Abstract
While the term churnalism in this special issue speaks to the negative impacts of extensive news re-use, one pervasive form of news redistribution, social media news sharing, has had the more positive connotations of creative engagement, political participation and cross-promotion. Yet this reading of commendary culture is, as José Van Dijck suggests, largely ideological, anchored in the Silicon Valley rhetorics that support the data capture, data mining and behavioural advertising activities of social media businesses. Our paper critically analyses journalisms’ increasing dependence on social media news-sharing analytics and the implications for news media diversity. We first examine how sharing analytics function as a novel form of news commodification, influencing reporting and editorial practices, with possible implications for news media diversity. We then map the news-sharing ecology, looking at the interlinked business models, ownership patterns and industrial power of social news intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, Gigya, Chartbeat and Newswhip, and how these relationships reinforce the significance of analytics to news production. Finally, we propose how the use of news analytics could also help in tracking the changes wrought by social media news sharing, particularly in developing a media policy framework for monitoring digital news diversity and pluralism.
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