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Descriptive statistics for posts, likes, comments, and shares across state-owned or commercial outlets in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
Source publication
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produc...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... third research question focused on whether the comparison of contextual variables like country and outlet ownership could produce more nuanced and complex findings. Table 3 and Figure 3 show the comparison between the contextual variables of the engagement metrics. Combining these two factors visualizes a more complex situation in Norway. ...Context 2
... 2 shows higher engagement with public broadcasters across the board. However, Table 3 shows that Swedish users' engagement with commercial and state-owned outlets' posts diverges less than engagement in Denmark or Norway; commenting, liking, and sharing in Sweden, while also showing discrepancies between commercial and state-owned outlets, works at more similar rates. This means that Sweden has substantially different patterns of engagement than Denmark and Norway in that the latter clearly favor public service engagement. ...Citations
... También se han beneficiado de la economía de plataformas, que ofrece nuevas oportunidades para la distribución de contenido. En comparación con los medios privados, los medios de servicio público muestran una mayor actividad en las redes sociales, publicando una mayor cantidad de contenido cuando se consideran individualmente (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2023). ...
La interacción entre el espacio público y los medios de comunicación en la era digital presenta tanto desafíos como oportunidades para la sociedad contemporánea. En consecuencia, el estudio y desarrollo de la esfera pública como espacio para el debate y la participación ciudadana resulta clave para comprender los procesos comunicativos que emergen en una sociedad democrática.
La evolución del valor público en los medios enfrenta retos en las organizaciones para cumplir con las expectativas comunicativas que demanda la sociedad. Esta dinámica de cambio constante subraya la dificultad de alinear el avance tecnológico con los compromisos éticos, sociales y legales que caracterizan a los medios públicos, enfatizando la necesidad de proteger la privacidad y garantizar el acceso equitativo y la participación de todos los sectores de la sociedad. La integración de la inteligencia artificial en los medios públicos tiene un impacto notable en la producción y distribución de contenido, planteando cuestiones legales y sociales en su aplicación.
Este libro es fruto de un homenaje a Bernard Miége en la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. En él, se presenta un enfoque multidisciplinar sobre los procesos comunicativos, abordando el escenario de adaptación y evolución de los medios públicos en la era de la comunicación digital. Esta transformación requiere una aproximación poliédrica que contemple la ética mediática, el desarrollo tecnológico y la participación ciudadana, con el objetivo de promover los valores democráticos en el desarrollo comunicativo de la sociedad.
... Audience metrics can, however, generate unexpected outcomes. Notably, increased content posting may not necessarily translate into greater engagement, as audiences appear to engage more with content that resonates with them (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2023). Data journalism is one aspect of journalism that focuses on using data to tell stories. ...
... In the online environment, numerous content pieces vie for the dwindling attention span of audiences, creating pressure on news platforms to produce content with broad appeal to capture a significant share of audience engagement (Adepetu, 2017). Respondents emphasized the need to deemphasize audience metrics as a dominant determining factor in driving datadriven content production, as engagement patterns may not necessarily reflect content quality or societal impact (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2023). Instead, they stressed the importance of targeting relevant stakeholders who can take meaningful action on the issues reported, rather than solely prioritizing audience engagement. ...
... This is particularly true for data journalism, where datadriven content is contextually produced and disseminated to meet the diverse needs of audience members (Bradshaw, 2024). Beyond promoting data-driven content that resonates with their audiences but may have little or no impact on society (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2023), the news platforms examined in this study appear committed to their social responsibility role within society. Respondents stressed the need to prioritize the potential impact of data journalism content over audience metrics in deciding what to publish (Knepple, 2022). ...
Despite the growing momentum of data analysis in Africa, scholarly attention has largely overlooked the promotion of data-driven content for enhanced audience engagement. Grounded in the sociology of news paradigm, this study examines engagement practices of online news platforms in Nigeria and explores the potential influence of audience engagement metrics on editorial decision-making. The in-depth interview research method was adopted for the study. Heads of data journalism units in four purposively selected online news media platforms in Nigeria with established data journalism practices were sampled as respondents for the study. The study identifies six innovative strategies being adopted by online news media in Nigeria to enhance audience engagement. Findings also confirm the centrality of audience engagement metrics to news-making decisions, but with the understanding to also consider the potential societal impact of stories in determining issues to produce data-driven content on. The implication for data journalism practice in Nigeria and its positioning for greater societal impact is discussed.
... This is because, among users, a curiosity arises for this type of news. Despite this, many prefer to look for reliable communication, as shown in their research by Ferrer-Conill et al., who found that netizens in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden tend to look for information with suitable sources to avoid fake news and a way to find the origin of the news [14]. Along these lines, Canavilhas et al. state that, in Brazil, there is news without sources, while the same group of information has a news channel as its source [15]. ...
... Ferrer-Conill et al. conducted studies on "commitment cultures" in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Across the three Scandinavian countries, 86% liked at least one post, 46% received at least one comment, and 51% shared it [14]. ...
Facebook has become a significant source of news around the world. Many people use the platform to post, find out, and share reviews. That is why it is necessary to understand the changes that the news had on journalists and the public-the research aimed to document the process of news coverage on Facebook over the past ten years. The systematic review is conducted using the PRISMA methodology. In addition, inclusion criteria are established for the search in the Scopus database, such as year of publication and open access. The results provide 15 papers that answer the research question. Finally, it is concluded that the press was modified to adapt to current events and thus increase its reach.
... Most of this line of research is based in Western contexts, which limits our understanding of election news making and consuming across media systems, political cultures and levels of voter engagement (Cushion & Thomas, 2018). Comparative research emphasizes that country context is a significant predictor of news audiences' social media engagement (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021;Salgado & Bobba, 2019) and journalists adoption of the audience-centric approach in news production (Andresen, Hoxha, & Godole, 2017). ...
This study provides insights on how journalists in the Western Balkans conceptualize and practice audience engagement during electoral campaigns. Taking a holistic approach, we first explore audience demand and news supply of strategic and negative election news on Facebook, then turn to news editors to explore what type of audience logic drives their reporting. Our data confirm previous findings about audience demand for strategic news but contradict the predominance of audience negativity bias in the context of Southeast Europe. These findings support generic trends in how social media audiences engage with political information, but also emphasize the importance of the socio-political context as a determinant of audience engagement with online news. Interview data identified an alignment between journalists’ imagined readership preferences with the reality, yet reporting patterns on Facebook do not entirely follow engagement trends. Together, these findings suggest that journalism culture developed in this region is more nuanced than previously defined, while news editors embrace new technologies to serve the commercial needs and audience strengthening logics in parallel during electoral campaigns.
... In addition, with the transformation of media technology, we are entering the "engagement" era (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021). Consistent with the acceleration of customer participation evolving into customer involvement, numerous studies have still classified these relationships as having no profound bonds (Myrick and Erlichman, 2020;Yamamoto et al., 2020;Barari et al., 2021). ...
Introduction
With the advancement of new media, brand communication has been taken into consideration by lots of firms. Apparently, customer affection plays a significant role in brand communications, though few studies have determined how the twofold of information function works in this communication mechanism. Based on this research gap and practical background, this paper proposes a hybrid model of communication comprising the utilitarian and hedonic aspects.
Methods
For this study, 575 questionnaires were collected, followed by the structural equation modeling of the derived data to test the research model.
Results
The results of statistical analysis show that the brand communication can be improved in terms of both utilitarian and hedonic aspects. Moreover, psychological contract and customer engagement play a chain mediation role in this mechanism.
Discussion
These findings contribute to the research of brand communication mechanism in digital era. Likewise, the findings offers several practical implications to the brand management.
... In the context of the broader news ecosystem, prior work has shown that comment activity is frequently positively associated with anger, and "likes" are the dominant response to news on Facebook (Smoliarova, Gromova, and Pavlushkina 2018). Such detailed relationships have yet to be explored in the local context (Ferrer-Conill et al. 2021;Larsson 2018). ...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, local news organizations have played an important role in keeping communities informed about the spread and impact of the virus. We explore how political, social media, and economic factors impacted the way local media reported on COVID-19 developments at a national scale between January 2020 and July 2021. We construct and make available a dataset of over 10,000 local news organizations and their social media handles across the U.S. We use social media data to estimate the population reach of outlets (their “localness”), and capture underlying content relationships between them. Building on this data, we analyze how local and national media covered four key COVID-19 news topics: Statistics and Case Counts, Vaccines and Testing, Public Health Guidelines, and Economic Effects. Our results show that news outlets with higher population reach reported proportionally more on COVID-19 than more local outlets. Separating the analysis by topic, we expose more nuanced trends, for example that outlets with a smaller population reach covered the Statistics and Case Counts topic proportionally more, and the Economic Effects topic proportionally less. Our analysis further shows that people engaged proportionally more and used stronger reactions when COVID-19 news were posted by outlets with a smaller population reach. Finally, we demonstrate that COVID-19 posts in Republican-leaning counties generally received more comments and fewer likes than in Democratic counties, perhaps indicating controversy.
... Moreover, online journalists now have direct access to accurate, precise quantitative feedback regarding their readers behavior: how many clicks they made, how much time they spent on a specific page, how many of them abandoned an article (Carlson, 2018;Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016;Christin, 2018;Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021;Hanusch, 2017;Zamith, 2019). These same numbers are what digital media is selling to advertisers. ...
In traditional journalism, sensationalism was a characteristic of tabloid press. The main instruments used in sensationalistic headlines were bombastic epithets (awesome, amazing, greatest etc), and exaggerations used to increase the impact by curiosity. In the last decade, transformation with society and online media consumption behaviour have triggered a change of paradigm: we believe that we are facing a post-sensationalism media narrative, defined by catastrophism and the fight paradigm. In the context of a huge news feed overloaded with information, in the purpose of increasing the number of views of online media, the journalistic discourse has transformed radically and switched from informative to a more aggressive approach. The study shows that in Romania, the pursuit for clicks has generated a new discursive paradigm, a sort of post-sensationalism era, which we referred to as catastrophism and fight paradigm. This conclusion is based on quantitative and qualitative research that analysed Romanian online press headlines and content in approximately the same period of time both in 2018 and 2019. The research followed the frequency and context of usage of a few hashtags and keywords connected with our main concepts of concern: sensationalism, catastrophism, fight paradigm. In other words, we selected a few words that are, in our opinion, the most representative for the aforementioned concepts, and, with the use of professional instruments of press monitoring, we analysed their frequency and dynamics.
... Audience engagement is usually understood as the sum of metrics such as comments, likes, replies, etc., depending on the platform. Yet, it is important to understand that these different components of engagement have different affordances and can serve different functions (e.g., Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021;Savolainen et al., 2020). Also empirically, it has been shown that the number of, for instance, shares, likes, and comments of political content is not influenced in the same way by the same predictors (e.g., Judina & Platonov, 2019;Larsson, 2018;Trilling et al., 2017). ...
This study examines how female politicians are using Instagram to present themselves to the electorate and how this affects audience engagement. A manual content analysis was conducted to explore how female politicians, compared to male politicians (N = 40), use Instagram in terms of visual self-presentation, the use of masculine and feminine issues, and how this may lead to increased engagement (i.e., likes and comments). In total, N = 762 posts were manually analyzed. The study shows that female politicians receive more likes when they are visible in a picture compared to male politicians. It also reveals that male and female politicians both refer more to feminine issues than to masculine issues, although the use of feminine issues resulted in less likes. We find that some issues lead to more discussion amongst Instagram users, and that this differs between male and female politicians. The study sheds light on how politicians use Instagram and offers insights into how (female) politicians can use the platform to their advantage.
Conceived as institutions funded by the public purse and intended to exist devoid of political influence, the mandate of public service media (PSM) entities is to disseminate reliable news content and high-quality audiovisual productions to all demographic segments, inclusive of marginalized communities and audiences that are typically under-served. Over the previous ten years, the rise in prominence of global platforms in national media systems has precipitated many changes in the media sector, including unique challenges for PSM institutions guided by specific public service values. Using a holistic conceptual framework for assessing the implementation of these values, this article analyzes the impact of platformization on Europe's PSM and discusses how the Union's policy approaches affect related challenges to PSM. The analysis indicates that while the European Union (EU) has accorded a high priority to PSM within its media policy framework, the role that Brussels plays in protecting the independence and efficacy of PSM has been circumscribed, given that the onus of regulating PSM entities rests with national governments. This has engendered contrasting experiences wherein certain PSM outlets enjoy political independence and command significant public trust while others function as state-controlled propaganda vehicles, advancing the objectives and interests of governing bodies. The EU has addressed global platform power in recent attempts to safeguard its digital future, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). However, these acts do not adequately address PSM's two central and often interconnected problems: funding challenges and political pressures.
