Digital Native News Research Articles

Coding and Capability-Building in Nonprofit Digital-Native News Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Latin America (LATAM)

Digital journalism scholars highlighted a gap in scholarly knowledge concerning data journalism in the Global South, emphasizing the importance of data literacy in newsrooms. This article investigates the coding capabilities within digital-native nonprofit news organizations amidst global digital inequalities, focusing on the MENA (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) and LATAM (Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, and the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico) regions. We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 15 organizations and analyzed emerging themes to understand coding capabilities in the context of sustaining available resources and mitigating existing constraints. This study concludes that the significance of adopting coding for nonprofit digital-native news organizations in MENA and LATAM is likely to increase, given the persistence of the existing political and economic conditions. Moreover, this study recognizes that certain news innovation trends related to coding, originally from the Global North, such as innovation labs, are gaining traction in the Global South. However, it also highlights variations among regions within the Global South regarding the adoption of coding in news organizations.

Dissecting Social Media Journalism: A Comparative Study Across Platforms, Outlets and Countries

ABSTRACT News outlets increasingly position themselves on social media platforms with platform-bound content next to their regular media offerings. At the time of writing, scholarship on studying these novel types of news content remains limited in size and scope. Drawing on recent theoretical insights from the dislocation of news journalism and social media logics, we assess a dataset of Instagram and TikTok posts of public, private and digital-native news outlets from Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom (n = 458). Contrary to previous findings, we conclude that news publishers tend to adapt their content to the specific technological affordances of social media networks and that news-related content prevails, signalling normalisation patterns for how news is produced for and diffused via both platforms.

E-Commerce as a Source of Revenue in Spanish Digital News Media

This study analyzes e-commerce strategies in Spanish active digital news outlets comprehensively based on a 2021 census. Out of the 2,862 outlets, 11.8% (or 337) incorporated some form of e-commerce, with a higher prevalence observed among legacy media than among digital-native outlets. The study also revealed that e-commerce was more prevalent among outlets with national coverage and specialized subject matters. A detailed examination of 34 high-reach outlets, including 25 legacy and nine digital-native news outlets, found that both types employed on-site sales and affiliate marketing. However, legacy media exclusively engaged in promotional editorial collections, merchandise, tickets, and travel sales. The study highlights that while some outlets are diversifying revenue streams, most still rely primarily on traditional income sources such as advertising and subscriptions. This reliance poses a risk as these conventional streams are becoming less dependable. Furthermore, the increasing move towards market-oriented journalism raises concerns about a shift from the democratic role of news media to a more consumerist model.

Symbiosis or Precarity? Digital Platforms’ Role on Australian Digital-Native Journalism and Their Funding Models

Legacy media outlets, especially newspapers, have confronted significant challenges this century due to the shift of advertising revenues to digital platforms like Facebook and Google. Major events like the Global Financial Crisis (2007–2009) and Covid-19 pandemic intensified the financial strain, resulting in further downsizing and newsroom closures. Despite these difficulties, digital-native journalism has experienced widespread growth globally. This article explores funding models of selected digital-native journalism in Australia, drawing on platform dependency theory to address questions of what role digital technology platforms and nascent regulation have played in shaping the state of digital-native journalism in Australia. Australia’s concentrated media ownership landscape and its introduction of the world-first News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), provide a unique backdrop to examine the economic and regulatory environment that impacts Australia’s digital-native journalism. Using a case-study approach, the research explores seven diverse digital-native news outlets over six years across three time periods: several years after the Global Financial Crisis (2017), just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–), and after the introduction of the NMBC (2023). Expert interviews provide insights into the role of digital platforms in shaping digital-only media. The digital native fail rate in this study is high (>40%). But we also find that of those that endure, the most successful placed a premium on building a distinctive brand (often through specialized reporting), adopting a diversified (hybrid) funding model, and growing audience share through trust. Most benefited from regulation in the form of the NMBC to increase newsroom resources, yet were also cautious of platform dependency.

“Whose Voice Resonates?” A Study on the News Content of Four Alternative Digital-native News Websites in Turkey

This study examines the news content of Turkish digital-native news websites, namely Diken, Gazete Duvar, Kısa Dalga, and T24. Employing both quantitative and qualitative content analysis approaches, the study initially investigates the utilization of sources and framing techniques within the news articles presented on these platforms. The findings underscore the imperative of embracing reporter-driven journalism to amplify the voices of disadvantaged individuals and groups and foster an alternative news agenda. Furthermore, while these websites prominently exhibit a critical framing towards the government and official entities, a distinguishing feature is adopting a balanced language, rather than one showing positive bias, when reporting on the opposition and associated individuals and institutions.

Digital-native news media: Reach in 46 countries, top brands and user profiles in Spain

Digital-pure news publications have become competitive players in many countries, populating audience rankings in the context of a high-choice media environment. With the aim of gaining insight into the performance of digital-native news brands around the world and into how their audiences are similar or different to those of media with traditional roots in Spain, we draw on survey data for 2021 and 2022, respectively. First, we examine what proportion of online adults use any of the most popular digital-pure news brands in 24 mostly European countries and in 22 markets in America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and we highlight how the main digital-native brands rank among online news sources, based on their weekly audience reach. Then we compare the user profiles of the five most-used online-only news organizations in Spain, against the audiences of the top five legacy brands (N = 2028), looking at reader loyalty, gender, age, income and education levels, and political leaning. With this media-centric approach to audiences, we find that digital-native news media brands either lead (in 15 out of 46 countries) or occupy some of the top positions by weekly reach in most markets, with Nordic countries standing out as an exception. In Spain, audiences of the top digital-native brands check them slightly less frequently than the users of news sites with traditional roots. News sites in our study are slightly more popular among males, older people, and more affluent and formally educated users who can define their political stance. Nevertheless, the diversity of editorial approaches found among sites in an externally pluralistic news media market inevitably results in brands with user profiles that show exceptions to these trends.

Book Review: Digital-Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism, by Summer Harlow

Book Review: <i>Digital-Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism</i>, by Summer Harlow

¿Qué pasa with American News Media? How Digital-Native Latinx News Serves Community Information Needs Using Messaging Apps

Traditional and legacy Spanish-language news outlets are shrinking, leaving many communities in the U.S. without news that satisfies their critical information needs. At the same time, news media entrepreneurs are adopting and adapting to technological changes that offer new venues for news delivery. We use a mixed-methods research approach to analyze Latinx digital-native news media organizations that distribute news in Spanish via mobile instant messaging (MIM) apps. Results show that journalists took a bottom-up approach to meeting the information needs of their audiences, choosing MIMs because their readers were already established on those platforms. Our work also reveals that news delivered via MIMs focuses mostly on health, emergencies and public safety, civic information, and economic development.

All the President’s Lies: How Brazilian News Media Addressed False and Inaccurate Claims in Their Titles

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the Brazilian media covered false and misleading claims made by President Jair Bolsonaro in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, we extracted titles from 111 news articles connected to twenty-one disinformation episodes. The texts were published by six news organizations, and we classified them into three categories using content analysis: contextualization, correction, and reproduction. Among our findings, we have discovered that 60.36% of the content reproduced the president's discourse without acknowledging it was a lie or an error, while 26.13% presented elements of contextualization. Only 13.51% of titles corrected Bolsonaro’s false or misleading claims. The results indicate that legacy and digital-native news organizations mostly failed to correct the Brazilian president’s errors and lies, evoking questions about ethics and transparency. Consequentially, journalism may increase the noise in an already polluted and high-choice online media environment if such issues are left unaddressed.

Improvisation, Economy, and MTV Moves: Online News and Video Production Style

This study uses content analysis to explore the way a news organization's norms and expectations is tied to video production style and extends Rogers's Diffusion of Innovations theory. The study compares the current online video production styles from legacy print, legacy TV, and digital native news organizations based in the United States. Over time, while these organizations have converged into one screen for viewers, their differing organizational histories, traditions, and norms affect the way they produce video news. The analysis found legacy print organizations continue to produce slower-paced videos without scripted narration; TV organizations use scripted narration with one correspondent; and digital natives produce stories with quick pacing and a mix of narrator types. Diffusion of Innovations theory helps to explain why these organizations offer distinct production styles that are not converging in form.

Changes in health communication in the age of COVID-19: A study on the dissemination of preprints to the public.

Preprints have become an important tool for meeting the challenges of health communication in the context of COVID-19. They allow scientists to disseminate their results more quickly due to the absence of a peer review process. Preprints have been well-received by scientists, however, there have been concerns about the exposure of wider public audiences to preprints due in part to this lack of peer review. The aim of this study is to examine the dissemination of preprints on medRxiv and bioRxiv during the COVID-19 pandemic using content analysis and statistical analysis. Our findings show that preprints have played an unprecedented role in disseminating COVID-19-related science results to the public. While the overall media coverage of preprints is unsatisfactory, digital native news media performed better than legacy media in reporting preprints, which means that we could make the most of digital native media to improve health communication. This study contributes to understanding how science communication has evolved in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and provides some practical recommendations.

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Alcohol Use Disorder Narratives in U.S. Digital News Coverage and Engagement on Social Media

ABSTRACT Social media regularly serves as a source of news and health-related information subsequently shaping public opinion and behavior. We examined mainstream digital news narratives about alcohol use disorder (AUD), including coverage of solutions to AUD, and associations between narratives and engagement on social media. AUD-related articles (N = 339) published in top U.S. newspapers and digital native news sources in 2019 were analyzed by trained coders with a structured codebook (κ = 0.75), examining characteristics of stories highlighting specific individuals affected by AUD and solution-framing of AUD. Facebook shares were used as a proxy measure for an article’s potential “reach” on social media. Of articles focused on individuals (72.0%), most (62.7%) depicted individuals affected by AUD as criminals, as opposed to engaging with alcohol treatment or being in recovery (31.1%). These criminal depictions received over eight times as many FB shares, compared to alcohol use treatment or recovery depictions. Law enforcement solutions (63.9%) were depicted most often, followed by AUD-treatment oriented solutions (40.1%), and prevention-oriented solutions (15.8%). Law enforcement solutions received more than five times as much social media engagement than AUD-treatment oriented solutions and over twenty-nine times more engagement than prevention-oriented solutions. There is a need to increase news coverage featuring depictions of individuals who have successfully engaged with alcohol treatment and recovery, reflecting the millions of Americans who have resolved a significant past alcohol problem. News coverage of AUD should also incorporate more depictions of evidence-based prevention-oriented and treatment-oriented solutions to AUD.

News stories and images of immigration online: A quantitative analysis of digital-native and traditional news websites of different political orientations and social media engagement

ABSTRACT The study employed a quantitative content analysis of stories (N = 1200) and photographs (N = 1200) to examine how U.S. digital-native and traditional news websites of different political orientations (right-leaning vs left-leaning) represented immigration in frames, topics and visual frames. Social media engagement was also analyzed to understand how people react to news content. Both in stories and images, left-leaning news websites focused more often on victimization, while right-leaning outlets emphasized threat. This trend was even more pronounced among digital-native news websites. Traditional left-leaning news sites generated the highest number of social media interactions.

Counted out or taken in: mapping out diversity of journalists in three Indian digital native English newsrooms

ABSTRACT Digital news media aim to seize the opportunity of the growing market of the Internet use in India. While the rise of digital start-ups or digital native news websites in the news industry is remarkable, it has not heralded significant changes in newsroom diversity. It has been established that media in India, as elsewhere, is largely dominated by male journalists and that the narratives are created by those from upper class and caste. This invites questions over the institution’s ideology toward having representations from religious minorities, dalits, adivasis, women, LGBT, disabled etc. that could result in producing pluralistic discourses. This study explored newsroom diversity and its manifestations in three Indian digital native newsrooms. Data were collected through participant observation and interviews from founders, editors and journalists in the three newsrooms. The study revealed that all three newsrooms are reasonably diverse on the basis of gender but less diverse in terms of religion and caste.

In Service of News Subscribers: Exploring Belgian Journalists’ Perceptions of Stakeholder Relations in the Digital News Ecosystem

This qualitative paper contends that as news media are faced with growing commercial pressures and changing news consumption habits, they need to rethink their relationship with two of their main stakeholders: readers and advertisers. Multi-stakeholder marketing provides a useful conceptual framework for such an exercise, since it invites media practitioners to reconcile the conflicting interests of different stakeholders. This study aims to understand journalists’ levels of multi-stakeholder thinking regarding advertisers and readers. To explore how contemporary journalists see their role with regard to distinct stakeholders in the news ecosystem, we interviewed 14 Belgian journalists working for legacy and digital native news media. The goal of this exploratory study is to examine (1) how journalists perceive and rethink their dependence on readers and advertisers in the digital news ecosystem and (2) how their perception of the digital news ecosystem influences their attitudes towards these stakeholders. Findings indicate that journalists tend to see the value of readers in monetary terms and believe increasing reader revenue will help journalism survive. Other types of reader value (feedback, expertise, and content) are peripheral. This focus on subscribers also seems to coincide with a devaluation of other stakeholders like advertisers and non-paying readers.

INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY IN NEW ECONOMIC JOURNALISTIC ARRANGEMENTS IN SANTA CATARINA

This paper investigates 20 digital native news arrangements in Santa Catarina. The exploratory research aims to find elements on how these arrangements perceive themselves as innovative or not, and how this is strained by the ways in which these initiatives are financed. Results show that part of the researched arrangements can be considered innovative as they are settled down in news deserts and, therefore, meet an information shortage for local populations. On the other hand, economic weaknesses can limit and jeopardize the useful life of these organizations.

“Tell the Story as You’d Tell It to Your Friends in a Pub”: Emotional Storytelling in Election Reporting by BuzzFeed News and Vice News

ABSTRACT This article analyses two digital-native news organisations, BuzzFeed News UK and Vice News (UK), and explores how they use emotional forms of storytelling in their election reporting. Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of 280 news articles published during the 2017 UK general election, we scrutinise the textual and visual elements of emotional storytelling across three distinct groupings: (1) language and tone; (2) visual, formatting, and interaction, and (3) production and editorial choices. We argue that BuzzFeed and Vice draw on an emotional vernacular to engage with and relate to their young audience, while simultaneously providing a gateway to convey sophisticated political content. Both organisations embrace internet culture in their reporting, drawing on subjective, confessional, and personalised forms of expression that characterise communication on social media. The journalistic work required to wrap long-form, analytical election reporting in an emotive narrative provides evidence of innovative audience-orientated practice. In doing so, BuzzFeed and Vice offer election coverage that is uniquely tailored to a younger audience.

Email Newsletters: An Analysis of Content From Nine Top News Organizations

Email newsletters are increasingly popular delivery systems for legacy and digital-native news outlets. The newsletter embodies another level of gatekeeping, but little research has explored which stories make it through the email newsletter “gate” and into the subscriber's inbox. This content analysis of newsletter items ( N = 1,231) from select broadcast, cable, print, and digital-native news outlets provides a snapshot of the focus, subject matter, and style of daily newsletters. Newsletter subscribers generally are encouraged to link to the outlet's full-length online content on its website; however, not all outlets attempt to make personal connections with their newsletter readers. In general, the newsletters are largely filled with nationally focused stories on politics and government and mimic the style of their full-length counterparts.