UKTwitNewsCor: A Dataset of Online Local News Articles for the Study of Local News Provision

TL;DR

UKTwitNewsCor is a large, multi-faceted dataset of UK local news articles, social media engagement, and metadata, enabling in-depth analysis of local media content, dissemination, and audience interaction over time.

Contribution

The paper introduces UKTwitNewsCor, a novel comprehensive dataset combining news articles, social media metrics, and metadata for UK local media, facilitating advanced research.

Findings

Dataset includes over 2.5 million articles from 360 outlets.

Provides social media engagement metrics at the tweet level.

Includes metadata on content duplication and media coverage scope.

Abstract

In this paper, we present UKTwitNewsCor, a comprehensive dataset for understanding the content production, dissemination, and audience engagement dynamics of online local media in the UK. It comprises over 2.5 million online news articles published between January 2020 and December 2022 from 360 local outlets. The corpus represents all articles shared on Twitter by the social media accounts of these outlets. We augment the dataset by incorporating social media performance metrics for the articles at the tweet-level. We further augment the dataset by creating metadata about content duplication across domains. Alongside the article dataset, we supply three additional datasets: a directory of local media web domains, one of UK Local Authority Districts, and one of digital local media providers, providing statistics on the coverage scope of UKTwitNewsCor. Our contributions enable comprehensive, longitudinal analysis of UK local media, news trends, and content diversity across multiple platforms and geographic areas. In this paper, we describe the data collection methodology, assess the dataset geographic and media ownership diversity, and outline how researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders can leverage UKTwitNewsCor to advance the study of local media.