Figure 2 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Violin plots of logarithmized engagement metrics as per ownership. Violin bodies show kernel density (i.e. histograms); vertical lines indicate median values per violin.
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...
Context 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. ...
Citations
... 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.
... 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.
As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant factor of news distribution. However, the influence of cultural differences on the relationship between emotions and news sharing remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of cultural disparities on emotional responses to political news in Hong Kong. We introduce the notion of “emotional profile” to capture cultural differences in the level and structure of audiences’ emotional responses to political topics on Facebook news pages. The study was conducted at a highly significant political moment in the former British colony when the National Security Law (NSL) was passed. The study found that readers of China-critical news pages on Facebook express the highest emotional intensity while readers of China’s media in Hong Kong express the lowest emotional intensity, and readers of China-supporting media fall in between. Readers of China-critical Facebook news pages express the most anger, but their political news sharing is correlated the most with “wow” and “sad” reactions. In contrast, readers of Facebook pages of China’s media in Hong Kong are more likely to react with “love”, which is also the emotion most associated with their political news sharing. The notion of “emotional profile” helps discover similarities within and differences across political boundaries of the news ecosystem. We interpret the results with the help of recent scholarly understanding of emotional expression on social media within Hong Kong’s political context.
As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of 140,359 Facebook posts of 17 Belgian news brands between March 2020 and 2021. We map out differences in audience engagement of news outlets' Facebook posts related and unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic and differences between mainstream and alternative news outlets. We find that COVID-19-related posts generate more engagement and more so for mainstream media than for alternative media outlets.
The datafication and platformization of social processes further the overall shift from an open, public, and decentralized internet towards a private and siloed realm that establishes power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade, and control data. The ongoing process of datafying societies embraces the logics of aggregation and automation that increasingly negotiate transactions between markets and social entities, informing governance systems, institutions, and public discourse. This thematic issue presents a collection of articles that tackle the political economy of datafication from three main perspectives: (a) digital media infrastructures and its actors, data structures, and markets; (b) the articulation of data power, public access to information, data privacy, and the risks of citizens in a datafied society; and (c) the policies and regulations for effective, independent media institutions and data sovereignty. It concludes with a reflection on the role of media and communication scholarship when studying sociotechnical processes controlled by giant technological companies.
Informed by the theoretical framework of media effects and resonance theory, this study investigates how issue obtrusiveness and information richness as message attributes, and media hierarchy and orientation as source characteristics influence audience engagement with news posts on social media. The data of news posts (N = 943,793) from the top 99 Sina Weibo accounts of Chinese media with likes, comments, and reposts as indicators of audience engagement were retrieved. Through multilevel modeling, the study finds that source characteristics exert stronger effects on audience engagement than message attributes, and the effects on comments differ from those on likes and reposts. The association between issue obtrusiveness and comments is stronger than that between obtrusiveness and likes/reposts. Posts of high information richness draw more audience engagement than posts of low information richness. Through their news posts, central-level media attract more engagement than local media. The implications of the findings are discussed.
This article combines two prominent discussions in media studies and industry: the challenged economic situation for independent community news and the complex relationship with digital platforms. Through empirical data, it assesses current incomes and the impact of platform companies on management practices in the UK. It finds that building your social media following, particularly on Twitter, correlates to higher income. Independent community media also report utility benefit from digital platforms for audience growth, the provision of analytics and story suggestions. Direct returns economically from advertising are less forthcoming and publishers feel subjugated by policymaker and platform opacity. Through a mixed method approach, we conclude social media practices can have positive indirect impact on the news revenue model, but absent direct returns mean management frustrations persist
In the face of ongoing digitisation, The Markets for News examines how certain established economic features of the news industry have persisted and what makes them such stable frameworks for journalistic organisations.
Drawing on an analysis of Scandinavian news industries, this text revises journalism’s economic foundations in the context of the algorithmically driven platform economy. Exploration of features such as journalism’s two-sided market model, the network effect of platforms, and chain ownership, leads to a discussion about how journalism faces disruption from the introduction of artificial intelligence in the production, dissemination, and sale of news. As journalism undergoes transformations due to revenue losses, this book recognises a return to certain enduring features of journalism’s organisational form, in particular the chain ownership form, that enables scale in adapting to platform logics and economics. This text serves as a basis for a theoretical discussion about strategic media management and critical political economy in the age of digital disruption.
