• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.45-67
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• 2016

Given the recent development of smart devices, users are producing, sharing, and acquiring a variety of information via the Internet and social network services (SNSs). Because users tend to use multiple media simultaneously according to their goals and preferences, domestic SNS users use around 2.09 media concurrently on average. Since the information provided by such media is usually textually represented, recent studies have been actively conducting textual analysis in order to understand users more deeply. Earlier studies using textual analysis focused on analyzing a document's contents without substantive consideration of the diverse characteristics of the source medium. However, current studies argue that analytical and interpretive approaches should be applied differently according to the characteristics of a document's source. Documents can be classified into the following types: informative documents for delivering information, expressive documents for expressing emotions and aesthetics, operational documents for inducing the recipient's behavior, and audiovisual media documents for supplementing the above three functions through images and music. Further, documents can be classified according to their contents, which comprise facts, concepts, procedures, principles, rules, stories, opinions, and descriptions. Documents have unique characteristics according to the source media by which they are distributed. In terms of newspapers, only highly trained people tend to write articles for public dissemination. In contrast, with SNSs, various types of users can freely write any message and such messages are distributed in an unpredictable way. Again, in the case of newspapers, each article exists independently and does not tend to have any relation to other articles. However, messages (original tweets) on Twitter, for example, are highly organized and regularly duplicated and repeated through replies and retweets. There have been many studies focusing on the different characteristics between newspapers and SNSs. However, it is difficult to find a study that focuses on the difference between the two media from the perspective of supply and demand. We can regard the articles of newspapers as a kind of information supply, whereas messages on various SNSs represent a demand for information. By investigating traditional newspapers and SNSs from the perspective of supply and demand of information, we can explore and explain the information dilemma more clearly. For example, there may be superfluous issues that are heavily reported in newspaper articles despite the fact that users seldom have much interest in these issues. Such overproduced information is not only a waste of media resources but also makes it difficult to find valuable, in-demand information. Further, some issues that are covered by only a few newspapers may be of high interest to SNS users. To alleviate the deleterious effects of information asymmetries, it is necessary to analyze the supply and demand of each information source and, accordingly, provide information flexibly. Such an approach would allow the value of information to be explored and approximated on the basis of the supply-demand balance. Conceptually, this is very similar to the price of goods or services being determined by the supply-demand relationship. Adopting this concept, media companies could focus on the production of highly in-demand issues that are in short supply. In this study, we selected Internet news sites and Twitter as representative media for investigating information supply and demand, respectively. We present the notion of News Value Index (NVI), which evaluates the value of news information in terms of the magnitude of Twitter messages associated with it. In addition, we visualize the change of information value over time using the NVI. We conducted an analysis using 387,014 news articles and 31,674,795 Twitter messages. The analysis results revealed interesting patterns: most issues show lower NVI than average of the whole issue, whereas a few issues show steadily higher NVI than the average.