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The audience logic in election news reporting on Facebook: what drives audience engagement in transitional democracies of Albania and Kosovo?
Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine periods and (b) across eight countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Analyzing 265,714 articles shared over 12 million times on Facebook, findings show that elections are broadly linked to increases in political news publication, but even larger increases in political news sharing. The study reveals how, overall, political news is shared more often than news publication patterns would suggest, proposing higher political interest by Facebook users than previously thought. In most cases, political news sharing far outpaces political news production in the form of a “negative” news sharing gap, with the relative demand for political news (in the form of news sharing) being higher than the supply. Lastly, building upon previous work, we propose and validate a distant supervised machine learning method for multilingual, large-scale identification of political news across distinct languages, contexts and time periods.
Despite its increasing attention for audiences, journalism studies remains an inherently production-focused discipline. Consequently, studying the perspective of audiences tends to automatically start from questions relevant for and benefitting the news industry. In this introduction, we argue for a more radical audience turn that pushes journalism studies forward beyond normative and industry concerns, and starts from the perspective of audiences themselves. We formulate four constructive starting points for advancing the audience turn in journalism: 1) further decentering journalism by also focusing on non-news and employing non-media centric approaches; 2) broadening who counts as audience by including audiences considered commercially unattractive; 3) shifting the focus from what counts as news use to what is experienced as informative; and 4) positing audiences as active agents. However, such a radical audience turn also creates fundamental dilemmas for journalism studies, raising questions about the field’s object of study, the spaces and contexts of news use considered, and the objectives of journalism studies as a field. With this special issue, we call for further reflections on how news and informational needs may be conceptualized from an audience perspective and how to theorize what this means for journalism’s role in society and everyday life. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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) 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.
This study investigates to what extent specific features of news articles about election campaigns impact reader engagement and civility in news comments. Using content analysis of articles ( N = 830) and comments ( N = 29,421) published during the 2015 Portuguese Legislative elections, we test the impact of negative coverage, issue coverage and game coverage (politics as a game) on the number of comments that an article receives and the level of civility thereof. Additionally, we explore how affective polarisation of a commenter may moderate the effects on incivility. Findings show that negativity towards political actors in an article is tied to both an increase in the number of comments and their level of incivility. Game coverage only led to a significant increase in the number of comments, while actor-related positivity was also related to an increase in incivility. Issue coverage had neither positive nor negative effects. The results inform newsrooms and academics about the implications of different types of election reporting, while accounting for features of news articles that are typically not integrated in a single study.
What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly to negative than positive information. “Negativity biases” in human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stimuli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level variation in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results make clear the pervasiveness of negativity biases on average, they help account for the tendency for audience-seeking news around the world to be predominantly negative. Insofar as our results highlight individual-level variation, however, they highlight the potential for more positive content, and suggest that there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic wisdom that “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Amid the increasing use of web analytics to gage the success, present and future, of news content and related news products, this article focuses on in-depth interviews with the suppliers of those analytics: web analytics companies. Drawing on the concepts of boundary work and interloper media, this article examines how managers for these companies understand and position their work in relation to news production as a boundary object. The larger finding of this article is that while web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists, they foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective, and routinized in news production. By offering a product that they (i.e. web analytics companies) need to modify on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, they foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This and other findings provide a portrait of the development of norms and values in journalism as these companies gain a greater acceptance in newsrooms and increasingly influence news production.
In recent years, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 tools has opened new possibilities for audience participation in news, while “engagement” has become a media industry buzzword. In this study, we explore approaches to engagement emerging in the field based on in-depth interviews with editors at a range of news outlets from several countries, and we map these approaches onto the literature on participatory journalism and related innovations in journalism practice. Our findings suggest variation in approaches to engagement that can be arrayed along several related dimensions, encompassing how news outlets measure and practice it (e.g. with the use of quantitative audience metrics methods), whether they think about audiences as more passive or more active users, the stages at which they incorporate audience data or input into the news product, and how skeptically or optimistically they view the audience. Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content. We identify technological, economic, professional, and organizational factors that shape and constrain how news outlets practice “engagement.”
We hypothesize that generic frames influence what news people share on Facebook and Twitter through three different routes: emotions, motivations, and psychological engagement. Using a mixed-methods design, a content analysis of a representative sample of articles published in six Chilean outlets was combined with in-depth interviews with digital journalists. After controlling for issue, newsworthiness, informational utility, valence, and other confounds, results show that—across platforms—a morality frame increases news sharing, whereas a conflict frame decreases it. Emphasizing economic consequences also decreases sharing, but only on Facebook. Surprisingly, the human interest angle has no noticeable effects. These results show that news frames can have behavioral consequences, and confirm the existence of a gap between preferred frames of journalists and users.
News sharing across different social media platforms is increasingly impacting on our news habits. However, we know very little about what makes news popular in these settings. The current paper details what types of news stories are are shared the most on two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter. By conducting a qualitative content analysis and comparing data from four Norwegian media outlets we find that editorial comment pieces about 'softer' news topics are more frequently shared than 'harder' news topics from all media outlets-except for TV2. For this latter broadcaster, the results suggest that sensational news and news regarding celebrities allows for viral effects to take place.
The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens’ political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians’ Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians’ Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.
While the two currently most popular social media services - Twitter and Facebook - are different in terms of technical and end-user details, this paper suggests that a series of similarities can also be found regarding different modes of communication offered by both services. These modes are labeled as Broadcasting, Redistributing, Interacting and Acknowledging. The argument is put forward that such synthesis of communication modes across platform could prove useful for longitudinal and comparative research efforts.
In this article we propose a concept of network media logic in order to discuss how online social media platforms change political communication without resorting to technological determinism or normalization. We argue that social media platforms operate with a distinctly different logic from that of traditional mass media, though overlapping with it. This is leading to different ways of producing content, distributing information and using media. By discussing the differences between traditional mass media and social media platforms in terms of production, consumption and use, we carve out the central elements of network media logic – that is, the rules/format of communication on social media platforms – and some consequences for political communication.
We investigate the levels of horse-race coverage in 160 different European print and broadcast outlets in 27 different countries at three different points in time. We match information on outlets’ content to survey-based information on the average levels of interest in politics and education of outlets’ audiences. We formulate hypotheses concerning journalists’ and citizens’ preferences over the ideal level of horse-race coverage, as well as hypotheses concerning the information content of horse-race coverage in different party systems. After controlling for the composition of each outlet’s audience, we find that horse-race coverage is most frequent in polarized party systems with close electoral contests, and in large markets with professional journalists. These findings challenge the traditional view of horse-race journalism as a ‘low-quality’ form of news.
The border between journalism and advertising in contemporary Estonian media is being increasingly blurred as a consequence of rapid commercialisation. The aim of this paper is to analyse this “blurring” in the context of a small media market where editorial resources are limited and the capital costs of media products are high. The study draws on interviews with journalists and editors, journalists’ questionnaire responses and textual analysis of news media contents. The different media of newspapers, magazines, television, and radio view this distinction between promotional material and independent journalistic production in contrasting ways; even particular newspapers display differing attitudes. Media organisations, moreover, openly declare an ideology that is contrary to the logic of economics. Hence, the complex process of the diminution of the border is hidden from public view but should not simply be reduced, as is frequently the case, to a matter of unethical journalistic behaviour.
The concept of negativity in political news has not reached the status of a homogenous, overarching theoretical concept. This article proposes conceptual understandings, categorizations and practical operationalizations of negativity in the news that reflect the consensus of existing work paying special attention to recent European research. This work aims to systematize existing concepts and categories in order to increase comparability and cumulativity of empirical evidence. To structure and standardize dimensions of negativity in the news we differentiate firstly between negativity and confrontation, secondly between frame-related negativity and individual actor-related negativity, and thirdly between non-directional and directional dimensions of negativity.
This article provides a common set of indicators and matrice-based classifications of negativity (and its antithesis) in the news to measure and categorize its intensity and multi-dimensionality.
Personalization has become a central concept in discussions on how political news, and election coverage in particular, has changed over time. The general belief is that the focus of news coverage has shifted from parties and organizations to candidates and leaders. However, the evidence is far from conclusive. This is due in no small part to a lack of conceptual clarity and an absence of common operationalizations which are a major cause of the unclear or conflicting conclusions about the personalization of political news. This article seeks to remedy this shortcoming. It presents a model for comprehending the personalization of political news based on a review of relevant studies. The article makes a series of recommendations for how the concept might be operationalized for an analysis of media content in order to enable cross-nationally comparative research.
Why do some citizens vote while others do not? Why does less than half of the American voting public routinely show up at the polls? Why is it that the vast majority of political issues affecting our day-to-day lives fail to generate either public interest or understanding? These questions have troubled political scientists for decades. Here, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella provide the first conclusive evidence to date that it is indeed the manner in which the print and broadcast media cover political events and issues that fuels voter non-participation. This book illustrates precisely how the media’s heavy focus on the game of politics, rather than on its substance, starts a “spiral of cynicism” that directly causes an erosion of citizen interest and, ultimately, citizen participation. Having observed voters who watched and read different sets of reports—some saturated in strategy talk, others focused on the real issues—the authors show decisive links between the way in which the media covers campaigns’ and voters’ levels of cynicism and participation. By closely monitoring media coverage among sample audiences for both the recent mayoral race in Philadelphia and the national health care reform debate, the authors confront issues concerning the effects of issue-based and competitive-based political coverage. Finally, they address the question repeatedly asked by news editors, “Will the public read or watch an alternative media coverage that has more substance? ” The answer their findings so clearly reveal is “yes.” Spiral of Cynicism is a pioneering work that will urge the media to take a close look at how it covers political events and issues, as well as its degree of culpability in current voter dissatisfaction, cynicism, and non-participation. For, in these pages, a possible cure to such ills is just what Jamieson and Cappella have to offer. Moreover, their work is likely to redefine the terms of the very debate on how politics should be covered in the future.
Although the intersection of social media usage and journalism practice enjoys a prominent place in many scholarly inquiries throughout the field of journalism studies, a comprehensive understanding of this body of literature is lacking. This study attempts to alleviate this problem. Through a systematic analysis of more than 150 studies primarily focusing on how journalists utilize social media in newswork, this article first classifies social media usage into three broad categories: news construction, news dissemination, and branding. Next, this study introduces a typology that visualizes and explores three dimensions of social media use: motivation (self vs. organization), prevalence (sporadic vs. prevalent), and disruption (disruptive vs. normalization). Our findings illustrate potential future research areas.
In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.
Mediatization research has repeatedly been accused of not taking sufficient account of the role of the audience. Whereas audience orientation is often implicitly assumed in concepts of commercial news logic, a stronger consideration of the audience in news media logic is needed, particularly in times of more interactive and participatory digital media. In this article, we investigate whether, on the one hand, market-oriented commercial logic has retained its importance and, on the other hand, a new connection-strengthening audience logic has emerged. We empirically analyze these two logics in a quantitative content analysis of political news coverage, combining a cross-temporal, a cross-national, and a cross-organizational perspective. Our results suggest that commercial logic has peaked in the past few decades and that an audience logic has developed in parallel. Yet, there are notable differences between countries and different types of media organizations.
Using data from a novel representative survey, we examine how corruption affects the performance of industrial-sector firms in Albania and Kosovo, two low–middle-income post-socialist economies in the Western Balkan region. Bribes are costs that firms incur to “grease the wheels” of the bureaucracy and/or to seek rents. Rents, however, may improve firm performance. Thus, to estimate the total effect of corruption, we develop and collect a set of perception-based indicators of both corruption and rents. In addition, we allow both bribery and rents to affect output growth through multiple channels—by influencing the firm’s investment and hiring decisions, by affecting total-factor productivity and by modifying the marginal product of factor additions. We find that, in Albania and Kosovo, bribes and rents have both positive and negative effects on firm performance. The net effect of corruption, however, is negative and large and is not fully offset by the beneficial effects of rents.
Issue and strategy frames, oft-used ways of conveying political news, affect people’s political beliefs and attitudes, with strategic news frames producing greater cynicism and distrust than issue frames. Although some past research suggests that audiences prefer strategically framed news, it is not clear whether the public gravitates toward issue or strategy frames on social media. We partnered with a national news organization to conduct 48 tests of whether people more frequently clicked on, commented on, or reacted to strategy- or issue-based news. On Facebook, people were randomly shown different versions of posts about a news article, resulting in 967,260 impressions. Using meta-analytic techniques, we found significant heterogeneity across the tests. Overall, however, strategy-based news yielded more clicks, whereas issue-based news yielded more comments and reactions. The results were not moderated by whether the test mentioned a salient issue or the number of days until the election.
Aiming to shed light on why Facebook users react to certain events and news stories more than to others, this study analyses their reactions to different events and to the media coverage of those events. The case selection includes six events covered by two newspapers from four countries: France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The research design combines an original content analysis of news media outlets’ posts with an analysis of the reactions that these posts have generated from Facebook users—likes, shares and comments—to assess whether and how the nature of events and the characteristics of the news content contribute to explaining the engagement of Facebook users with the news. The data analysis indicated that the decisions to like, share or comment were not driven by the same factors. Unexpected events showed significance, at different levels, for all kinds of reactions to news. Conversely, the specific features of news content only slightly affected the levels of liking and sharing. Facebook users were more likely to comment on news adhering to known criteria for news values, such as negativity or personalization.
With the integration of social media in political communication repertoires, politicians now permanently campaign for support online. By promoting their personal agenda, politicians increasingly profile themselves independent from their associated parties on the web (i.e., self-personalization). By focusing on self-personalization as a multi-layered concept (i.e., professional, emotional, private self-personalization), this study investigates both the use and consequences of self-personalization on Facebook. A manual content analysis of politicians’ Facebook posts (N = 435) reveals that self-personalization is indeed often used as a communication style on Facebook and is most often present in visual communication. Moreover, the study shows that the use of a more emotional and private style provides a beneficial tool for politicians’ impression management. Publishing emotional and private content yields positive effects on audience engagement, suggesting audiences’ demand for more intimate and emotional impressions of public figures on the web.
Previous research has identified a strong consumer demand for sensationalized and conflict-oriented news coverage. With the rise of social network services as central spaces for encountering news, there is a need to move beyond the notion of consumer demand (measured by attention to news stories) to a broader conception of user engagement (encompassing attention as well as social interactions online). This article seeks to remedy this by analyzing which parts of election coverage tend to become popular and go viral. It develops a concept of user agendas that include popularity (news stories that receive most clicks on news Web sites) and virality (stories that users share most intensively on social network sites). The article then applies the concepts in a case study of online news coverage during the 2015 Danish parliamentary election. Through an analysis of frames, sentiments, and actors, it is shown that game-strategic and personalized coverage tend to attract large-scale attention on news Web sites, whereas issue-oriented coverage fares better on social network sites. This suggests that what users demand depend on where they encounter news. Users tend to engage with one kind of news in private settings and another in the public settings on the social Internet.
One of the most dominant ways of covering politics in the media is by focusing on politicians’ strategies for gaining public support and their positions at the polls. The conventional wisdom is that this tendency—usually referred to as strategic, horse race, or game coverage—has negative consequences for democracy because it increases political alienation. Others argue, however, that the public’s attraction to strategic coverage improves knowledge about issues and encourages civic engagement. This study examines the consequences of strategic coverage by performing a meta-analysis of published and unpublished studies. Based on 54 findings from 32 studies and 38,658 respondents, I show that across studies and contexts, strategic coverage increases political cynicism (d = 0.32), reduces substance-based political knowledge (d = −0.31), and discourages positive evaluations regarding the news items (d = −0.22). However, there is no evidence that this coverage erodes participation. These findings correspond with scholars’ previous concerns.
The participation gap arises from two contrasting trends. Voting turnout is generally declining, especially among citizens with lower social status. At the same time, more people are participating in civil-society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. These non-electoral activities are growing because of more activity by higher-social-status citizens. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy exercise less voice. This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public-opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social-status skills and resources. Civil-society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes. The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice. © Russell J. Dalton 2017 and Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon.
This study examines the potential of constructive journalism ideas and their implementation in Croatia, a country with a different social, cultural and historical background than that of Denmark or other Western European countries where constructive journalism is practised. Three Croatian linguists explain the potential hidden meanings of the word constructive for Croatians. Fifteen broadcast journalists and editors in Croatia have been interviewed in order to examine the potential opportunities and obstacles for the implementation of constructive journalism ideas in their newsrooms. Croatian journalists have a more active approach towards journalism and their overall impression of constructive journalism ideas is positive. Both linguists and journalists noticed potential ideological connotations of the word constructive, while journalists were careful about reporting on possible solutions and things that would work so as not to cross the line and be pulled into ideology. When it comes to implementation, most journalists point out differences in mindset, political influences and newsroom routines as main obstacles. A development of a specific strategy for Croatian newsrooms that moves away from adhering to ideas only is recommended, while the word constructive may be used only if it is clearly defined.
Journalism is known to be culturally specific in historical terms, while cross-country studies have demonstrated differences in journalistic milieus in different political regimes. This article applies a multilevel, cross-national comparative research design to explore the patterns and sources of influence that act on the professional practices of European journalists as well as the ways they differ across different media systems. The research is more broadly framed within the mediatization approach, and it aims to explore the relationship between increased media logic and journalistic practices within specific digital mediascapes. This study also identifies the ways in which journalistic practices are influenced by both the macro level of the structural framework of the media system and the mezzo level of media organization. The institutional framework defines the digital media system/mediascape in terms of four dimensions: contemporary multimedia markets, globalization processes, cultural industry, and institutional inclusiveness. The data concerning the influences on journalism are drawn from surveys conducted in 28 Western, Central, and Eastern European countries as part of the 2012–2015 Worlds of Journalism Study. A cluster analysis produced four digital media systems. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regression confirmed the predominant influence of structural levels on the perceptions of the influences on journalism – the mezzo organizational level and macro level of the digital media system additionally explained the variance of the contextual influences on journalistic practices beyond individual differences. Variations in the different influences are shown between media system clusters. Moreover, the study introduces new questions regarding the mediatization of journalism and the mediatized condition.
Today, social network sites (SNS) are a major platform for news consumption. However, their interface differs dramatically from those of news sites. On SNS, news posts lack the traditional news cues that guide audience selection of stories. Instead, they are accompanied by social cues, traces of engagement by other users with news items. This process is known as the socialization of news. This study sought to test the effect of the socialization of news on users’ attention and selection processes. By means of an experimental design employing eye-tracking measurements (N = 86), the study (1) asked whether the existence of various social cues of endorsement (user comments, ‘Likes’, and ‘Reactions’) influenced attention and selection; (2) explored how users divided their attention between news information and social cues, and whether social endorsement affected the attention given by users to news cues; (3) identified differences among users regarding their sensitivity to social endorsement (relying on two psychological traits: self-monitoring and need for cognition). The findings demonstrate that social cues have some effect on attention and selection processes; however, users varied significantly in their response to social endorsement, both in terms of attention and selection. Together, the findings suggest that the socialization of news has changed news consumption processes, and that the consumption of news on SNS might require the development of a new theoretical approach to the consumption of news.
Partisan incivility is prevalent in news comments, but we have limited insight into how journalists and news users engage with it. Gatekeeping, cognitive bias, and social identity theories suggest that journalists may tolerate incivility while users actively promote partisan incivility. Using 9.6 million comments from The New York Times, we analyze whether the presence of uncivil and partisan terms affects how journalists and news users engage with comments. Results show that partisanship and incivility increase recommendations and the likelihood of receiving an abuse flag. Swearing increases the likelihood of a comment being rejected and reduces the chances of being highlighted as a NYT Pick. These findings suggest that journalists and news users interact with partisan incivility differently, and that some forms of incivility may be promoted or tacitly accepted in comments.
Innovations in communication technology have changed the way news is produced and consumed. Various digital platforms, ranging from news websites to social media sites to personal blogs, have enabled news users to indicate how much they like the news they have read, to share it with others, and to leave comments. News users' mouse clicks are automatically recorded and aggregated by computational systems and made publicly visible (e.g., “Most Read Articles”). This essay reviews the ever-growing research on how audience feedback online, a hybrid form of interpersonal and mass communication, alters various stages of news production and influences the way people select, process, and make sense of the news. Future research agendas are proposed.
After almost 20 years of political instability and ongoing conflicts in the Western Balkans, the region is still haunted by the past, and there is an ongoing synergy of influence between media and the political sector. Media in this region have frequently been criticized for fueling conflicts, instigating ethnic hatred and taking political sides. This article suggests a new research agenda in the practice of transitional journalism in this part of Southeastern Europe. This research strand combines elements from troubled pasts, war reporting, peace journalism and issues of transitional justice. This article analyzes how journalists in the Western Balkans consider the roles of journalism in times of transitions in the region. Findings from the Worlds of Journalism (WJS) study reveal that journalists and editors in the Western Balkans perceive their roles to be broader than those in traditionally western societies. They subscribe to traditional journalism values but also argue that the media has a broad responsibility to contribute to enhance transitions of societies after longer periods of conflict. At the same time, journalists have little trust in the institutions of society entrusted with the task of leading the countries through many issues of transitional justice. The article draws on empirical material from the WJS survey in 2014 and 2015 in Albania, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia.
In recent years communication scholars have repeatedly pointed out that commercial logic represents an integral element of (news) media logic, referring to specific news content characteristics such as conflict, personalization, negativity or scandal reporting that are assumed to be increasingly deployed by journalists to gain public attention. In order to empirically prove the assumption that commercial news media logic is on the rise, differences and commonalities in media reality construction are examined in Germany’s most influential news media across all regular news beats, analysing a total of 2973 news items from 1984/1989 and 2014. The sample includes the leading national quality daily (Süddeutsche Zeitung), the leading tabloid (Bild-Zeitung), and the major television newscast (Tagesschau). The findings suggest that, compared to the past, German news media reality is constructed differently in 2014, using—as predicted—a higher share of commercial logic characteristics. Surprisingly enough, these changes not only affect hard news in particular but especially address Germany’s paper of record, the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Researchers condemn the effects of news but have only recently turned their attention to determining the extent to which individuals engage with news. Within the context of online uncivil news, the current project investigates whether negativity always increases engagement with news. The results of two experiments demonstrate that civility in the news increased news engagement, especially compared to news with the most incivility. News articles that included multiple types of incivility and news articles that prompted individuals to perceive that an out-group political party was behaving uncivilly discouraged people from engaging with online news. The studies contribute theoretically to negativity bias and incivility research and signal that negativity does not always attract clicks.
This comparative study examines the power relationship between journalists and political elites in South-Eastern Europe, emphasizing the clientelistic ties under which these interactions take place. It is based on 60 in-depth interviews with journalists from Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro. The results suggest that the journalist–politician relationship in these countries has gradually evolved into two-way communication marked by cooperation and conflict. On one hand, the clientelist ties at the inter-organizational level have subordinated journalists to the political elites in power who negotiate the news agenda with media owners. On the other hand, journalists often serve as tools to combat political and economic enemies, leading to the exposure of corruption and scandals. However, this is done selectively, based on the media owner’s agenda. Overall, the study implies the lack of a uniform relationship between journalists and political elites, challenging previous assumptions that media clientelism in Eastern Europe is a stable system that exerts predictable relationships.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
Political communication is a precondition of democracy, and democracy depends heavily on the infrastructure of the media system (see chapters 1 and 2). The media and mediated communication are of central relevance for contemporary societies due to their decisive influence on, and consequences for, political institutions, political actors, and individual citizens. Political actors have learnt to accept that their behavior to a significant extent is influenced by the rules of the game set by the mass media. This transformation has been described as a shift to audience democracy (Manin 1995) or media democracy (Jarren 2008a). The idea of media democracy is an extension of the model of representative democracy (see Chapter 3). It refers to a development that at its beginning aimed to make politics more inclusive and transparent. In the process policy-makers have become accountable to an ever growing volume of interests and demands from the public — not only in the context of elections but in many phases of the policy process. The pressure on policy-makers to be responsive to public opinion in general and special interests in particular has increased the role of the mass media in many ways. Politicians have grown to rely on the mass media for gauging public opinion (using media coverage as a proxy for public sentiments), and for generating attention, acceptance, and legitimation of their actions (using media channels for public presentation of politics).
People increasingly visit online news sites not directly, but by following links on social network sites. Drawing on news value theory and integrating theories about online identities and self-representation, we develop a concept of shareworthiness, with which we seek to understand how the number of shares an article receives on such sites can be predicted. Findings suggest that traditional criteria of newsworthiness indeed play a role in predicting the number of shares, and that further development of a theory of shareworthiness based on the foundations of newsworthiness can offer fruitful insights in news dissemination processes.
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of news, producing a social media news agenda which has important differences from its traditional counterpart. The discussion suggests that this may be consequential for perceptions of crime and engagement with politics; it might even stimulate a partial reversal of the tabloidization of news outlets.
A survey of senior editors of U.S. print broadcast and online news outlets found that while 98 percent of the 376 respondents say they use social media, they primarily use it to post links to stories on Facebook and Twitter. Far fewer use social media to interact with audiences by posing questions and responding to comments.
This study investigates how citizens select election news online. Voluntary national samples (n = 372) browsed a news website featuring four types of election news (horserace, candidates' issue positions, campaign trails, and voters). Their online activities, including article selection and the length of exposure, were unobtrusively measured by behavior tracking software. The results revealed that participants tended to choose issue-based election coverage but avoided news stories about campaign trails. The horserace was not more popular than the other types of election news. The findings also supported negative bias by showing that participants preferred election news headlines that contained negative words.
Social networking sites such as Facebook provide new ways of sharing news stories that allow users to act as opinion leaders in their networks, encourage discussion, and potentially increase their involvement in current events. This study identifies the particular features of Facebook that facilitate the discussion of news and tests their effects on involvement and feelings of influence. Participants (N = 265) in a 3 (Broadcast level: news feed vs. wall post vs. direct message) × 3 (Elaboration: opinion vs. question vs. no comment) × 2 (Involving-friends: tag vs. no tag) between-subjects factorial experiment were randomly assigned to share a story from a news website on Facebook. Results show that user involvement in the news content depends on the social affordances of the site, particularly those that allow for audience customization and those that drive network feedback. Asking the network’s opinions and targeting specific friends led to greater involvement in the news content. Discussion through comments led to a greater sense of influence and greater involvement for those sharing the news story. These findings highlight the importance of encouraging individuals to act as sources of information in their networks to drive engagement in current events in the changing news landscape.
Commentators regularly lament the proliferation of both negative and/or strategic (“horse race”) coverage in political news content. The most frequent account for this trend focuses on news norms and/or the priorities of news journalists. Here, we build on recent work arguing for the importance of demand-side, rather than supply-side, explanations of news content. In short, news may be negative and/or strategy-focused because that is the kind of news that people are interested in. We use a lab study to capture participants’ news-selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Interest is associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. And results suggest that behavioral results do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content.
During the last few decades, the world has witnessed a dual democratic transformation. On the one hand and beginning with the fall of communism, the number of electoral democracies worldwide almost doubled between 1989 and 2011 (Freedom House, 2012). The victory of democracy and capitalism may not have marked the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), but today there is no alternative political system that enjoys the same worldwide support and legitimacy as democracy (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Inglehart, 2003). On the other hand, many established democracies have witnessed a transformation towards increasing complexity, less deferential and increasingly critical and dissatisfied citizens (Norris, 2011), lower electoral turnout and trust in politicians and political institutions (Franklin, 2004; Norris, 1999), and increasingly autonomous, market-driven and critical media (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Hamilton, 2004; Patterson, 1993). National political institutions and actors thus find themselves under increasing pressure from both citizens and the media, while the need to find solutions to major challenges such as global warming, rising inequalities, weak growth and increasing deficits appears both more urgent and more difficult to tackle.
Who makes the news in a digital age? Participatory Journalism offers fascinating insights into how journalists in Western democracies are thinking about, and dealing with, the inclusion of content produced and published by the public.
This article argues that the traditional political science definition of clientelism is insufficient for explaining how the media fit in with clientelistic systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It is suggested that a broader understanding of clientelism, looking in particular at how media are used as elite-to-elite communication tools as well as elite-to-mass communication tools, better explains the place of the media in the clientelistic systems of the CEE nations. Empirically, it is based on a set of 272 elite and expert interviews conducted across ten CEE countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) in 2010 and 2011. The article presents some general findings on the nature and character of the linkages between political elites and the media, and the extent to which such linkages can be considered clientelistic. Then follows a discussion of specific practices of media instrumentalization, charting the many ways in which the media can function as a resource in conflicts and negotiations between clientelistic elite networks, directly as well as indirectly. Particular attention is given to the phenomena of advertorials and kompromat.
This article suggests a conceptual framework for the mediatization of politics. It critically discusses the concepts of “media logic” and “political logic” emanating from the political communication literature and argues that “normative logic” and “market logic” are more appropriate concepts for the theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of the behavior of mass media and political actors. These two logics guide media and political actors' issue selection and presentation to different degrees. The mediatization of politics in this account takes place when both media and political actors adapt their behavior to the audience-oriented market logic. This process works in parallel with the economic integration and technological progress comprised by the term globalization, thereby challenging established institutional mechanisms in advanced democracies.
Studying agenda setting and policy dynamics is a well-established research tradition dating back to the work of Bachrach and Baratz and Schattschneider. The research tradition provides considerable insights into how changes in agendas and political attention affect public policy. However, the research tradition has been strongly dominated by studies of the US and has suffered from a lack of comparative studies. This paper discusses the different ways in which such comparative studies can be conducted as well as the potential insights which can be gained from them.