News Audiences Research Articles

“Listening Literacies” as Keys to Rebuilding Trust in Journalism: A Typology for a Changing News Audience

ABSTRACT Using in-depth interviews and textual analyses of trust-building projects as case studies, this research explores the links between trust and news literacy. The major contribution includes a contextualized definition and formal typology for the literacies to come out of these initiatives and programs, which are well-funded by foundations, technology companies and others. In these trust-building strategies, we are asked to reimagine who is responsible for information literacy so that mainstream journalism can be revitalized. Four dimensions of news literacy for trust-building in public information exchange emerged from this dataset: civic consumption, amateur (co-)production (sharing), professional information production (newsrooms), and algorithms/technology. We find that the notion of a “listening literacy” within these strategies has application for not only K-12 schools, universities and “regular” people, but also for journalists and media platforms to restore trust in accurate information.

Digital news audience engagement and web metrics: exploring major research trends

In today’s digital era, new audience tracking tools have become available for use by journalists and editors. These digital tools bring both innovations and challenges. The goal of this exploratory literature review is to define the rough contours of the recent trends in research focusing on j-audience engage- ment metrics. While journalists have access to dynamic and diverse analytics data, it is not clear what the best way to interpret these data is and how journalists should benefit from using these tools. In this review, using exploratory content analysis, I will map the key research directions and emerging themes in the digital audience engagement studies published within 2013-2018. By no means has this review represented an exhaustive analysis. Instead, it attempts to define some key themes emerging in the research studies that focus on the digital news engagement through the prism of audience metrics. The findings suggest that when studying audience engagement and web metrics the scholars were particularly interested in four major research topics: a) the impact of metrics on journalism; b) how met- rics are produced, interpreted, and used; c) what metrics fail to measure; d) changing power dynamics between news consumers and news producers. The findings of this study will be useful for journalists, news editors and media scholars in understanding the nuanced interplay between web metrics and newsroom decisions. Key words: audience engagement, news engagement, digital news, web metrics, web analytics.

Journalistic Values in Modern Democracy: Balancing Power Between Constitutionalism and Populism

In modern representative democracy, political legitimacy is based on potentially conflicting principles: (1) the “popular sovereignty” principle, stating that the republic must be based on “the opinion of the people,” and (2) the “rule of law” principle which suggests that constitutional values of the republic must be protected from “irregular interpositions of the people.” As a parallel institution supporting the democratic republic (e.g., the press as the “Fourth Branch”), the role of journalists has continuously changed, and the journalistic institution has been balancing those two potentially conflicting principles. This study examines the current status of journalistic values as part of modern democracy. Traditionally accepted news used to balance the conflict between constitutionalism and populism by distancing journalists from both the existing elites and the mass. However, due to the recent transformation of the media landscape and the uprising of people’s anti-establishment feelings, news audience has struggled to relate their everyday lives to the mainstream journalism institutions. As a key alternative journalistic value of the traditional journalistic standard, the “news objectivity,” this study suggests “social empathy” as a solution of the modern political conundrum between two potentially conflicting principles that most representative democracies face.

COVID-19 news reporting and engaging in the age of social media: Comparing Xinhua News Agency and The Paper

“To follow and to be followed” has become the new normal in news communication in the age of social media. News audience follow news via social media while they are being followed by news anytime anywhere. This new normal has created a pressing need to investigate whether social media have brought any changes to both party-controlled and market-oriented news media in China in reporting crises. Comparing Xinhua News Agency (party-controlled) and The Paper (market-oriented), this study investigated how they reported COVID-19 and how their news consumers engaged with their COVID-19 news stories on Jinri Toutiao, a popular and yet special form of social media. This study found that Xinhua News Agency continued to stay overwhelmingly positive, while The Paper was more neutral in reporting the health crisis. Xinhua News Agency was surprisingly more episodic than The Paper in framing the pandemic. The Paper, however, had a higher level of user engagement than Xinhua News Agency. To cater to the changing news-seeking behaviors and patterns, both party-controlled and market-oriented news media have changed their operations, but not their fundamental orientations.

Share or not? Effects of Stereotypes on Social Media Engagement Using the Stereotype Content Model

ABSTRACT From a reader-experience and reader-engagement perspective, drawing upon stereotype content model and news engagement research, this study examined the impact of the stereotypes that the news characters receive on news audience’ s affective and behavioral responses in social media news environment. 145 participants were recruited for a between-subjects posttest-only online experiment. Based on an identical news plot, the stereotypes (warmth and competence) of the news characters were manipulated into four stereotypical quadrants, high competence and high warmth, high competence and low warmth, low competence and high warmth, and low competence and low warmth. Results showed that distinct emotions were elicited by the different stereotyped news characters. Second, the stereotypical perception of warmth was conducive to emotional, functional and communal engagement compared with competence, validating the warmth primacy principle. Furthermore, we found that ambivalent emotions, pity and envy, fueled more social media engagement than admiration and contempt. Lastly, lining with the principle of cognition, affect, and behavior, the mediation analyses showed that emotions significantly mediated the relationships between stereotype perceptions and social media engagement. Theoretical and practical implications on audience engagement and the role of emotion in journalism are further discussed.

Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: a Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individuals in 17 European countries. Our aim is to (i) profile different types of news consumers and (ii) understand how each user profile is linked to political knowledge acquisition. Our results show that five user profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers – can be identified, although the prevalence of these profiles varies across countries. Findings further show that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. However, online-based news use is more widespread in Southern Europe, where it is associated with lower levels of political knowledge than in Northern Europe. By focusing on news audiences, this study provides a comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of how contemporary European political information environments perform and contribute to an informed citizenry.

The Imagined Audience for News: Where Does a Journalist’s Perception of the Audience Come From?

ABSTRACT In public communication, in the absence of a clear sense of one’s actual audience, a communicator relies on a mental image of an imagined audience. But where does one’s image of the audience come from, and how might that matter for how people evaluate their audience? The case of journalists and their perceptions offers an instructive lens for examining this question, particularly given the digitally mediated changes in the way news audiences are known (e.g., via digital metrics and encounters on social media). Through a survey of U.S. journalists (N = 544), we find that journalists’ views of their audience spring from a complex variety of sources, including interactions via email, social media, and comment sections, as well as relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. These sources carry differing consequences for the evaluations of those audiences—namely, regarding whether journalists perceive their audience as smart (rational) and/or similar to them (homophilous). Results suggest that the origins of journalists’ imagined audiences are a significant factor in shaping journalists’ perception of the people with whom they are communicating, with the concomitant potential to influence the communication itself.

Pɔhim Zuɣu: Understanding Indigenous Language News Audiences in Ghana

ABSTRACT Although there is scant audience research in media studies, audiences continue to be key drivers in the political economy of media in Africa and elsewhere. The study explores the dynamics of indigenous language news audiences’ listening habits, how their information-seeking habits are shaped by personal values and the ways in which their participation in civic engagement reinforces their media consumption habits. The study focuses on Dagbanli and Gonja news audiences living in Ghana’s Northern and Savannah Regions. The objective of the study is to explore the way that Dagbanli and Gonja news audiences use the news they receive by parsing out these uses within this sociocultural context. Through in-depth interviews, the listening habits and civic engagements of news audiences are brought to the fore. Through a uses and gratifications approach, I argue that indigenous language news audiences are active agentive consumers whose habits are shaped by contextual factors, personal and social values. The findings of the study demonstrate that the news shapes the political behaviour and voting decisions of audiences. The study also finds that many audiences use the news as an avenue for learning more about education, agriculture, the environment and pervading conversations in the public sphere.

Media behavior of youth in the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine

The COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine measures have transformed the media agenda. The aim of the study is to identify the behavioral characteristics of the youth news audience, which is formed in the context of COVID-19. To solve research tasks, from March 24 to April 5, 2020, an intelligence survey of young Ukrainians as news readers was conducted. 364 respondents aged from 18 to 29, living in different regions of Ukraine, answered the questions of the Google questionnaire. The results of the survey are qualitative in nature and highlight the trends that exist in the youth audience. According to the data, the topic of coronavirus has become a priority for 82% of respondents. Phobias of young respondents increased: more than 70% stated they were worried and afraid. The alarm response to the pandemic has prompted many media consumers (46%) to turn to more information sources than usual. On the other hand, some media consumers have reduced their contact with the media, which is a typical protective reaction. Uncertainty, suspicion, and anxiety shake the confidence of the youth audience in public institutions and the media. The study showed the emergence of new challenges for media companies. The media should anticipate the consequences of disseminating information, fake news, and adjust content strategies accordingly: compliance with journalistic standards, responsible dissemination of news, fact-checking.

Pandemic News Experience: COVID-19, News Consumption, Mental Health, and the Demand for Positive News

COJO for COVID Recovery is a UKRI/AHRC-funded rapid COVID-19 response research project that addresses the role that constructive journalism (COJO), particularly solution-focused journalism, can play in the pandemic recovery. The research set out in this report details the findings of the project’s initial in-depth interviews and survey with UK news audiences. Four key sets of findings regarding COVID-19 news consumption and experience emerge from this analysis. 1. The high interest in COVID-19 news was associated with the need to monitor and navigate the uncertain evolution of the pandemic as it affected audiences. 2. There was a clear fluctuation that followed “an inverse Bell curve” (up-down-up) pattern of COVID-19 news consumption which was in parallel with the severity of the pandemic and its associated lockdown restrictions. 3. Many of our participants reported switching off from the news or avoiding it for reasons linked to mental and emotional health, including negativity, repetitive reporting and information overload. 4. Participants demanded the media provide more positive news that helps to lift the mood of the public and/or offers ways out of the pandemic.

Hyperpartisan News Use: Relationships with Partisanship and Cognitive and Affective Involvement

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the issue of partisan selectivity in the era of prevalent false, misleading, and biased information. We surveyed a representative sample of adults living in the United States to investigate the relationships among hyperpartisan news use, partisanship, and cognitive and affective involvement. First, we find that strong partisanship—from both Democrats and Republicans—relates to exposure to both left- and right-leaning hyperpartisan news. Second, exposure to left-leaning hyperpartisan content relates to negative affective involvement, while exposure to right-leaning hyperpartisan news relates to positive affective involvement. Neither left- nor right-leaning hyperpartisan news use relates to cognitive involvement, though traditional news use does. These findings add to the literature on partisan selective exposure and provide new details about the makeup of news audiences and their cognitive and affective involvement with hyperpartisan news.

Predicting Audience-Rated News Quality: Using Survey, Text Mining, and Neural Network Methods

This study aims to predict audience-rated news quality with journalistic values and linguistic/formal features of news articles, based on the theoretical rationales derived from information processing models, journalism and news consumption literature, and linguistic studies. We employed a traditional social science survey of over 7,800 news audiences and implemented natural language processing, text-mining, and neural network analyses for 1,500 news articles concerning public affairs. Results suggest that the journalistic values of news articles are stronger predictors of audience-rated news quality than their linguistic/formal features. The impact of journalistic values overrode that of the news audience attributes which served as a baseline for comparison. Specifically, believability, depth, and diversity were more important in predicting audience-rated news quality than readability, objectivity, factuality, and sensationalism. Regarding linguistic/formal features, bylines, sources, subjective expressions, and article similarities were influential. This study provides an additional support that news audiences regard journalistic values highly as substantial factors of news quality. It also provides empirical evidence for the normative news reporting guidelines. Methodologically, it serves as an example of integrating computational and textual methods with traditional social science approach.

Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population of over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the 'news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online every day. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

Так ли страшен фейк? Ложные новости и их роль в современном мире

В статье представлен обзор ключевых зарубежных исследований фейковых новостей. Работы, посвященные фейковым новостям, зачатую противоречивы и приходят к противоположным выводам. В литературе отсутствует единое определение данного понятия. Оценки общественной опасности фейковых новостей, на которых сфокусирована эта статья, также неоднозначны. В числе поводов для тревоги выделяют спорную эффективность имеющихся методов противодействия ложной информации, политическую предвзятость такого контента, а также тот факт, что любой контент может при определенных условиях стать вирусным. Кроме того, увеличение числа фейковых новостей рассматривается как причина снижения доверия СМИ, которое, впрочем, наблюдалось задолго до того, как рассматриваемое явление возникло. Вместе с тем ряд исследований показывает, что реальная аудитория фейковых новостей не очень велика и достаточно специфична. Это должно несколько снизить потенциальные негативные эффекты ложной информации. Кроме того, есть возможности для противодействия дезинформирующим сайтам и группы людей, менее подверженные их влиянию. Таким образом, потенциальные последствия фейковых новостей неоднозначны. Хотя данный феномен обсуждается преимущественно в негативном ключе, существуют факторы, снижающие остроту проблемы. Благодарность. Статья приготовлена при поддержке Российского научного фонда (РНФ), грант № 19-18-00206.

Utilizing Bots for Sustainable News Business: Understanding Users’ Perspectives of News Bots in the Age of Social Media

The move of news audiences to social media has presented a major challenge for news organizations. How to adapt and adjust to this social media environment is an important issue for sustainable news business. News bots are one of the key technologies offered in the current media environment and are widely applied in news production, dissemination, and interaction with audiences. While benefits and concerns coexist about the application of bots in news organizations, the current study aimed to examine how social media users perceive news bots, the factors that affect their acceptance of bots in news organizations, and how this is related to their evaluation of social media news in general. An analysis of the US national survey dataset showed that self-efficacy (confidence in identifying content from a bot) was a successful predictor of news bot acceptance, which in turn resulted in a positive evaluation of social media news in general. In addition, an individual’s perceived prevalence of social media news from bots had an indirect effect on acceptance by increasing self-efficacy. The results are discussed with the aim of providing a better understanding of news audiences in the social media environment, and practical implications for the sustainable news business are suggested.

The Temporal Nature of Mobile Push Notification Alerts: A Study of European News Outlets’ Dissemination Patterns

Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and control of temporal news personalisation; and (c) reinforces mobile as the locus of contact between news organisations and audiences. However, push notifications are a relatively under-researched topic. We explore news organisations’ use of alerts, considering whether they attempt to integrate with existing mobile-user behaviour patterns or seek to be a disruptive element, garnering attention when audiences are not typically using devices. Through quantitative content analysis, this study examines the temporality of push notifications (n = 7092) from nine Northwestern European countries, comprising 34 news outlets. These data allow for comparisons at two levels: publisher type and national context. The study shows how the temporal patterns of push notifications’ dissemination align with existing news consumption behaviours; concepts of content-snacking and audiences’ rhythms and rituals are a useful lens through which these immediate, concise texts can be considered. Our findings show that news organisations use the mobile channel for attracting and maintaining users’ attention, with varying interpretations of temporal customisability.

U.S Audiences' Perceptions of Covid-19 and Conservative News Frames

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative news downplayed the threat of the virus. Perceived risks of COVID-19 are an important factor in influencing citizens' willingness to comply with risk prevention measures. An online survey (N=269) of U.S. residents was conducted March 30 - April 1, 2020. We found that those who used partisan conservative news sources as their primary source of information about the virus were significantly less likely to view it as a threat, compared to those who cited Far Left, Center Left, and Center Right news sources. Politically conservative Far Right news audiences reported significantly lower estimates of their own COVID-19 risk, as well as that of their age group peers, the average person in the U.S., and the average senior citizen in the U.S.

Is There a Nordic News Media System?: A descriptive comparative analysis of Nordic news audiences

Abstract In media systems theory, the Nordic countries are often held to constitute a specific media system (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In this article, we put this claim to the test in the area of news consumption. Based on findings about the four Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019), and inspired by previous studies of the audience dimension of media systems (Hölig et al., 2016; Peruško et al., 2015; Van Damme et al., 2017), we undertake a descriptive empirical analysis of the 2019 data of this 38-country study. Our study compares news audience practices in the Nordic countries with those of countries belonging to other supranational media systems. We find that while there are some internal differences within the Nordic media system, there are salient news consumption commonalities that are specific to the Nordic countries, such as preferred sources of news, pathways to news, paying for online news, and trust in the news.

Handle with Care: How Exemplars Affect the Perceived Appeal and Informativeness of News Stories

ABSTRACTJournalists often include exemplars in their reporting to produce news that is perceived as appealing and informative. In this paper, we ask the question whether the audience perceives news with ordinary citizens as exemplars as more appealing and informative, as argued by the journalists. Relying on two survey experiments based on samples representative of the adult Danish population, we show that news stories with exemplars are perceived as more appealing, but we also see a tendency toward lower levels of perceived informativeness. In addition, we also document that effects of exemplars depend on the characteristics of the exemplars, and the characteristics of the news audience. In a concluding section, we discuss the implications of our findings for journalism practice and future research.