Making it Fit: How Science News Gets Remediated for Facebook and Instagram

Abstract

ABSTRACT Today’s news users have a wide range of options when it comes to news consumption. Articles can be read on an app, via a news website, on social media or a printed newspaper. To provide these different platforms news media have become integrated newsrooms that shovel news as a standard practice. After posting a news article to the news website, the same news article can later appear on a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. During the transportation from one platform to another the news inevitably undergoes changes. These remediations can be initiated by the platform: format-dependent constraints, e.g., the mandatory addition of a status message; based on preferences of the algorithm; or can be according to the personal preferences of the social media editor. Based on these insights we compiled a unique corpus of 109 news stories that map “a perfect chain” of science news in a one-to-one relationship between the news website, Facebook, and Instagram accounts of three traditional Flemish newspapers. We manually explored the circulation flow of these news posts and identified the corresponding types of news remediation. These results contribute theoretical and practical insights into the affordances, characteristics and constraints of social media news.