publications

2025

1. ICWSM

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

   Simona Bisiani, Agnes Gulyas, John Wihbey, and Bahareh Heravi

   Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025

   Abs DOI Bib Poster

   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.

   @article{bisiani_uktwitnewscor_2025,
     title = {{UKTwitNewsCor}: A Dataset of Online Local News Articles for the Study of Local News Provision},
     volume = {19},
     url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/35940},
     doi = {10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35940},
     pages = {2371--2384},
     number = {1},
     journal = {Proceedings of the International {AAAI} Conference on Web and Social Media},
     author = {Bisiani, Simona and Gulyas, Agnes and Wihbey, John and Heravi, Bahareh},
     year = {2025},
   }

2. LJRW

   Computational Tools for Mapping and Measuring Local News Diversity at Scale

   Simona Bisiani

   Local Journalism Researchers WorkshopUNC, North Carolina , 2025

   Abs Slides

   Presentation from the Local News Researchers Workshop (UNC, March 2025) covering large-scale computational approaches to assess diversity in local news content. Includes methodologies for: content syndication detection using Min-Hashing and LSH algorithms; geographic focus analysis through LLM-based geoparsing; and analysis of the UK commercial and independent digital news sector using the UKTwitNewsCor dataset (360 domains, 87 publishers, 2.5M articles). Key findings: 22% content repurposing rate, with syndication occurring primarily at short distances (median 33km) and instantaneously (median 0h delay). Demonstrates scalable computational methods for national-level assessments of local media provision.

2024

1. SocArXiv

   A Semi-Automated Directory System for the UK Local News Landscape: Supporting Policy and Research

   Simona Bisiani, Joe Mitchell, Agnes Gulyas, and Bahareh Heravi

   2024

   Abs DOI Bib Poster

   The UK local news landscape faces significant challenges, with declines in outlets, staffing, and relevance due to market pressures, digital disruption, and media consolidation. This crisis is compounded by the lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date directory of local news outlets, hindering research and policy interventions. Existing directories are often incomplete, outdated, and fail to capture the diversity of the local media landscape. To address this, the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) has developed a semi-automated system leveraging open-source intelligence (OSINT) and computational workflows to maintain a comprehensive and current directory of local news outlets across print, digital, radio, and television in the UK. This system tracks closures, launches, ownership changes, and geographic coverage. Notable events are flagged for manual review. This research and review pipeline, combining computational analysis with human review, significantly reduces manual labor while enhancing data accuracy. Overall, the system offers a model for future initiatives aimed at tracking the health of local news ecosystems. The implications of this system for media pluralism, policy interventions, and the sustainability of local journalism are discussed, alongside suggestions for future research.

   @article{bisiani_mitchell_gulyas_heravi_2024,
     title = {A Semi-Automated Directory System for the UK Local News Landscape: Supporting Policy and Research},
     url = {osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/zsxdg},
     doi = {10.31235/osf.io/zsxdg},
     publisher = {SocArXiv},
     author = {Bisiani, Simona and Mitchell, Joe and Gulyas, Agnes and Heravi, Bahareh},
     year = {2024},
   }

2023

1. Journalism and Media

   Uncovering the State of Local News Databases in the UK: Limitations and Impacts on Research

   Simona Bisiani and Bahareh Heravi

   Journalism and Media, 2023

   Abs DOI Bib

   Local journalism is fundamental for a thriving democracy, yet the UK faces a decline in the number of print and digital local news outlets. Large-scale mappings of the surviving outlets offer invaluable insights to policymakers designing interventions to strengthen the sector. Due to the lack of a comprehensive national directory of UK print and digital local news outlets, researchers have resorted to datasets such as circulation auditors’ databases, which have been additional_infod to be incomplete and outdated. A lack of understanding of the magnitude of these data limitations hinders researchers from selecting optimal datasets. This study evaluates four commonly used local news databases, uncovering significant variations in their currentness and comprehensiveness. Thereafter, statistical analyses demonstrate the significant effect of each dataset’s shortcomings on findings in local news research. To address this issue, triangulation and manual verification are employed to create a more comprehensive and robust dataset. This procedure generates a new national dataset of print and digital local news outlets that can be used in future research, alongside a framework for leveraging public data to build an independent research dataset. This work paves the way for more rigorous research in data-driven local news provision studies. Concluding remarks stress the importance of setting definitions and establishing clear data pipelines in an increasingly diversified and dynamic sector.

   @article{bisiani_uncovering_2023,
     title = {Uncovering the State of Local News Databases in the {UK}: Limitations and Impacts on Research},
     volume = {4},
     issn = {2673-5172},
     url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/4/4/77},
     doi = {10.3390/journalmedia4040077},
     pages = {1211--1231},
     number = {4},
     journal = {Journalism and Media},
     author = {Bisiani, Simona and Heravi, Bahareh},
     year = {2023}
   }

2. Journalism Practice

   The Data Journalism Workforce: Demographics, Skills, Work Practices, and Challenges in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Simona Bisiani, Andrea Abellan, Félix Arias Robles, and José Alberto García-Avilés

   Journalism PracticePublisher: Routledge , 2023

   Abs DOI Bib

   In the last decade, data journalism has established itself as a thriving field. Recently, COVID-19 has boosted the demand for data-driven reporting to make sense of the pandemic, increasing the importance of studying the evolution of this rapidly evolving and technology-bounded practice. However, the number of efforts to map and systematically measure the data journalism industry are few. This paper analyses the findings of The State of the Data Journalism Survey 2021, currently the most extensive study on the characteristics surrounding the workforce producing and contributing to the data journalism industry. The outcome is an understanding of an expanding workforce with a geographically uneven distribution, which is still homogeneous in terms of tools and educational paths. Self-taught, resourceful, and multi-skilled, data journalists often work in isolation but share pressures of limited resources, time limitations, and access to quality data. The pandemic appears to have directly increased those struggles, although data journalists agree that the field’s reputation has ultimately benefited from it.

   @article{bisiani_data_2023,
     title = {The Data Journalism Workforce: Demographics, Skills, Work Practices, and Challenges in the Aftermath of the {COVID}-19 Pandemic},
     volume = {0},
     issn = {1751-2786},
     url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2023.2191866},
     doi = {10.1080/17512786.2023.2191866},
     shorttitle = {The Data Journalism Workforce},
     pages = {1--21},
     number = {0},
     journal = {Journalism Practice},
     author = {Bisiani, Simona and Abellan, Andrea and Arias Robles, Félix and García-Avilés, José Alberto},
     urldate = {2023-12-14},
     year = {2023},
     keywords = {survey, {COVID}-19, Data journalism, demographics, skills, tools, work practices},
     file = {Full Text PDF:C\:\\Users\\sb02767\\Zotero\\storage\\XPACBL8N\\Bisiani et al. - 2023 - The Data Journalism Workforce Demographics, Skill.pdf:application/pdf}
   }

3. C+J

   Data Journalism Today: A Comparative Analysis of Two Consecutive Surveys

   Simona Bisiani

   The Joint Computation + Journalism and European Data and Computational Journalism Conference 2023ETH, Zurich , 2023

   Slides