Abstract
Social media have become one of the most important news delivery channels due to their interactivity and large audiences. The content published by news organizations on social networking sites is of particular value to sociologists, because it allows measurement of users’ attitude to certain events. However, we understand that the media choose which events become news in accordance with certain criteria, such as news values. In this study, we decided to examine how news values determine the public’s response as expressed by likes, reposts, and comments. To analyze the characteristics of different media and their audiences, we selected four popular newsgroups on the social networking site Vkontakte: TASS and Russia Today, representing the state media, alongside RBC and Meduza, representing the private media. The posts of the selected newsgroups were coded and analyzed by means of Harcup and O’Neill taxonomy of values (2016). The study showed that news organizations tend to have preferences for some news values rather than others. Regression analysis revealed positive relationships between 1) the sharing of likes and good and entertaining content, 2) the sharing of comments and the presence of celebrities or conflicts in news, 3) the sharing of reposts and comments and significant events. An unexpected discovery was a negative dependency between the number of comments and the presence of exclusive content.
Highlights
The assessment of attributes pertaining to the audiences of online media is an important measurement of public opinion on social media since these news sources contain a significant part of opinions on broadcast news
The study showed how news values shape the agenda of popular media in social media in Russia, as well as how their readers react to the presence of certain values in the news
The separate analysis of the public’s feedback for private and state-owned media discovered that audiences may be distinguished by the level of interest in a certain news value
Summary
The assessment of attributes pertaining to the audiences of online media is an important measurement of public opinion on social media since these news sources contain a significant part of opinions on broadcast news. Social networking sites provide researchers with the opportunity to reveal the socio-demographic characteristics of users as well as their interests and friendships Applying these parameters, it is possible (in part) to assess the user’s political views or his/her prioritized values This analysis is rather complicated, and it does not always provide sufficiently reliable results (Cohen & Ruths, 2013; Mislove, Lehmann, Ahn, Onnela, & Rosenquist, 2011). Both the administration of social networking sites and users themselves restrict, for a number of reasons, access to users’ personal data, which further undermines the validity of analysis.
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