Available via license: CC BY 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211009246
new media & society
1 –24
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14614448211009246
journals.sagepub.com/home/nms
Toward ‘Cultures of
Engagement’? An exploratory
comparison of engagement
patterns on Facebook news
posts
Raul Ferrer-Conill
Karlstad University, Sweden; University of Stavanger, Norway
Michael Karlsson
Karlstad University, Sweden
Mario Haim
University of Leipzig, Germany
Aske Kammer
Danish School of Media and Journalism, Denmark
Dag Elgesem
University of Bergen, Norway
Helle Sjøvaag
University of Stavanger, Norway
Abstract
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
Corresponding author:
Raul Ferrer-Conill, Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University,
Universitetsgatan 2, 65637 Karlstad, Sweden.
Email: raul.ferrer@kau.se
1009246NMS0010.1177/14614448211009246new media & societyFerrer-Conill et al.
research-article2021
Article
2 new media & society 00(0)
(n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of
engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether
the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and
type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers
of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in
how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether
they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.
Keywords
Comparative research, culture, engagement, journalism, social media
Introduction
Journalistic ideas, practices, and artifacts are manifested in content, and they reflect spe-
cific news cultures (Esser, 2008). These are, on one hand, journalistic “cultures of pro-
duction” whose output is contingent on national contexts, market configurations, and the
individual characteristics of news outlets (Aalberg and Curran, 2012; Hallin and Mancini,
2004; Örnebring and Jönsson, 2004; Sjøvaag, 2019), and on the other hand, “cultures of
news consumption,” represented by patterns of consumption explained by country-level
factors beyond individual user differences (Toff and Kalogeropoulos, 2020). As news
organizations continue to concentrate on quantifying audience engagement, it is unknown
what the patterns of audience engagement are and whether they are similar across coun-
tries and media.
This study aims to explore and compare what we tentatively call “cultures of engage-
ment” across three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and differ-
ent outlet types. We do so by investigating the patterns of audience engagement with
news posts on Facebook produced by Scandinavian state-owned (i.e. public service
media) and private-owned news media. Our interest lies in whether aggregated metrics
of engagement with news organizations’ output on Facebook show distinct patterns of
engagement across countries and ownership, and whether these patterns align with news
outlets’ Facebook distribution strategies. Essentially, our goal is to move the debate on
media engagement forward by exploring patterns that can be attributed to national con-
texts and to expand the “cultural approaches” beyond production and distribution
domains.
Scholarship on “measurable journalism” (Carlson, 2018) explores the many ways in
which news audiences’ consumption practices are quantified and examined by news-
workers through metrics and analytics. The widespread adoption of audience data and
metrics (Cherubini and Nielsen, 2016) presupposes that a concept such as engagement
can be captured, quantified, and used for editorial and commercial purposes (Ferrer-
Conill, 2017). This is important because the central role of metrics of audience engage-
ment in news organizations sets the standards for journalistic success (Belair-Gagnon,
2018) and economic relevance (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013), and also social legitimacy
Ferrer-Conill et al. 3
(Carlson, 2018). As long as the industry continues to understand engagement as a pre-
dominantly measurable behavior at a user level (Steensen et al., 2020), research will fail
to understand whether aggregated metrics of interactivity represent broader forms of
engagement with the news.
Our departing argument suggests that if audience feedback and data have an effect on
news production (Lee and Tandoc, 2017), then the patterns of consumption should align
with production patterns. Therefore, this alignment should be a variable that helps
explain differences across journalistic output. Considering that audience engagement has
become a key performance indicator of journalistic production (Cherubini and Nielsen,
2016) and that audience analytics exert social influence in norm formation in the news-
room (Zamith et al., 2019), it is relevant to investigate if engagement metrics are contin-
gent on cultural markers.
To attune to trends in newsrooms, in this study, we consider engagement as a form of
interaction, or what Haim et al. (2018) call “popularity cues” as a site where news pro-
duction and consumption interact. Our goal is to scrutinize audience engagement through
aggregated metrics, seeing what newsworkers see, but at a scale that is often out of reach
for individual journalists or news organizations. Thus, this study’s contribution lies in
providing the first insights into the existence of distinct, national forms of engagement.
These insights are backed by a wealth of data that showcase over 69 million interactions
by Facebook users with news posts, providing an accurate view of engagement patterns
across the three Scandinavian countries. This constitutes the first study, to our knowl-
edge, to focus on engagement as a cultural trait while analyzing the practical entire
national engagement of three countries. We analyze 1,173,159 public posts published by
482 Scandinavian news outlets’ to their 694 Facebook pages. We acknowledge that find-
ing causation between news consumption on Facebook and news production is beyond
the reach of this study. However, if the patterns of engagement show similar variation as
journalistic output based on key contextual variables, it would be an indicator that “cul-
tures of engagement” exist and could be a relevant factor when thinking about contem-
porary news engagement.
A reductionist and quantified approach to audience
engagement
Due to the current focus on metrics and analytics in journalism scholarship (see Zamith,
2018), the notion of engagement has slowly been reduced, among researchers and prac-
titioners, to an aggregation of ill-defined technological measurements (Nelson, 2018)
that loosely indicate what audiences want from news outlets (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc,
2018). While we remain skeptical of equating metrics to what the audience wants, at a
larger scale, metrics point to the content with which audiences chose to engage. Following
the approach of Steensen et al. (2020), we believe this is a reductionist and quantified
understanding of audience engagement, but we acknowledge it is the one practitioners
adopt and welcome. While “cultures of news” are more a theoretical approach than an
established theory, our interest here is, first, to discuss the social importance of quantify-
ing journalism and engagement in social media; second, to visualize forms of cultures of
production and dissemination across Scandinavian news media on Facebook; and third,
4 new media & society 00(0)
to explore the existence of cultures of engagement based on the quantification of their
behavior.
Quantifying audience engagement with popularity cues
The quantification of social phenomena continues to grow as an attempt to simplify and
measure the complexity of social dynamics through technological means (Berman and
Hirschman, 2018). In news media, the “desire for numbers” (Kennedy, 2016) can be
understood as a form of rationalizing both the societal and commercial relevance of an
industry and a profession that embraced online publishing with the speed of an aging
tortoise.
While the current push for engagement responds to a “public media journalists’ desire
to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial”
(Belair-Gagnon et al., 2019: 558), the widespread adoption of metrics and analytics as a
form of quantifying audience behavior signals an attempt to capture “audience engage-
ment.” This quantification of behavior has three major developments. First, the deploy-
ment of analytic tools in the newsroom is becoming central in editorial decision-making
and advertising negotiations (Moyo et al., 2019). Second, this development has also
spurred the creation of new journalistic positions, such as audience-oriented editors,
whose task is to translate audience engagement in the newsroom (Ferrer-Conill and
Tandoc, 2018). And third, it has led to the uptake of external analytic providers (Belair-
Gagnon and Holton, 2018) inside newsrooms analyzing both internal and social media
audience engagement. The transition from an “imagined audience” (Litt, 2012) to a
“constructed audience” (Napoli, 2011) responds to a technologically aided attempt to
understand the audience as a path to slowly close the gap between what news organiza-
tions produce and what news audiences consume (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2013).
This shift can be explained by an attempt to maximize the commercial value of the audi-
ence (Napoli, 2011) by producing what news organizations believe will yield higher
levels of engagement. Bonsón and Ratkai (2013), for example, claim that metrics, such
as popularity, commitment, and virality are suitable to assess reactivity, dialogic com-
munication, and stakeholder engagement, as well as their social legitimacy on corporate
Facebook pages. While Steensen et al. (2020) claim that to truly capture audience
engagement, news organizations should not only focus on the behavior-technical aspects
and instead expand their analysis on emotional, spatial–temporal, and normative dimen-
sions of engagement, it is clear that practitioners tend to equate audience behavior cap-
tured by metrics to audience engagement (Cherubini and Nielsen, 2016).
Thus, it is important to acknowledge that the current understanding of engagement
across most media industries relies on few quantified patterns of behavior on social
media, specifically small “acts of engagement,” such as liking, sharing, and comment-
ing, which require limited audience investment (Picone et al., 2019). Being “small,”
however, does not diminish their importance, as aggregating multiple instances of spe-
cific behavior ascribes a monetary value to that behavior (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013).
Despite not capturing emotional or normative aspects of engagement, these popularity
cues are “metric information about users’ behavior or their evaluations of entities” (Haim
et al., 2018: 188) that have the capacity of affecting not only news production but also
Ferrer-Conill et al. 5
patterns of consumption among the audience as they often feed into algorithmic recom-
mendation systems that drive news consumption (Porten-Cheé et al., 2018). Moreover,
by posting news on social media, news organizations aim to both drive and increase
engagement with their content, which, at the same time, will modify audience behavior.
If technical constraints fail to capture all dimensions of engagements (Steensen et al.,
2020), may be the large-scale aggregation of technical–behavioral dimension (through
the actions of Facebook’s platform-driven population), as well as the spatial–temporal
dimension (through the externally constructed Scandinavian population during
2018/2019) might yield betters results. This implies that, just like with any dimensions
of news production and consumption, there are nuances affected by their cultural con-
texts, and even the adoption or pushback of metrics in news media is contingent on
specific “news cultures” (Hanusch, 2017).
Cultures of news production and consumption
There have been multiple impressive comparative projects theorizing the relationship
between journalism, politics, economics, and culture, and what this means for news con-
tent, professional ideals, and independence, to mention a few dimensions (De Vreese
et al., 2017; Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Mellado, 2015). Drawing
from a functionalist model of culture (Hofstede, 1980), media researchers have ascribed
these dimensions to cultural and national borders. Deuze (2002), for example, comparing
Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and the United States, concludes that a
national news culture can be seen as consisting of the characteristics of its journalists, its types
of storytelling, and its relationships to news sources and public, or, in other words, to its
structure and agency in relation to media types, genres, and public perceptions. (p. 143)
Similar “cultural” approaches, often scrutinized through international comparative
research, have been explored in journalism scholarship (Bødker, 2015; Esser, 2008;
Hanitzsch, 2007; Hanusch, 2009). Particularly, in Scandinavian countries, the news
media market is characterized by a strong presence of the state, as a player that not only
regulates the market tightly, but that also participates in it via subsidies and public broad-
casting services (Sjøvaag, 2019). While the role of the state exerts different influences in
other media systems (such as clientelism in the polarized-pluralist media; Hallin and
Mancini, 2004), the involvement of the welfare state in the Nordic media system is asso-
ciated with maintaining journalistic professionalism and the democratic and social duties
of news media (Kammer, 2016). The coexistence of a public media sector alongside a
commercial, private media rests on the ideals that the public should have access to a
diverse wealth of content that is both commercially and socially viable (Syvertsen et al.,
2014).
On the reception side of the engagement, the fast-growing body of literature concen-
trates on how and why users interact (e.g. shares, likes, comments) in one particular
country (Lee and Ma, 2012; Picone et al., 2016; Swart et al., 2018). Alternatively,
research is interested in exploring correlations between specific content dimensions (e.g.
emotions, subjective writing) and how much news items are shared (Khuntia et al., 2016;
6 new media & society 00(0)
Trilling et al., 2016). The focus on users per se suggests that the results are either an
aggregation of randomly chosen individuals (quantitatively) or insights into how cultur-
ally embedded people relate to engagement (qualitatively) rather than an actual investi-
gation into the diversity of voices as they collectively exist online (e.g. Silverstone,
2013). Toff and Kalogeropoulos (2020), however, consider that group-level social, cul-
tural, or political forces form specific “cultures of news consumption” that should yield
observable country-level differences in collective patterns of consumption. In this study,
we focus on patterns of user engagement as they unfold at a large scale in real-life set-
tings, following a similar logic. If there are “cultures of news production” and “cultures
of news consumption,” we should find “cultures of engagement” where patterns of news
production and distribution on social media meet users’ consumption patterns.
Comparative research has demonstrated that there are indeed distinctions in journal-
ism, depending on the culture in which it is embedded. Similarly, studies on news con-
sumption demonstrate the relationship between news media output and news consumption
and knowledge levels about current affairs among the public (Aalberg et al., 2013;
Curran et al., 2009; Shehata and Strömbäck, 2011). Similar comparative studies indicate
that commenting and sharing of news on social media vary between countries and news
sites (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2017; Larsson, 2018). From the perspective of news con-
sumption in Scandinavia, Schrøder et al. (2020) find that while news consumption com-
monalities (e.g. preferred sources of news, pathways to news, paying for online news,
and trust in the news) confirm the existence of a “Nordic news media system,” there are
intra-systemic differences across the countries. This does not challenge Hallin and
Mancini’s (2004) composition of the Democratic Corporatist Model, but rather suggests
a more granular and nuanced account for the sub-division of that model. What Schrøder
and colleagues propose is that the North/Central European model can further be divided
into sub-systems and that within the Nordic system, there are minor, but significant
national differences. Surveying these popularity cues highlights the perceived relevance
of news items among a population that can be appreciated by both news producers and
audiences, potentially affecting both patterns of news production and consumption
(Porten-Cheé et al., 2018). At a large-scale and aggregated level, these cues or acts of
engagement show Facebook audiences considered worth interacting with and providing
patterns of collective behaviors toward news outlets’ posts.
Theoretical synthesis and research questions
In light of the theoretical discussion, this article offers three theoretical propositions.
First, as the industry only has technological means to quantify audience behavior, news
organizations have conflated audience engagement with popularity cues while overlook-
ing the emotional, normative, and spatial–temporal dimensions of engagement (Steensen
et al., 2020). These cues have become central to establish news media’s commercial and
societal success. They are also an instrumental part of the production process as well as in
the consumption process. The former draws from metrics to discern what resonates with
the audience to “inform” editorial decisions. The latter strengthens consumption patterns
as liking, commenting, and sharing spreads the news across social media networks. By
aggregating at a large-scale the results of technical–behavioral (i.e. Facebook likes, shares,
Ferrer-Conill et al. 7
and comments) and the spatial–temporal (i.e. Scandinavia during 2018 and 2019), we
provide a more contextualized understanding of audience engagement.
Second, we know there are specific cultures of news production that shape how jour-
nalism is produced according to various contextual variables, particularly national bound-
aries. Drawing from Esser (2008), if “news cultures” are manifested through content, we
believe similar dynamics should exist around how audiences engage with that content and
that the patterns of engagement with the content should visualize existing “cultures of
engagement.” While Scandinavian countries coexist within the same media system
(Hallin and Mancini, 2004) and, therefore, we should find small differences in social
media news distribution, these differences should be further explored at the national level
(Schrøder et al., 2020). Similarly, we propose that the patterns of engagement should
reproduce these patterns of output dissemination, and whether there are any differences in
production, these should be replicated across the patterns of production (e.g. more output
in one country should be followed by more engagement in that same country).
Third, due to more substantial metrics-driven scrutiny of audiences and stronger
attempt to close the news gap as a way to increase revenues (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein,
2013), we propose that audience engagement should be sharper with private-owned out-
lets than with state-owned ones since the role of public service media is not to maximize
profit but rather to offer more diverse content (Sjøvaag, 2019). We do not have a priori
comparative data of engagement across countries; however, we expect to see similar pat-
terns of engagement with commercial and public outlets across national boundaries.
Given these theoretical propositions, this study sets out to respond to the following
research questions:
First, we want to establish a baseline and see to what extent engagement varies, if at
all, between news posts and news items in the different countries. Thus, RQ1 asks:
Do the patterns of engagement with the news posts on Facebook in the three
Scandinavian countries align with the patterns of news items posted on Facebook? If
not, how do they diverge?
Second, given our literature review and theoretical synthesis above, we are interested
to see how the engagement patterns established in RQ1 are connected to country and
ownership.
RQ2 asks: Are there different patterns of engagement depending on outlet ownership
or country?
Finally, in RQ3, we want to make a combined comparison, including both countries
and ownership: How do differences between patterns of engagement vary across
countries and outlet ownership?
Data and method
This study is based on an inductive research design based on a rich dataset of Facebook
posts along with their engagement metrics (i.e. likes, shares, comments) from all news
outlets in three Scandinavian countries. This first exploration looked for patterns and
8 new media & society 00(0)
relationships that offer potential meanings, rather than causal relationships. The reason
for looking at three countries within the same media system is that comparing patterns of
engagement from very diverse countries would present “obvious differences which
could be explained in terms of the societal and corresponding media cultural differences
of the countries” (Deuze, 2002: 135). We believe the presence of variance in patterns of
engagement in countries that are very similar would be a better indicator of a cultural
approach to engagement.
The empirical material builds on an initial amount of 489 news outlets, active in one
or several of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, n = 165 active outlets; Norway,
n = 153; and Sweden, n = 173). This list represents all news outlets as compiled in early
2018 in accordance with the editorial poster, to which these outlets reportedly adhere and
thus claim to follow ethical guidelines as well as Facebook’s code of the press. We then
coded the outlets manually for whether they are wholly state-owned (Danish Broadcastin
Corporation (DR), Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), and Swedish Public
Radio (SR) as well as Television SVT) or commercial outlets (n = 485). Moreover, we
manually collected these outlets’ Facebook pages, summing up to 710 Facebook pages.
This increase from 489 outlets to 710 Facebook pages results from several outlets main-
taining more than one Facebook page to, for example, separate sports from politics.
Actual post data, then, were collected through the Swedish commercial social media
data supplier Twingly1 (which later transferred these services to Netfeedr2). Until recently,
Twingly provided access to monthly archives of public Facebook posts along with their
publication date, post texts, and the cumulated numbers of likes, shares, and comments
(counted 1 month after publication). Although most researchers were prohibited access
to these parts of the Facebook application programming interface (API) after April 2018
(Freelon, 2018), Twingly was able to retain bilateral contracts with Facebook for some
time to digest public posts along with aggregated numbers. We provided Twingly with
our list of Facebook pages in mid-2018 and retrieved data from August 2018 until the
end of June 2019. While originally aiming for 1 year of data, technical issues led to the
ultimate set of 11 months. We collected all public posts, including links, status updates,
photo, and video posts, and manually inspected a sample of posts to compare it to the
actual Facebook pages of the news outlets to validate Twingly’s data, yielding no irregu-
larities. We also removed all Facebook pages and outlets that were less active than one
post per month. Ultimately, this left us with a total of 482 active news outlets subsuming
694 Facebook pages and a total of 1,173,131 posts (see Table 1).
The posts distribute across the three countries following roughly similar proportions
as the numbers of Facebook pages; that is, while the final data consist of 27% Danish
Facebook pages (Norwegian: 38%; Swedish: 36%), it also consists of 22% posts from
Danish pages (Norwegian: 44%; Swedish: 33%). Relatedly, state-owned pages from
Denmark make up for 2% of all Facebook pages (Norway: 5%; Sweden: 4%) and 1% of
all posts (Norway: 3%; Sweden: 4%).
Twingly also provided us with the numbers of comments, likes, and shares each post
retrieved 1 month after its publication. While these metrics of engagement vary heavily,
in total, all posts yielded over 69.6 million interactions (i.e. 20.2 million comments, 42.7
million likes, and 6.7 million shares). While we cannot be sure Twingly’s data collection
actually contains every single post and interaction, to the best of our knowledge, our
Ferrer-Conill et al. 9
dataset accounts for the entire population of news posts made on Facebook by news
outlets in these countries during the 333 day period of data collection, with the exception
of 2 days (30 December 2018 and 16 May 2019) during which technical issues prevented
reliable data collection. This issue, however, should only comprise a minor fraction of
posts per outlet.
For our analyses, we employed simple descriptive measures to get a sense of the vol-
ume of posts and their respective engagements. To account for outliers among posts, we
first summarized within each outlet before deriving measures across countries and own-
erships. With such a high volume of data, and considering that we are analyzing the
entire population of interactions, typical inferential analyses were unnecessary due to
Table 1. Descriptive statistics across outlets for posts, likes, comments, and shares in
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
Denmark Norway Sweden Totals
Available outlets 165 153 173 489
Available Facebook pages 190 267 255 710
Active outlets 162 153 169 482
Active Facebook pages 185 263 248 694
Posts 260,155 521,247 391,729 1,173,131
Posts/outlet 1605.90 3406.84 2317.92 2433.88
Comments
Total amount 8,165,604 6,471,947 5,589,092 20,226,640
M10.00 4.65 4.89 6.52
SD 19.65 8.70 8.71 13.60
Max. M154.57 70.07 77.66 154.57
Median 1 0 0 0
M of 0 comments (%) 49 58 55 54
Likes
Total amount 11,083,260 16,742,440 14,885,530 42,711,230
M20.75 20.80 19.90 20.47
SD 25.14 18.57 21.20 21.81
Max. M243.30 134.54 188.54 243.30
Median 6 5 5 6
M of 0 likes (%) 14 16 14 14
Shares
Total amount 2,469,640 1,787,363 2,445,991 6,702,994
M 4.78 1.87 2.85 3.19
SD 6.68 1.90 3.28 4.61
Max. M55.09 14.73 28.56 55.09
Median 1 0 1 0
M of 0 shares (%) 41 58 49 49
SD: standard deviation.
Comments, likes, and shares summarized within each outlet first, before calculating depicted results across
outlets.
10 new media & society 00(0)
decreasing standard errors, which in turn increases statistical power. Thus, while the
results are mostly descriptive, they are still significant. To answer RQ1 and RQ2, we
analyzed the distribution of posts produced and the interactions created. These interac-
tions are divided into three metrics of engagement (i.e. likes, comments, and shares), for
which we analyzed their total amount, the mean and median across outlets as well as the
highest mean per outlet, and the outlets’ average share of posts that did not receive any
interactions. Knowing the distribution of posts without engagement helps to further off-
set the effects of viral posts. While it is interesting to know the number of interactions
(total and per post), it is also important to visualize to what extent people engage with the
complete set of posts produced by news outlets. To respond to RQ3, we conducted a
similar analysis but combining both variables so that we could see the distribution and
descriptive statistics for outlets ownerships across all three countries individually. This
allowed us to see whether the individual results for each variable had unusual variations
when analyzed together.
Results
Engagement at a national level
The first research question focused on how Facebook users engaged with news posts
made by news organizations. Table 1 offers an overview of key indices of posts in each
country as per the three main engagement metrics in use—comments, likes, and shares.
Figure 1 depicts histogram distributions for each of the three countries and each of the
three metrics.
In general, engagement with news posts on Facebook shows a pattern in which likes
are most common interactions (∑ = 42,711,230, M = 20.47, SD = 21.81), followed by
comments (∑ = 20,226,640, M = 6.52, SD = 13.60), and shares (∑ = 6,702,994, M = 3.19,
SD = 4.61). The popularity of likes, comments, and shares goes beyond the sum of inter-
actions. On average across outlets, 86% were liked by at least one user, 46% received at
least one comment, and 51% were shared. Moreover, while there is a roughly similar
number of posts with comments and shares, likes are almost three times more frequent
than both comments and shares. These results show the usual engagement patterns in
which likes are more frequent than comments and shares as a representation of different
levels of engagement (Kim and Yang, 2017); however, the contrast with the results by
Larsson (2017) showing that the means of each interaction, overall, is much lower now
than it was in 2014. Larsson (2017), however, analyzed the outlets’ pages, while this
study covered individual news posts, which are expected to attract less engagement indi-
vidually than the outlets’ pages as a whole.
However, the premise of this study suggests that if there are evident news production
cultures that resonate at various levels, there probably are engagement cultures repli-
cated in how users interact with the news. At a national level, the production of posts by
news organizations across countries is dominated by Norwegian media. Norwegian out-
lets posted a total of 521,247 posts, with an average of almost 3407 posts per outlet. In
comparison, Sweden, with 2318 posts per outlet, and Denmark, with 1606 posts per
outlet, trail behind with much less activity on Facebook.
Ferrer-Conill et al. 11
Looking at the engagement of users with these posts, the data show that the patterns
of engagement are inverted in the three countries. The engagement with Danish posts is
by far the highest of all. While they receive a fewer total number of likes, Danish
(M = 20.75, SD = 25.14) news posts have about the same average of likes as posts by
Swedish (M = 19.90, SD = 21.20) and Norwegian (M = 20.80, SD = 18.57) outlets. Only
14% of posts by Danish outlets were not liked by Facebook users. The difference is most
prominent in shares and comments, though. On average, Danish (M = 10.00, SD = 19.65)
posts received comments at a far superior rate than Swedish (M = 4.89, SD = 8.71) and
Figure 1. Violin plots of logarithmized engagement metrics. Violin bodies show kernel density
(i.e. histograms); vertical lines indicate median values per violin.
12 new media & society 00(0)
Norwegian (M = 4.65, SD = 8.70) posts. 49% of all Danish posts receive no comments,
while 55% of Swedish posts and 58% of Norwegian posts are left uncommented.
Similarly, Danish (M = 4.78, SD = 6.68) posts were shared more than Swedish (M = 2.85,
SD = 3.28) posts and almost three times as much as Norwegian (M = 1.87, SD = 1.90)
posts. About 59% of Danish posts are shared by users, while only 51% of Swedish and
42% of Norwegian posts are shared.
Considering the number of interactions analyzed, these results suggest that there are
differences in the way Nordic audiences engage with news Facebook posts. Overall,
Danish audiences like, comment, and share at a higher rate than Swedish and Norwegian
audiences, respectively. This is more accentuated in comments and shares. There are two
main takeaways here. The first one relates engagement to production patterns. While
Norwegian outlets produce more posts than their Swedish and their Danish counterparts,
it is the Danish users that engage more with the fewer pieces. Norwegians show much
less interest in making comments and sharing posts, despite having a larger pool of posts
to interact with. Thus, these differences indicate that the volume of content is not neces-
sarily an indicator of engagement and that, with fewer posts, Danish outlets manage to
engage more with their audience. While there is a relationship between the number of
posts and the total measurements of engagement, the engagement per post, and most
importantly, the type of engagement is not correlated to the overall number of posts in
each country. The implication here is that while production patterns have a role in
engagement metrics, they are not necessarily a good indicator for the type or intensity of
audience engagement with the content that is disseminated through social media. The
second one relates engagement to consumption patterns. The fact that we could find
distinct differences in consumption patterns and that these also show different patterns
across the engagement measures show that there are different forms of engagement
across countries. Moreover, seeing that specific “popularity cues” are more pronounced
in specific countries (like commenting and sharing in Denmark) means that audiences in
these countries tend to interact with news on social media in distinct ways. We cannot
claim whether the type of interaction is positive or negative, but the cycles of interaction
between the actors are different across nations.
Engagement at the outlet ownership level
The second research question focused on whether outlet ownership (i.e. state-owned or
private-owned) has any implications for how audiences engage with them.
As Table 2 and Figure 2 show, commercial outlets in Scandinavian countries outnum-
ber state-owned outlets considerably. The number of commercial outlets is high because,
while the newspapers market was always a private sector, with the liberalization of
broadcasting services in the Nordic countries, commercially driven outlets multiplied
manifold. The higher number of commercial outlets means that the vast majority of
Facebook posts in the sample belong to commercial outlets (about 92%), and therefore,
the total number of likes, comments, and shares is higher in commercial news media.
The number of posts per outlet, however, shows that commercial outlets post far
fewer news items than public broadcasters. Conversely, looking at posts per Facebook
page, the number of posted news items is roughly equal. This is because public
Ferrer-Conill et al. 13
broadcasters are more prominent in scale and branch off to multiple national and local
pages. State-owned media, while being few, have the capacity to engage more with audi-
ences by posting more on social media. This is also replicated in how users engage with
the posts. While private-owned media produces the vast majority of posts, when compar-
ing the means of likes, comments, and shares shows that public broadcasters outperform
private-owned media in audience engagement. The number of likes per post in state-
owned media posts on Facebook (M = 60.96, SD = 40.66) almost triples the number of
likes in commercial media (M = 20.13, SD = 20.13). Across all the posts, only 6% of pub-
lic service posts have no likes. In other words, 94% of all posts by state-owned media
have at least one like by the audience. In comparison, only 85% of commercial posts are
“liked” by the audience. The difference in comments also favors state-owned media. In
this regard, public broadcasting media have an average of 30 comments per post
(M = 30.10, SD = 22.03), while commercial media have only six comments per post
Table 2. Descriptive statistics for posts, likes, comments, and shares across state-owned or
commercial outlets.
Commercial State-owned Total
Active outlets 478 4 482
Active Facebook pages 618 76 694
Posts 1,082,221 90,910 1,173,131
Posts/outlet 2264.06 22,727.5 2433.88
Comments
Total amount 17,604,910 2,621,736 20,226,640
M6.33 30.10 6.52
SD 13.37 22.03 13.60
Max. M154.57 58.08 154.57
Median 0 4 0
M of 0 comments (%) 54 26 54
Likes
Total amount 36,725,230 5,985,997 42,711,230
M20.13 60.96 20.47
SD 21.34 40.66 21.81
Max. M243.30 102.38 243.30
Median 6 15 6
M of 0 likes (%) 15 6 14
Shares
Total amount 5,702,981 1,000,013 6,702,994
M3.13 9.97 3.19
SD 4.56 5.23 4.61
Max. M55.09 14.73 55.09
Median 0 2 0
M of 0 shares (%) 49 30 49
SD: standard deviation.
Comments, likes, and shares summarized within each outlet first, before calculating depicted results across
outlets.
14 new media & society 00(0)
(M = 6.33, SD = 13.37). About 74% of all public broadcast posts receive at least one com-
ment, while only 46% of comments in commercial media received comments. This dif-
ference is also present in the number of shares. Even though the total number of shares,
as discussed above, is smaller, in state-owned media, about 70% of all posts are shared
at least once by the audience (M = 9.97, SD = 5.23). In contrast, 49% of commercial posts
are not shared at all (M = 3.13, SD = 4.56).
This finding is surprising in two respects. First, the results challenge the theoretical
proposition that commercial outlets, with a higher audience-orientation and more use of
Figure 2. Violin plots of logarithmized engagement metrics as per ownership. Violin bodies
show kernel density (i.e. histograms); vertical lines indicate median values per violin.
Ferrer-Conill et al. 15
metrics and analytics, should have higher levels of engagement with the audience. This
is based on the fact that the more commercial the outlet, the smaller the news gap
(Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2013) between what the audience wants and what the
outlets produce, given that private-owned outlets seek commercial gain, as opposed to
public media services (Sjøvaag, 2019). However, the data show a much higher level of
engagement with public broadcasters’ posts, and therefore, state-owned media posts on
Facebook are more popular and successful at engaging the audience. Second, private-
owned media, despite producing more content than public broadcasters, fail to engage
with the audience, and about half of their posts are not valuable enough to grant a com-
ment or a share.
Engagement across national context and outlet ownership
The third research question focused on whether the comparison of contextual varia-
bles 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. While the national aggregate pointed to a higher number of posts by Norwegian
outlets, the comparison shows that it is the commercial outlets that dramatically increase
the number of posts per outlet in contrast with the other commercial outlets in Denmark
and Sweden. In other words, while Denmark and Sweden have similar patterns of posts
per outlet in commercial outlets, Norway is an outlier at this point.
Another apparent anomaly emerging from the comparison of variables is the
engagement with Swedish public service broadcasters. Table 1 shows seemingly reg-
ular levels of engagement with Swedish outlets, on par or in between the levels of
Denmark and Norway. Table 2 shows higher engagement with public broadcasters
across the board. However, Table 3 shows that Swedish users’ engagement with com-
mercial and state-owned outlets’ posts diverges less than engagement in Denmark or
Norway; commenting, liking, and sharing in Sweden, while also showing discrepan-
cies 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. In fact, after
considering outlet ownership separately, we can see that Norwegian outlets have the
least comments and the least shares with private-owned outlets. Another striking
example is the comparison of comments in Danish (M = 58.08) posts by state-owned
outlets, which is four times higher than in Swedish state-owned (M = 12.62, SD = 3.62)
posts. Norwegian (M = 37.06) posts receive comments at over three times the rate of
Swedish posts. Similar differences are replicated at the level of likes and shares,
where engagement with the state-owned Norwegian outlets is higher than in the other
two countries. Interestingly, engagement with Norwegian commercial outlets is on
par or lower than in both Sweden and Denmark.
Taken together, these differentiated findings primarily suggest the need to add a more
granular set of intervening variables to further scrutinize the role that different variables
play in explicating the different emerging patterns of engagement.
16 new media & society 00(0)
Table 3. Descriptive statistics for posts, likes, comments, and shares across state-owned or commercial outlets in Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden.
Denmark Norway Sweden Total
Commercial State-owned Commercial State-owned Commercial State-owned
Active outlets 161 1 152 1 167 2 482
Active Facebook pages 174 11 228 35 218 30 694
Posts 247,017 13,138 489,050 32,197 346,154 45,575 1,173,131
Posts/outlet 1,534.27 13,138 3,217.43 32,197 2072.78 22,787.5 2433.88
Comments
Total amount 7,402,494 763,110 5,278,684 1,193,263 4,923,729 665,363 20,226,640
M9.70 58.08 4.44 37.06 4.80 12.62 6.52
SD 19.34 - 8.32 - 8.72 3.62 13.60
Max. M154.57 58.08 70.07 37.06 77.66 15.18 154.57
Median 1 12 0 5 0 2 0
M of 0 comments (%) 49 15 59 24 55 33 54
Likes
Total amount 9,926,101 1,157,155 13,446,000 3,296,446 13,353,130 1,532,396 42,711,230
M20.33 88.08 20.26 102.38 19.82 26.70 20.47
SD 24.64 - 17.40 - 21.29 12.64 21.81
Max. M243.30 88.08 134.54 102.38 188.54 35.64 243.30
Median 6 20 5 23 5 8 6
M of 0 likes (%) 14 5 16 4 14 8 14
Shares
Total amount 2,291,246 178,394 1,313,165 474,198 2,098,570 347,421 6,702,994
M4.73 13.58 1.78 14.73 2.82 5.78 3.19
SD 6.67 – 1.59 – 3.28 3.36 4.61
Max. M55.09 13.58 11.89 14.73 28.56 8.16 55.09
Median 1 3 0 3 1 1 0
M of 0 shares (%) 41 25 58 24 49 35 49
SD: standard deviation.
Comments, likes, and shares summarized within each outlet first, before calculating depicted results across outlets. Having only one state-owned outlet, no standard deviations can be
calculated for Denmark and Norway.
Ferrer-Conill et al. 17
Discussion and conclusion
A few interesting observations can be made of this study. First, we see a clear divergence
in how news organizations post news on Facebook and how audiences engage with them
(RQ1). We expected that countries with more outlets would make more posts, and there-
fore would receive more engagement. However, our findings show that posting more
news on Facebook does not result in higher levels of engagement necessarily. The three
countries have a similar number of outlets, but the total number of interactions are very
Figure 3. Violin plots of logarithmized engagement metrics as per country and ownership.
Violin bodies show kernel density (i.e. histograms); vertical lines indicate median values per
violin.
18 new media & society 00(0)
different. The differences become even more prominent when comparing engagement
per post. Denmark, as the country with the outlets that least post on Facebook, captures
over 35 interactions per post on average, 30% more than Norway, at 27 interactions per
post, and Sweden, with 28 interactions per post. These differences are replicated with
small variations for both comments and shares. Another critical difference is the number
of posts receiving at least one interaction. Here, too, Danish readers show more engage-
ment, liking 86%, commenting on 51%, and sharing 69% of all posts. Thus, the pattern
of news production does not align with the pattern of engagement. In fact, in our
Scandinavian case, these patterns are diametrically opposed, and the country with the
least posts reaps by far the most engagement.
This has two important implications. First, quantity does not necessarily drive audi-
ence engagement. While it seems logical that the more news outlets publish content, the
more it should be consumed by users, it is clear that pushing content and expecting that
audiences will engage with it might not be a good strategy for news outlets. Second, it
establishes audience agency to navigate, select, and engage with content that better suits
their needs, rather than what news organizations produce. While we do not know why
each country shows different and distinct patterns of engagement, Kim and Yang (2017)
propose that like, comment, and share on Facebook are behaviors reflective of affective
and cognitive triggers that can be connected to sensory and visual interaction (such as
likes), rational and interactive (such as comments), or a combination (such as shares).
Following that logic, cultures that are oriented more toward interactive forms of com-
munication would show a higher level of comments and shares, and cultures drawn
toward sensory and visual interaction might prefer likes. This is a theoretical proposition
we hope future research might test empirically in order to establish whether such differ-
ences exist, or not, between the countries in the study.
Turning our focus to outlet ownership (RQ2), we expected that commercial outlets
would show higher levels of engagement because they would actively try to produce
news that resonates with the audience, thus reducing the news gap (Boczkowski and
Mitchelstein, 2013). Instead, what we see are much higher levels of engagement with
state-owned outlets than on private-owned outlets. While there are more posts from pri-
vate-owned outlets, the level of engagement with public broadcast posts outperforms
commercial posts in all three metrics of engagement. We believe the higher levels of
engagement with state-owned outlets should be understood as users feeling a stronger
connection with the stories covered by public outlets. While our data are not conclusive
on this, we can find traces of such “strong connections” in scholarship that points toward
higher levels of trust in public media (Enli et al., 2018), or willingness to engage publicly
with “more important issues” in social media (Newman et al., 2019). New research
should explore potential social media strategies across private and publicly owned news
outlets.
Looking at national and ownership variables in isolation yielded clear-cut results that
we did not expect. However, looking into the relationships between these two variables
provides more nuanced insights (RQ3). First, in Denmark, the combination of both vari-
ables presents similar results to the variables in isolation, namely, more interaction with
state-owned media in all three metrics of engagement and lower engagement with com-
mercial outlets per post on average. If anything, there is an amplification of engagement
Ferrer-Conill et al. 19
across all metrics and both types of outlets. Danish readers comment and share more than
their counterparts in Norway and Sweden in general. Second, the results in Norway show
a similar development; however, here, the sheer volume of private-owned posts reduces
the mean of engagement in the isolated measurements. Third, and probably most surpris-
ingly, Sweden shows the least differences in its distribution of engagement, between
private-owned and state-owned outlets. This is a puzzling result that is only present once
we analyze the combination of variables, and that was impossible to see in isolation.
Closer inspection shows that, while engagement with posts from commercial outlets is
higher than in other countries, what truly sets Sweden apart is the much lower levels of
engagement with state-owned posts. Swedish readers, after all, seem to follow different
patterns of engagement than those from Denmark and Norway.
From the perspective that engagement has become an economic and societal driver of
relevance (Belair-Gagnon, 2018; Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013), we believe these results
imply three main important conclusions. First, the patterns of production do not neces-
sarily imply similar, aligning patterns of engagement. With such a large dataset, showing
empirical results that clarify that fewer posts can lead to more engagement is important
should be relevant for news organizations. Quantity of content is not a precondition for
success, and, while our data do not include markers of quality, they imply that the rela-
tionship between engagement and news lies beyond churning articles on social media.
Second, even for countries as similar to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the patterns
of engagement are strikingly different. The studies on “cultures of production” discussed
earlier showed there are indeed differences in how news media operates across national
borders. This is the first study, to our knowledge, that identifies distinct “cultures of
engagement” that are mostly overlooked in the literature. More importantly, our results
show that the “cultures of production” and the “cultures of engagement” do not necessar-
ily align. This is, of course, because the actors behind each of the “cultures” are different,
but it implies that the mechanisms by which these actors interact may also have a cultural
component.
Third, the overall level of engagements favors posts made by state-owned outlets
against private-owned outlets. However, the more important implication here is that, if
more engagement on social media carries an economic value (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013;
Khuntia et al., 2016), media organizations in Scandinavian countries should be more
aware of the dominance of public media services and that the public’s engagement in
social media should not only be a sign of societal relevance but their economic potential,
as well. Our data show that even in social media, the levels of engagement with public
media services is higher, and it is a sign of relevance that should be acknowledged.
A final comment in what all this means and why it is relevant. Our attempts to find
“cultures of engagement” that showed explicit patterns of engagement across different
national boundaries were based on a broader set of characteristics, such as practices,
norms, and values. In that regard, claiming there are cultures of engagement based on
three metrics of engagement that could be considered mere popularity cues (Haim et al.,
2018) seems like a bet we are not willing to take. However, if we adhere to the reduction-
ist approach that the industry and most often scholarship take toward engagement, and
consider likes, shares, and comments as measures of engagement, then yes, we can find
distinct patterns of engagement across national boundaries. We have already
20 new media & society 00(0)
acknowledged that our empirical material cannot explicate these changes, but our initial
interests rested on the existence of these differences. This is relevant because it chal-
lenges the notion that engagement should mirror patterns of news production and dis-
semination in those national contexts. More importantly, it visualizes the need to pay
more attention to the patterns of engagement on an aggregate level to understand larger
trends in media consumption that may be invisible to news organizations and researchers
when looking at just a few individual outlets. The overarching preferences in media con-
sumption might be able to tell us more about the social fabric of a country, the differences
between other countries, and the adequacy (or lack of) of media outlets to meet those
preferences.
This study contributes to journalism studies in two distinct ways. Theoretically, we set
out to find cultures of engagement, and while we argue for the need for a more complex
set of measurements to fully grasp how audiences engage with the news, adopting a
reductionist approach has provided the first building blocks to address varying forms of
engagement across varying contextual factors. We believe this to be an important com-
ponent that may be equally important to the cultures of news production, but that is often
overlooked by journalism scholarship. Empirically, this study has provided the first
large-scale insight into how audiences in different countries engage with news on
Facebook. Beyond the comparative aspect, analyzing over a million posts and over 69
million interactions provides an empirical scale that is rarely present in our field.
Limitations
There are two limitations to this study we would like to address. Regarding reliability,
the dataset was collected by a third-party provider (Twingly). This means that, while we
could specify the pages we wanted to collect data from, the data collection process was
eventually out of our hands, and we have relied on the quality of the data. The corpus of
data also is a snapshot of aggregated data that does not account for changes across time.
Concerning validity, we hoped to capture possible “cultures of engagement,” but data
on metrics of engagement only reflect a limited understanding of engagement (what
Steensen and colleagues (2020) call the technical–behavioral dimension of engagement).
Similarly, we are aware that we cannot account for inter-user differences, and their indi-
vidual takes on engaging with Facebook. We have tackled this issue by taking a look at
three most-similar cases, also in that respect. That is, while there are some socio-demo-
graphical differences between the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden have a fairly similar social composition (Syvertsen et al., 2014). According to
Newman and colleagues (2019), Facebook’s use in Scandinavian countries is well com-
parable, as is their willingness to pay and other indications of media use, thus echoing
Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) seminal typology for a Nordic media sphere. Hence, we do
not have a reason to believe that the distribution of Facebook news users varies across
social strata in each country under observation. While we address this issue theoretically,
and our goal was to address engagement with the data available to news organizations,
we still consider it a limitation to discuss engagement in such a reductionist approach.
Similarly, we agree with Macfadyen (2010) that by adopting a functionalist model of
culture, we accept a reductionist and essentialist approach to culture, yet, since
Ferrer-Conill et al. 21
the studies defining news cultures are based on the functionalist paradigm, it would be
dishonest from us to approach them differently. In addition, we are aware that our study
could be interpreted as if engaging with Facebook posts made by news organizations
equates to a cultural engagement with news. This is not our intention.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Ander Foundation: Anne Marie
och Gustav Anders Stiftelse för mediaforskning.
ORCID iDs
Raul Ferrer-Conill https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0501-2217
Michael Karlsson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4286-7764
Mario Haim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0643-2299
Aske Kammer https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9114-5464
Helle Sjøvaag https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6737-8129
Notes
1. https://www.twingly.com/.
2. https://www.netfeedr.com/.
References
Aalberg T and Curran J (eds) (2012) How Media Inform Democracy: A Comparative Approach.
London: Routledge.
Aalberg T, Blekesaune A and Elvestad E (2013) Media choice and informed democracy: toward
increasing news consumption gaps in Europe? The International Journal of Press/Politics
18(3): 281–303.
Bødker H (2015) Journalism as cultures of circulation. Digital Journalism 3(1): 101–115.
Belair-Gagnon V (2018) News on the fly: journalist-audience online engagement success as a
cultural matching process. Media, Culture & Society 41(6): 757–773.
Belair-Gagnon V and Holton AE (2018) Boundary work, interloper media, and analytics in news-
rooms: an analysis of the roles of web analytics companies in news production. Digital
Journalism 6(4): 492–508.
Belair-Gagnon V, Nelson J and Lewis SC (2019) Audience engagement, reciprocity, and the pursuit
of community connectedness in public media journalism. Journalism Practice 13(5): 558–575.
Berman EP and Hirschman D (2018) The sociology of quantification: where are we now?
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 47(3): 257–266.
Boczkowski PJ and Mitchelstein E (2013) The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of
the Media and the Public Diverge. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bonsón E and Ratkai M (2013) A set of metrics to assess stakeholder engagement and social legiti-
macy on a corporate Facebook page. Online Information Review 37(5): 787–803.
22 new media & society 00(0)
Carlson M (2018) Confronting measurable journalism. Digital Journalism 6(4): 406–417.
Cherubini F and Nielsen RK (2016) Editorial Analytics: How News Media Are Developing and
Using Audience Data and Metrics. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Curran J, Iyengar S and Lund AB (2009) Media system, public knowledge and democracy: a com-
parative study. European Journal of Communication 24(1): 5–26.
De Vreese C, Esser F and Hopmann DN (eds) (2017) Comparing Political Journalism. London:
Routledge.
Deuze M (2002) National news cultures: a comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian, and
US journalists. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79(1): 134–149.
Enli G, Syvertsen T and Mjøs OJ (2018) The welfare state and the media system. The role of media
and communications in the evolution and transformation of Scandinavian welfare states.
Scandinavian Journal of History 43(5): 601–623.
Esser F (2008) Dimensions of political news cultures: sound bite and image bite news in France,
Germany, Great Britain and the United States. International Journal of Press/Politics 4:
401–428.
Ferrer-Conill R (2017) Quantifying journalism? A study on the use of data and gamification to
motivate journalists. Television & New Media 18(8): 706–720.
Ferrer-Conill R and Tandoc EC (2018) The audience-oriented editor: making sense of the audience
in the newsroom. Digital Journalism 6(4): 436–453.
Freelon D (2018) Computational research in the post-API age. Political Communication 35(4):
665–668.
Gerlitz C and Helmond A (2013) The like economy: social buttons and the data-intensive web.
New Media & Society 15(8): 1348–1365.
Haim M, Kümpel AS and Brosius H-B (2018) Popularity cues in online media: a review of con-
ceptualizations, operationalizations, and general effects. Studies in Communication—Media
7(2): 186–207.
Hallin DC and Mancini P (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hanitzsch T (2007) Deconstructing journalism culture: toward a universal theory. Communication
Theory 17(4): 367–385.
Hanitzsch T, Hanusch F, Mellado C, et al. (2011) Mapping journalism cultures across nations. A
comparative study of 18 countries. Journalism Studies 12(3): 273–293.
Hanusch F (2009) A product of their culture: using a value systems approach to understand the
work practices of journalists. International Communication Gazette 71(7): 613–626.
Hanusch F (2017) Web analytics and the functional differentiation of journalism cultures:
individual, organizational and platform-specific influences on newswork. Information,
Communication & Society 20(10): 1571–1586.
Hofstede G (1980) Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values.
London: SAGE.
Kalogeropoulos A, Negredo S, Picone I, et al. (2017) Who shares and comments on news? A
cross-national comparative analysis of online and social media participation. Social Media+
Society 3(4): 1–12.
Kammer A (2016) A welfare perspective on Nordic media subsidies. Journal of Media Business
Studies 13(3): 140–152.
Kennedy H (2016) Post, Mine, Repeat. Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Khuntia J, Sun H and Yim D (2016) Sharing news through social networks. International Journal
on Media Management 1277: 1–16.
Kim C and Yang S-U (2017) Like, comment, and share on Facebook: how each behavior differs
from the other. Public Relations Review 43(2): 441–449.
Ferrer-Conill et al. 23
Larsson AO (2017) In it for the long run? Swedish newspapers and their audiences on Facebook
2010–2014. Journalism Practice 11(4): 438–457.
Larsson AO (2018) The news user on social media. A comparative study of interacting with media
organizations on Facebook and Instagram. Journalism Studies 19(15): 2225–2242.
Lee CS and Ma L (2012) News sharing in social media: the effect of gratifications and prior expe-
rience. Computers in Human Behavior 28(2): 331–339.
Lee EJ and Tandoc EC (2017) When news meets the audience: how audience feedback online
affects news production and consumption. Human Communication Research 43(4): 436–449.
Litt E (2012) Knock, knock. Who’s there? The imagined audience. Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media 56(3): 330–345.
Macfadyen LP (2010) Perils of Parsimony. The problematic paradigm of “national culture.”
Information, Communication & Society 14(2): 280–293.
Mellado C (2015) Professional roles in news content. Six dimensions of journalistic role perfor-
mance. Journalism Studies 16(4): 596–614.
Moyo D, Mare A and Matsilele T (2019) Analytics-driven journalism? Editorial metrics and
the reconfiguration of online news production practices in African newsrooms. Digital
Journalism 7(4): 490–506.
Napoli PM (2011) Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media
Audiences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nelson JL (2018) The elusive engagement metric. Digital Journalism 6(4): 528–544.
Newman N, Fletcher R, Kalogeropoulos A, et al. (2019) Reuters Institute Digital News Report
2019. Oxford: Reuters Institute.
Örnebring H and Jönsson AM (2004) Tabloid journalism and the public sphere: a historical per-
spective on tabloid journalism. Journalism Studies 5(3): 283–295.
Picone I, De Wolf R and Robijt S (2016) Who shares what with whom and why? News sharing
profiles amongst Flemish news users. Digital Journalism 4(7): 921–932.
Picone I, Kleut J, Pavlíčková T, et al. (2019) Small acts of engagement: reconnecting productive
audience practices with everyday agency. New Media & Society 21(9): 2010–2028.
Porten-Cheé P, Haßler J, Jost P, et al. (2018) Popularity cues in online media: theoretical and meth-
odological perspectives. Studies in Communication Media 7(2): 208–230.
Schrøder KC, Blach-Ørsten M and Kæmsgaard Eberholst M (2020) Is there a Nordic news media
system? A descriptive comparative analysis of Nordic news audiences. Nordic Journal of
Media Studies 2. Available at: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/njms-2020-0003
Shehata A and Strömbäck J (2011) A matter of context: a comparative study of media environ-
ments and news consumption gaps in Europe. Political Communication 28(1): 110–134.
Silverstone R (2013) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sjøvaag H (2019) Journalism between the State and the Market. London: Routledge.
Steensen S, Ferrer-Conill R and Peters C (2020) (Against a) Theory of audience engagement with
the news. Journalism Studies 21(12): 1662–1680.
Swart J, Peters C and Broersma M (2018) Shedding light on the dark social: the connective role of
news and journalism in social media communities. New Media & Society 20(11): 4329–4345.
Syvertsen T, Enli G, Mjøs OJ, et al. (2014) The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital
Era. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Toff B and Kalogeropoulos A (2020) All the news that’s fit to ignore. How the information envi-
ronment does and does not shape news avoidance. Public Opinion Quarterly 84: 366–390.
Trilling D, Tolochko P and Burscher B (2016) From newsworthiness to shareworthiness: how to
predict news sharing based on article characteristics. Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly 94(1): 38–60.
Zamith R (2018) Quantified audiences in news production: a synthesis and research agenda.
Digital Journalism 6(4): 418–435.
24 new media & society 00(0)
Zamith R, Belair-Gagnon V and Lewis SC (2019) Constructing audience quantification: social
influences and the development of norms about audience analytics and metrics. New Media
& Society 22(10): 1763–1784.
Author biographies
Raul Ferrer-Conill is an assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad
University, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Stavanger,
Norway. His research investigates digital journalism, audience engagement and gamified pro-
cesses, and the structural changes of the datafied society.
Michael Karlsson is Professor in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication,
Karlstad University, Sweden. His research interests are theoretical, methodological and normative
issues related to digital journalism. He is widely published in journals such as Communication
Theory, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and New Media & Society.
Mario Haim is Assistant Professor for Data Journalism at the Institute of Communication and
Media Studies at the University of Leipzig. His research focuses on computational journalism,
news use within algorithmically curated media environments, and computational social science.
Aske Kammer, PhD, is Docent in Media Innovation at the Danish School of Media and Journalism,
Denmark. His research concerns the intersections between digital news media, business models,
and user data.
Dag Elgesem is Professor of ICT and society at the Department of information science and media
studies, University of Bergen.
Helle Sjøvaag is Professor of Journalism at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research
areas include digital journalism, media diversity, and media systems and regulation. Her most
recent book is Journalism Between the State and the Market (2019), published by Routledge.
