News Audiences Research Articles

What Gets into the Media

This study investigated the coverage of COVID-19 in Vietnam to understand what types of information can be published, how accurate it is, and if media bias exists. The results show that media biases are more clearly presented during the gathering and editing stages of news production. Although COVID-19 received a heightened frequency of reporting, news articles about this topic had limited use of sources, provide mostly general information and statistics, and lack of scientific quality. These results are intended to provide public health authorities and news audience with an understanding of how a health event is presented in the media.

Online news platforms still matter: generational news consumption patterns during the 2020 presidential election

Abstract Purpose Gen Z or younger news audiences are believed to contribute to declining news consumption as a result of decreased news interest and reduced trust, particularly in political news. It can have adverse consequences for democratic processes. This study offers a more nuanced perspective by qualifying the role of context, and generational differences and similarities in online political news consumption patterns before and after the 2020 US presidential election, which witnessed a series of unprecedented events in the country’s history. Design/methodology/approach To investigate these patterns, I use US aggregated website visitation data from Comscore in a quasi-experimental interrupted time series design, leveraging the 2020 election as a natural experimental condition. Findings While Gen Z are indeed consuming considerably less news, contrary to assumptions, there was significantly increased engagement with news websites following the election. Additionally, media audiences across generations are likely to reduce social media use during such events. Implications Major political events can significantly influence media use patterns such as the extent of news consumption in general and political news in particular, something not often considered in media effects-oriented research. There is also an urgent need to review and reassess our definitions of news, news sources, and its audience. Originality/value By using observational data in a quasi-experimental design, this study offers a more precise and refined perspective of generational patterns of online political news consumption in the context of a major political event that both corroborates as well as challenges some our existing notions of media use.

News Closures, Trust, and Community Attachment among Regional News Audiences: A Case Study of Australia

ABSTRACT Local media play a critical role in providing information and opportunities for citizens to participate and feel attached to their local community. In recent years, there has been a decline in local news outlets and the provision of local news, which can impact residents’ sense of community. Findings from an online survey of 2,038 Australian regional news audiences conducted in 2019 reveal that local news consumption and engagement with local organisations are positively related to feelings of community attachment. On the other hand, closures of local news outlets have had a negative impact on news audiences’ attachment to their community. Trust was found to play an important mediating role between news consumption, engagement with community organisations, and community attachment. These findings highlight the importance of the provision of local news and information, and audiences’ trust in them, in engendering community attachment. The study provides valuable theoretical and practical implications regarding the impact of news outlet closures on community wellbeing in the absence of credible alternatives.

“There Must be Room for Critical Questions, but … ”: A News Audience Perspective on (In)decorous Journalistic Roles in the Emergence Phase of a Health Crisis

ABSTRACT In this article, we study how journalists may discursively balance their different and, at times, conflicting roles in the emergence phase of a health crisis in order not to violate news audience respondents’ sense of decorum, i.e., propriety or appropriateness in a communication situation. Based on 21 in-depth interviews with Danish news users about the questions posed by journalists to politicians and public officials in the emergence phase of the corona (COVID-19) pandemic, we identify the types of questions that news users deem, respectively, proper, improper and (in)appropriate, the latter referring to questions that the news users perceive as neither clearly decorous nor indecorous, but highly dependent on situational finesse and discursive adaptation. Findings suggest that in the eyes of respondents, critical questions in particular may be inappropriate and, thus, particularly discursively demanding in the emergence phase of a health crisis. However, respondents’ responses were contradictory, indicating that in the context of a democratic, corporatist media system respondents are reluctant to challenge journalists’ ideal role as democracy’s watchdog even under extreme circumstances.

Algorithmic indifference: The dearth of news recommendations on TikTok

The role of recommendation systems in news consumption has been hotly contested. From one perspective, the combination of personalized recommendations and practically limitless content diminishes news consumption, as people turn to more entertaining fare. From another, algorithmic systems and social networks heighten incidental exposure, raising opportunities for news consumption regardless of explicit individual interest. In this work, we examine the potential for algorithmic exposure to news on TikTok, a massively popular social network built around short-form video. In the context of US-based news audiences, we examine the accounts TikTok recommends, the videos it shows new users, and its trending hashtags. We find almost no evidence of proactive news exposure on TikTok’s behalf. We also find that, while TikTok’s algorithms respond slightly to active signals of news interest from simulated users, that response does not lead to increased exposure to credible news content. These findings highlight a lack of algorithmic news distribution on TikTok.

“You’d be Right to Indulge Some Skepticism”: Trust-building Strategies in Future-oriented News Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.

Ritual check-in, shocked immersion, regained stability: A sequential typology of news experiences in crisis situations

This short paper discusses people’s news experiences before, during and after societal crisis situations, contributing with a sequential typology outlining the three phases ritual check-in, shocked immersion and regained stability. Theoretically, we draw on classical contributions to media studies and sociology, particularly the concepts of ritual communication and ontological security. Empirically, we build on qualitative interview studies with news audiences in Norway, spanning 5 years and different crisis cases including political turmoil, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. We underline the significance of emotional distancing to regain stability, and identify crises lacking start- and endpoints as particularly difficult to navigate. These insights should instigate further debate about our understanding of news audiences in a tumultuous world, particularly relevant to scholarship on news use and avoidance.

Uninformed or Misinformed in the Digital News Environment? How Social Media News Use Affects Two Dimensions of Political Knowledge

ABSTRACT This article examines how the use of social media for news affects citizens’ knowledge about politics and current affairs. We employ a two-dimensional perspective on political knowledge and investigate how factual political knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, and misinformation, understood as the mismatch between factual political knowledge and confidence in knowledge, are related to social media news consumption. While earlier studies have suggested a negative relationship between social media news consumption and factual knowledge, there are indications that social media use may give people a general sense of being informed, even when they are not. Such general subjective knowledge might, however, differ from confidence in retrieved facts. Drawing on a two-wave panel study from Norway, we find evidence of a negative relationship between social media news consumption and both dimensions of knowledge. Notably, however, we do not find that social media news use leads to confidence in incorrect beliefs, suggesting that the digital media environment produces an uninformed, but not an overconfident, misinformed news audience.

Same Words, Different Meanings: Semantic Polarization in Broadcast Media Language Forecasts Polarity in Online Public Discourse

With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence around the impact of such phenomenon, leading some to argue that partisan segregation across news audiences can- not be fully explained by online news consumption alone and that the role of traditional legacy media may be as salient in polarizing public discourse around current events. In this work, we expand the scope of analysis to include both online and more traditional media by investigating the relationship between broadcast news media language and social media discourse. By analyzing a decade’s worth of closed captions (2.1 million speaker turns) from CNN and Fox News along with topically corresponding discourse from Twitter, we pro- vide a novel framework for measuring semantic polarization between America’s two major broadcast networks to demonstrate how semantic polarization between these outlets has evolved (Study 1), peaked (Study 2) and influenced partisan discussions on Twitter (Study 3) across the last decade. Our results demonstrate a sharp increase in polarization in how topically important keywords are discussed between the two channels, especially after 2016, with overall highest peaks occurring in 2020. The two stations discuss identical topics in drastically distinct contexts in 2020, to the extent that there is barely any linguistic overlap in how identical keywords are contextually discussed. Further, we demonstrate at-scale, how such partisan division in broadcast media language significantly shapes semantic polarity trends on Twitter (and vice-versa), empirically linking for the first time, how online discussions are influenced by televised media. We show how the language characterizing opposing media narratives about similar news events on TV can increase levels of partisan dis- course online. To this end, our work has implications for how media polarization on TV plays a significant role in impeding rather than supporting online democratic discourse.

Contesting the Mainstream: Towards an Audience-Centered Agenda of Alternative News Research

In order to better understand alternative news media, we need to focus more centrally on the audiences that regularly consume them. This special issue, entitled “Contesting the Mainstream: Understanding Alternative News Media,” advances such an audience turn. In the introduction, we outline how scholars have understood and characterized alternative news audiences. These have ranged from seeing them as (i) ideal participants and activists; as (ii) being misinformed and manipulated; and as (iii) being critical users. Drawing on studies published in this special issue, we highlight how these studies provide new and revealing empirical insights that advance all three perspectives. Taken together, the articles make a strong argument to move beyond binary ideations of normatively “good” or “bad” alternative news audiences. In our view, they signal the need to better understand the complexity behind audience engagement not just with alternative news media but mainstream journalism more generally. Based on this argument, we identify several starting points for moving the field forward with such an audience turn in mind.

Appealing to News Audiences or News Funders? An Empirical Analysis of the Solutions Journalism Network’s Revenue Project

ABSTRACT Many newsrooms have begun pursuing “solutions journalism,” which is defined as a rigorous journalistic method that reports on evidence-based responses to societal problems. What remains to be seen, however, is whether this approach to news production results in more revenue for news organizations. This study seeks to investigate this issue by examining an effort by the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) to help 12 newsrooms across the United States develop revenue streams derived from solutions journalism approaches to news production. We find that journalists face enormous—perhaps insurmountable—challenges when it comes to evaluating the impact of their efforts to strengthen their relationships with their audiences and ultimately grow more revenue via audience support. Yet, journalists remain committed to solutions journalism despite these obstacles, both because they find it compelling and because of its potential for revenue in the form of foundation funding. We conclude that as foundations play an increasingly powerful role in the business of news production, journalism funders’ imagined news audiences have become just as important for journalism scholars to consider as the imagined audiences of journalists themselves.

“Fair and Balanced”: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News

ABSTRACT Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-of-view, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 132 individuals in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, conducted in early 2021. Our results show while the idea of impartial news is widely embraced in abstract, ranging from notions of reporting “just the facts” to more nuanced views about how feasible impartiality is to achieve, there is no shared understanding of impartiality in practice. People’s perceptions of impartiality are rooted in two intertwined folk theories: the notion that news production and editorial decisions are guided largely by (a) partisan political agendas or (b) commercial considerations, determining what stories were chosen, ignored, or crafted in order to deceive and manipulate. There is some country variation around the importance of these folk theories, but their recurrence suggests that demonstrating impartiality to audiences requires convincing them not only that news content is balanced but also that editorial decisions were not driven by ulterior motives.

Entertainment journalism as a resource for public connection: A qualitative study of digital news audiences

Entertainment journalism has long been a marginal object of academic inquiry due to its reputation as a trivial distraction from public affairs journalism, yet this view has since been challenged by scholars who emphasize its substantive role in political discourse. Although previous research has disputed the idea that entertainment news helps audiences forge connections with public issues, the present study renews this line of inquiry at a time when this journalism has increasingly become a driver of political reporting and opinion, particularly in tandem with activism efforts addressing the media representation of marginalized identity groups as well as celebrity-fueled public advocacy. In-depth interviews are used to illuminate the interpretive processes of US audience members who engage online with this news, outlining how it is used as a resource for navigating the politics of media representation, for making political meanings from celebrity culture, and for fulminating right-wing backlash to cultural institutions.

Cutting through the Hype: Understanding the Implications of Deepfakes for the Fact-Checking Actor-Network

During recent years, growing concerns about emergent formats of visual disinformation and, in particular, deepfakes have shaped public debates and media scholarship. Empirical studies about deepfakes have most often focused on investigating their potential effects on news audiences. However, very little is known about how they impact producers of mediated communication and what strategies are taken to mitigate this potential threat. Based on in-depth interviews, this study focuses on fact-checkers as a central expert group dealing with evolving forms of visual mis- and disinformation on a day-to-day basis. We employ actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate the tangible impact deepfake technology has on their work. Our findings show that, so far, deepfakes as novel actants are only impacting fact-checking routines to a limited degree and are considered a future challenge. Instead, other forms of false and misleading images are considered to be far more disruptive. In particular, fact-checkers struggle with decontextualized videos, whose corrections require the integration of new technology-driven and manual detection techniques not yet available to many.

Personalization, Echo Chambers, News Literacy, and Algorithmic Literacy: A Qualitative Study of AI-Powered News App Users

ABSTRACT This qualitative study aims to illuminate the profound impacts of algorithmic processes on news audiences. The CAPI with 101 participants nationwide examines algorithmic news consumption from several interrelated perspectives, including personalization, news appreciation, echo chambers, algorithmic literacy, and news literacy. The study finds that users of AI-powered news apps often trust and even prefer algorithmic to human judgement but are concerned about missing out on important information and challenging viewpoints, as well as about their privacy. Many participants, while ambivalent about living with algorithm-based news recommendations, commonly exhibit a sense of comfort, appreciation, and gratification with personalized news feeds, calling the use of news apps a pleasant and satisfactory experience. While participants in general report being less active in searching information after using news apps, many participants believe that they are, ironically, more informed and knowledgeable now that they have the news apps.

News Audiences in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Perceptions and Behaviors of Optimizers, Mainstreamers, and Skeptics

ABSTRACT This study segmented digital news users according to their engagement with news personalization services. A national survey of 1,369 randomly selected digital news users was conducted. Three groups were identified through latent class analysis: Optimizers, Mainstreamers, and Skeptics. Optimizers had the most favorable attitude toward the services and the highest perceived contingency of news personalization. Skeptics showed the least favorable attitude and had the lowest perceived contingency. Optimizers were the most active consumers of digital news platforms, whereas skeptics were lagging in using digital news services. The study discussed the differences between these groups and their implications on news organizations.

THE NEW PARADIGM OF COMMUNICATION. INFLUENCING THE ALGORITHM THAT CONTROLS THE SPREAD OF INFORMATION

The media channel's audience was determined by the circulation or the coverage of radio and TV stations. The digital age has changed these milestones. The news reaches readers mainly through digital platforms, and media institutions are no longer broadcasters but content generators. We will analyze how specific technical parameters influence the audience. Some technical parameters affect the spread of information more than its quality. Some algorithms decide the spread of the news, and those are secret due to commercial laws. The algorithms that determine what information will be viral are the property of the companies operating the digital platforms that are ruling at this moment information industry. They seek profit, and the rules of the algorithms are profit-oriented. We will try to see what parameters are essential and how they influence the spreading of the news. We will take a closer look at the metrics of the most influential newspaper in Romania and the UK to find a relation between some technical facts and the news audience. The central fact analyzed in this research is the backlinks connecting a specific website to the worldwide web. This parameter remains one of the most crucial factors that influence the spreading of an article's news and newspaper audience.

Ordinary People and Social Media as Sources in Norwegian Newspapers

Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience.

News literacy, fake news recognition, and authentication behaviors after exposure to fake news on social media

The global problem of online disinformation has led scholars, educators, and other stakeholders in societies to emphasize the utility of news literacy to engender more critical news audiences. Using a survey among a representative online sample of citizens in Hong Kong ( N = 1485), this study examined how dispositional news literacy was related to individuals’ ability to discern real and fake COVID-related news on social media and their news authentication behaviors. Results showed that higher news literacy was related to greater ability to discern the veracity of real and fake news headlines; greater likelihood of certain internal acts of authentication when exposed to fake news (e.g. assessing content characteristics of the message); and greater likelihood to search online to verify fake news. The findings demonstrated the normative benefits of high dispositional news literacy among the general populace that can attenuate the effects of online disinformation.

Third-Person Perception as a Mediator of the Influence of Social Networking Sites Use & Personal Relevance to the 6M Preventive Behavioural Intention: A Study on the Online Covid-19 News Audience in Jakarta Special Capital Region

News coverage on Covid-19 is important as it provides people with important updates as well as crucial information for avoiding infection. Previous studies have shown undesirable messages such as Covid-19 news that circulates in social networking sites can trigger ‘third-person perception (TPP)’, which is a phenomenon in which audiences presume a message exerts more influence upon people other than themselves. It is crucial to examine whether audiences experience TPP during consumption of pandemic news – especially when there is a possible negative correlation between TPP and protective behavioural intentions. Previous studies showed empirical evidence when users used Covid-19 news in SNS (consume, contribute or create), such use could reduce TPP and was also correlated with preventive behavioural intentions. This suggests that three types of SNS usage and personal relevance have direct relationship with protective behavioural intentions, as well as indirect relationship with TPP, where it has a mediating role. To test these hypotheses, explanatory research of a positivistic paradigm and quantitative approach was administered. This research utilized quota sampling to collect data from 400 respondents through online questionnaire. Based on the structural analysis, there is no significant relationship between TPP and preventive behavioural intentions. Analyses also did not support the hypotheses that TPP mediated: 1.) SNS usage and preventive behavioural intensions; 2.) and personal relevance and preventive behavioural intensions. Personal relevance was found to be an important construct as it had a positive influence toward preventive behavioural intentions and a negative relationship with TPP. It is suggested that low level of interaction with Covid-19 news in Social Networking Sites is due to the respondents only incidentally consumed Covid-19 news. It is also suggested that non-existing relationship between third-person perception and preventive behavioural intention is due to the mandatory nature of health protocol in Indonesia.