Attention To News Research Articles

How News Images Affect Clicking on Subscription Appeals

ABSTRACT The newspaper industry’s business model increasingly relies on subscriptions as a means of revenue. Little scholarly research has examined what characteristics of subscription appeals make them more or less successful, although prior research on news attention proposes that negative images may be more successful whereas digital advertising research suggests the benefits of positive images. In 10 tests with three newsroom partners, we experimentally manipulate the type of image used in the subscription appeal. Across the tests, we varied the type of subscription (paid or free newsletter), the medium used (Facebook Sponsored Posts or direct email), and the targeting method (Facebook custom audiences or email lists from the newsroom). Results show that images of journalists doing their work or images of natural disasters covered by the news organization are consistently more effective than logos at generating subscriptions. Implications of this study exist for our understanding of the effects of visuals, for news organizations attempting to garner subscribers, and for researchers interested in conducting real-world experiments via Facebook or email.

Components of digital literacy as predictors of youth civic engagement and the role of social media news attention: the case of Korea

ABSTRACT This study examined the multi-component concept of digital literacy as a predictor of civic engagement depending on news attention level among teens. First, it explicated each effect of the four main components of digital literacy such as technical skills, information usage, communication and creation. A nationwide survey of more than 2,500 South Korean students showed that all components but technical skills were significant predictors of various activities of engagement. Information usage was the most salient predictor of posting on social issues and donation, while creation was highly related to volunteering. Next, we tested if there were any salient differences among the low, medium and high-news attention groups. Digital literacy components were significantly related to engagement among high-news attention respondents. In the low-attention group, however, the variables rarely predicted participation. The differences among groups were coherent across various engagement variables. This study demonstrates that frequency and amount of time spent on social media does not automatically guarantee adolescents’ civic engagement. Competence and attitude under the broader umbrella of digital literacy are what really matter. The normative and practical implication for digital literacy education and the function of news regarding the connection between digital literacy and engagement were further discussed.

Exogenous events and media reporting of mass shootings

ABSTRACT A growing literature has revealed that not all mass shootings are covered equally by the media. Thus far, endogenous and contextual characteristics of mass shootings have been causally associated with heightened print and online news coverage such as offender identity, weapon usage, motivations, shooting location and fatality count. This study utilizes univariate logistic regression to investigate whether the occurrence of exogenous events can offset coverage of mass shootings as measured through article counts drawn from the New York Times counts on 68 different cases. Results reveal that the odds of a given mass shooting being newsworthy are 12 times higher in absence of an exogenous event the day prior, the day of, or day after the shooting. These findings also support previously identified statistical trends. Cases featuring Middle-Eastern offenders have 28 times greater odds of being highly newsworthy. Large fatality counts also tend to attract news attention with each additional fatality in a shooting increasing the odds of it being highly newsworthy by one.

Central Banks Communication and the State of the Economy

In this paper, I use FOMC minutes transcripts from 1995 to 2019 to estimate a topic model that summarizes Central Banks communication as easily interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of news attention allocated to each theme at each point in time. I then use news attention estimates and show that they accurately predict time series of the key economic state variables. Furthermore, I evidence the link between the news sentiment in FOMC announcements in the dynamic of the key economic state variables.

Personalizing the U.S. Supreme Court Through Attention to Individual Justices

ObjectivesWe examine media incentives shaping the nature of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ news coverage and, in particular, how those incentives often lead news outlets to concentrate coverage on particular justices on the Court.MethodsFirst, we examine and model aggregate, over time patterns of news attention devoted to individual justices in the New York Times over the past four decades. Second, we compare and model temporal variation in individual justice coverage relative to generic coverage of the Supreme Court.FindingsThe results suggest that particular justices receive disproportionate attention from the national news media. Further, we demonstrate how individual justices have received a greater proportion of print media coverage over time and in a way that is shaped by internal division among the justices.ConclusionThe findings provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of how national media utilize resources to maximize journalistic impact and personalize the Court as an institution.

“Can naughty be healthy?”: Healthism and its discontents in news coverage of orthorexia nervosa

Orthorexia nervosa was first proposed as a diagnosis in 1997, referring to a pathological obsession with healthy food. While not formally accepted by the medical establishment, since its inception, it drew the attention of news outlets around the world. This paper examines almost two decades of news coverage about orthorexia to understand how writers have made sense of the proposed diagnosis. Based on an inductive thematic analysis of 492 articles, I find news stories have overwhelmingly framed orthorexia as a medical problem but relied on narratives that mix moral and medical beliefs to explain what is problematic about it, depicting it as absurd, obnoxious, paradoxical, and dangerous. I also examine how shifting explanations of orthorexia's causes differentially allocate responsibility, presenting it as a matter of personal choice when associating it with diets, while presenting orthorexics as victims in technology-focused explanations. I compare orthorexia coverage with discourses about obesity and eating disorders to show how the label simultaneously draws from and contests preceding health discourse. While narratives about orthorexia demonstrate the pervasiveness of medicalization, I suggest they can also be read as a backlash against healthism, relying on metaphors of mental health, illness, and risk to speak to healthism in its own language.

Attenuation characteristics analysis of concept tree

Dynamic Concept-cognitive Learning (CCL) is an active field in cognitive computing. Decremented concept cognition is an important topic in dynamic CCL. As an important feature of the dynamic CCL, attenuation characteristics have been successfully visualized by concept lattice and three-dimensional attribute topology. However, the existing attenuation characteristic analysis method has limitations to the description of interaction between attributes. A method of attenuation characteristics analysis of concept tree is proposed. The coupling between nodes is discussed from the concept tree, the nodes are decremented according to the coupling relationship, and the corresponding node attenuation rules are discussed according to the different types of nodes. In this paper, the news attention is the research object. The experimental results show that the attenuation characteristic analysis scheme of the concept tree is feasible. In the process of attenuation, the effect of attribute attenuation on the concept structure can be clearly demonstrated. At the same time, the concept tree can better visualize the process of decremented news attention than the concept lattice and three-dimensional attribute topology.

Who is heard in climate change journalism? Sourcing patterns in climate change news in China, India, Singapore, and Thailand

This study examines climate change news attention and sourcing patterns in news publications in China, India, Singapore, and Thailand. Using content analysis of 3781 articles from 1995 to 2017, the study reveals striking similarities in the countries despite their differing media systems. All four countries demonstrate a heavy reliance on government sources, followed by scientists. Activists, business interests, and members of the public are represented at low levels. Only business sources show increase over time. The results also demonstrate relatively low reliance on international news agencies and increased use of staff journalists. Significant reliance on government sources has implications for the poorest communities, which are the most affected by climate change.

The Structure of Economic News

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text content of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984{2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news as easily interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of news attention allocated to each theme at each point in time. We then use our news attention estimates as inputs into statistical models of numerical economic time series. We demonstrate that these text-based inputs accurately track a wide range of economic activity measures and that they have incremental forecasting power for macroeconomic outcomes, above and beyond standard numerical predictors. Finally, we use our model to retrieve the news-based narratives that underly “shocks” in numerical economic data.

Delapan agenda pembangunan Provinsi NTT tahun 2013-2018 dalam agenda surat kabar

The implementation of the eight NTT Province development agendas (2013-2018) received attention in the daily news of Pos Kupang, Timor Ekspress and Victory News. The purpose of this study included identifying the quantity of news from the three newspapers, knowing the description of the news and testing the hypothesis of the different news coverage of three newspapers. The results of the analysis show that the most dominant news theme reported by Pos Kupang daily (71 news), Timor Ekspress (78 news) and Victory News (125 news) is the agenda of the development of populist economy and tourism. The description of the news by the Pos Kupang daily is dominated by neutral portrayals (109 news), Timor Ekspress is dominated by positive depictions (109 news) and Victory News is dominated by negative depictions (180 news). The results of the analysis show that there are significant differences in the news theme and news depiction of the NTT province's eight development agenda for 2013-2018 between the three newspapers. This confirms the importance of an issue that the media considers in determining the media agenda and the way the media express a reality. 
 Keywords: NTT Province Development Agenda, Newspapers, Media Agenda

Determining economic news about China in global news feed: Evidence from Global Database of Events, Language and Tone

Current literature on economic news coverage mainly focuses on the economic news about domestic economy. This study asks a further question: will international economic news be accurately reflecting the economic performance of a foreign country? This study takes China as the target country and economic news coverage from other countries from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone for this research and constructs a Poisson Lagged Regression model for news volume and compares autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model versus autoregressive integrated moving average model for economic news tone change. The results show that international economic news coverage is largely different from domestic news coverage, and the attention of foreign news on Chinese economy is negativity related to the performance of the Shanghai Stock Index. Moreover, the economic news tone about China’s economy showed a seasonal pattern.

Framing and immigration through the trump era

AbstractFor the last decade, undocumented or illegal immigration has been one of the most contested policy issues in the United States, with significant news attention on policies affecting the undocumented population, ranging from deportations to comprehensive immigration reform, the DREAM Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Despite these prominent and multifaceted policy debates, scholarship on media framing and public opinion remain more focused on the portrayal of immigrants rather than policies affecting them. In general, scholars find that policy frames are far more consequential to public opinion than equivalency frames (variations in how news media describe unauthorized immigrants, either as “illegal” or “undocumented”) or episodic frames (whether news articles are heavy on human‐interest stories rather than policy facts and statistics). Also, negative frames generally have stronger effects than positive frames, and these effects sometimes vary by partisanship and family migration history. Finally, the relative infrequency of powerful frames in news stories, like a life spent in the United States, provides opportunities for advocates to move public opinion on immigration policy. These findings have important implications for future battles over immigration policy in the United States, which show no signs of abating.

The mediating role of political talk and political efficacy in the effects of news use on expressive and collective participation

This study examines how media use for news can relate to expressive and collective participation through the mediating role of political talk and internal and external political efficacy. Based on two cross-sectional analyses and one autoregressive analyses of the data obtained from a two-wave panel survey during the 2012 presidential campaign in South Korea, this study finds that political talk and internal political efficacy mediate the association between news attention and expressive participation, while external political efficacy does not. Political talk and internal political efficacy jointly mediate the impact of news attention on expressive participation. The analysis also reveals that social media news attention and internal political efficacy play a bigger role in connecting news attention and political participation than traditional news attention, external political efficacy, and political talk.

Delegitimizing the enemy: framing, tactical innovation, and blunders in the battle for the Arctic

ABSTRACTUtilizing scholarship on legitimation, tactical innovation, and blunders, this paper examines the dynamics by which Greenpeace tried to gain legitimacy and delegitimize Shell in the conflict over Arctic drilling. Content analysis of news media mentions found that the vast majority of Greenpeace frames centered on the ethical concerns surrounding Arctic drilling, mainly potential consequences such as oil spills and climate change. In contrast, Shell’s efforts to delegitimize Greenpeace were limited and more evenly distributed between scientific claims about the safety of drilling in the Arctic, economic opportunities such as jobs created, and ethical claims about Greenpeace threatening the safety of Shell crews. The tactically innovative use of celebrity endorsements by Greenpeace was particularly influential for mobilizing and gaining news attention when combined with occupations. Viral videos gained little news media attention, yet helped mobilize Greenpeace support when they featured a celebrity. In response, Shell tactics overwhelmingly involved litigation against Greenpeace which had some success in neutralizing the occupation tactic. Blunders by Shell amplified resonance of Greenpeace delegitimation frames, ultimately contributing to Shell ceasing their Arctic drilling operations in 2013.

Media Coverage and The Stock Market: What Is the Real Cost of Congress?

This paper demonstrates a strong inverse connection between daily stock returns and Congress in session. Our key conjecture is when Congress is in session, more media attention focuses on congressional activity than on the stock market; the more the news attention is political, the lower the demand for stock, which consequently impacts asset pricing. We find support for this hypothesis using text-based search data from Factiva; irrespective of the day Congress is in session, the stock market is 0.059% more likely to drop. Furthermore, the overall impact of in-session congressional activity varies across sectors and by Congress job approval ratings.

Explicating factual and subjective science knowledge: knowledge as a mediator of news attention and attitudes

ABSTRACTCommunication scholars have conflicting views on the relationship between exposure to science news and knowledge, and its subsequent influence on attitudes. Such mixed sentiments could arise from the vague definition of knowledge. Therefore, this paper explicates science knowledge into factual knowledge and subjective knowledge. It also compares the mediating roles of both types of knowledge between news attention and public support for science and technology (S&T). A survey of 967 Singaporeans showed that news attention was positively related to both factual and subjective knowledge. The findings revealed a stronger relationship between subjective knowledge and news attention than factual knowledge and news attention. Additionally, factual knowledge was positively related to public support for S&T, but subjective knowledge was negatively related to public support for S&T. The contrasting directions of these associations demonstrate that factual and subjective knowledge are two distinct dimensions of knowledge. Practically, the findings can inform policymakers and communication practitioners about effective public education and engagement initiatives. This study also provided guidelines for newsmakers in news reporting about S&T.

Effects of Issue Involvement, News Attention, Perceived Knowledge, and Perceived Influence of Anti-Corruption News on Chinese Students’ Political Participation

Informed by the third-person effect hypothesis, this study used a survey of 1,060 Chinese university students to analyze the impact of anti-corruption news on Chinese audiences’ attitudes and political participation. This study found that university students tended to think the influence of anti-corruption news on others was greater than on themselves. In addition, issue involvement and new media attention to such news were found to reduce the self-other perceptual gap. Furthermore, the perceived effects of such news on self were positively associated with supportive attitude toward the anti-corruption policies. Meanwhile, perceived effects on others were negatively related to respondents’ political participation.

Threatening criminals and marginalized individuals: Frames and news conventions in reporting of radicalization and violent extremism

The phenomenon of so-called foreign fighters has in recent years attracted renewed public interest regarding why young people who have grown up in Western, democratic countries come to accept and engage in politically motivated violence, and these issues have received extensive news attention. Based on analysis of news texts published in four major Norwegian news outlets throughout 2014 and 2015, and supplemented with in-depth interviews with reporters, the present article investigates how radicalization and violent extremism are framed in the news, including how news conventions contribute to shape the ways in which these issues are defined in public debate. The analysis shows that authority definitions prevailed. ‘Radicalized’ individuals were predominantly presented as threats and criminals to be dealt with in the judicial system. A ‘marginalization approach’ was, however, also present in the reporting. This was partly due to reporters’ efforts to bring personalized human-interest stories, which, to some extent, served to broaden the overall range of depictions. Simultaneously, issues pertaining to radicalization were mainly discussed at micro- and mesolevels, and more abstract political or systemic explanations not actualized by specific events or easily concretized through foregrounding specific individuals were largely absent. The article contributes new insights into characteristics of public discourses of radicalization and violent extremism, and how these are constructed in the intersection between news conventions and (elite) sources.

Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Crime Under Trump

We study whether social media can contribute to hatred against minorities with a focus on Donald Trump's political rise. To establish causality, we construct an instrument for Twitter usage based on the platform's early adopters at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in 2007, who were crucial for Twitter's diffusion across US counties. Instrumenting with the home counties of SXSW followers who joined in March 2007, while controlling for the counties of SXSW followers who joined before the festival, we find that a one standard deviation increase in Twitter usage is associated with a 32% larger increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes since the 2016 presidential primaries. Further, Trump's tweets about Islam-related topics predict increases in xenophobic tweets by his followers, cable news attention paid to Muslims, and hate crimes on the following days. These correlations persist in an instrumental variable framework exploiting that Trump is more likely to tweet about Muslims on days he plays golf.

News Attention in a Mobile Era

News Attention in a Mobile Era