Abstract
The current media environment is primarily characterised by a large amount of information and, in contrast, rather fragmented audience attention. This is especially true for social media, particularly Facebook, which have become important news sources for many people. Journalists cannot help but publish content on Facebook if they want to reach the part of their audience that mainly—or even only—consumes news there. On Facebook, journalists are at the mercy of the algorithm that determines the visibility of their content. Because user engagement is a crucial factor in the algorithm, concerns have been raised that journalists are abandoning their normative quality standards to make the news as attractive as possible to the audience—at the expense of media performance. A softened presentation of the news, particularly in Facebook posts, may help achieve this aim, but research on this subject is lacking. The present study analyses this practice of softening the news in four German media outlets’ (<em>BILD</em>,<em> FAZ</em>,<em> Der Spiegel</em>,<em> Tagesschau</em>) political Facebook posts. The results show that the overall level of news softening is low to medium. Furthermore, comparing them to website teasers reveals that news softening is only slightly higher on Facebook (mainly <em>BILD</em> and <em>Der Spiegel</em>), and that there are no converging trends between quality or public service media and tabloid media. Exaggerated fears about news softening are therefore unnecessary. Continued analysis of news softening, as well as ongoing adaption of the concept according to dynamic developments, is nevertheless important.
Highlights
The current media environment has made it increasingly difficult for journalists to attract attention
To test the hypotheses and answer the research questions, a quantitative content analysis investigated the political 1) Facebook news posts and 2) website teasers of four German media outlets all of which are important representatives of the media types taken into account: one tabloid newspaper (BILD), one quality newspaper (FAZ), one news magazine (Der Spiegel), and one public service newscast (Tagesschau)
This section first concentrates on news softening in Facebook posts (RQ1) and examines different subdimensions in greater detail (RQ2)
Summary
The current media environment has made it increasingly difficult for journalists to attract attention. This is true for social media, which have become important news sources for many people in recent years (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, & Nielsen, 2019). Facebook’s importance has somewhat decreased most recently and the younger audience is increasingly turning to Instagram, Facebook remains by far the most important social media platform for news (Newman et al, 2019). Journalists may adapt to these principles that shape the so-called social media logic (van Dijck & Poell, 2013), that is, alter their presentation of the news to attract attention and increase engagement with the content
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