terms and I wonder if we are going to see more robust measures of "texting addiction" (which I think would measure not only the number of texts but also people's attitudes about texting) in future studies.

To learn more about texting, check out these books from Cook Library.

What Do We Know about Weather Broadcasts?

With the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina last week and Hurricane Earl threatening to barrel down on the east coast this week, I found myself being curious about news coverage of weather.

I wanted to know whether communications scholars uncovered any patterns in weather broadcasts? (For example: During a big storm, how likely are we to see that poor weather-beaten field reporter compared to the high and dry station meteorologist with his mighty Doppler Radar data?)

After turning to the Communication and Mass Media Complete database and searching for broadcasting AND news, I found a great article from the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research titled " Conceptualizing Continuous Coverage: A Strategic Model for Wall-to-Wall Local Television Weather Broadcasts". This study looked at four local television stations’ coverage of four Atlantic hurricanes in two Southeastern markets in 2005 and found that live reporting only made up about 12% of coverage and weather reporters received most of the air time compared to news talent.

Granted, this is only one study, but it makes me wonder what other patterns exist in weather broadcasting. With all of these news-worthy weather events, I'm afraid communication scholars will have many opportunities to find out.

How to be influential on Twitter

According to new research, an average Joe or Josephine can gain influence in Twitter by limiting his or her tweets to a particular topic and being engaged in that topic.

The authors of this study analyzed about 2 billion public tweets and looked at followers, retweets, and mentions to see who moves information on Twitter. They found that while news organizations, such as CNN, can hold significant influence on a variety of topics, average people can gain influence "through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic." Apparently, influence on Twitter is not all about the number of followers that you have.