Online News Reading Research Articles

News Popularity Prediction in West Sumatera Using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average

The increasing public interest in reading online news is undoubtedly a challenge for news portals as online news providers. Therefore, this research was conducted to predict news popularity in West Sumatra through the FajarSumbar.com news portal using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. This research aims to develop a forecasting model that can assist in estimating the popularity of each news category so that news portals can devise more effective content strategies. The data used in this study includes the number of monthly news impressions from March 2021 to June 2024, which are grouped into various categories such as Religion Culture, Industrial Economics, Criminal Law, etc. Using the ARIMA method, which can handle time series data and overcome data non-stationarity problems through differencing and the use of grid search in optimization to find the best parameters based on the lowest evaluation metric. The results show that the ARIMA model can provide reasonably accurate predictions, although the level of accuracy varies between categories. The Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) values obtained are as follows: Religion Culture 26%, Industrial Economy 29%, Criminal Law 29%, Health 40%, Sports 38%, Tourism Entertainment 26%, Education 27%, Government Politics 31%, Social Environment 27%, and Technology 51%. The Technology and Health news categories show higher error rates than others, while Religion Culture and Tourism Entertainment have better accuracy rates. Thus, the ARIMA model can be used to predict future trends in news popularity, helping editors plan content strategies that are more relevant and interesting to readers. However, improvements are needed for news categories that have high variability.

Accumulation of self-reported restorative effects of natural sounds: A seven-day intervention indoors

This study investigated the restorative effects of repeated listening to natural sounds indoors in real-life settings. Previous studies have mainly been cross-sectional and laboratory studies. We designed an online field experiment lasting seven days, in which we assigned 166 university students to one of four intervention groups: (1) listening to natural sounds, (2) sitting in silence (i.e., another means of restoration), (3) reading news online (i.e., a prevalent but not necessarily restorative activity), or (4) no intervention (i.e., the control). Self-reported restorative experience was measured both before and after the daily intervention (but once a day in the no-intervention group), and the weekly-measured perceived stress and state mindfulness were assessed at the beginning and end of the intervention week. Linear hypothesis tests based on a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) showed that, at the day level, natural sounds were the most restorative, followed by silence, while reading news proved not to be restorative. In addition, the daily restorative effect of natural sounds was carried over to later days and its seven-day accumulation was half as great as the general daily restorative effect, although the within-day pre-post change ostensibly diminished over time. An ANCOVA and paired t-tests revealed that a reduction in the weekly-measured perceived stress and an increase in the weekly-measured mindfulness took place after listening to natural sounds or sitting in silence, with the former intervention type having stronger effects, aligning with the results for the restorative experience. Our findings suggest that the carryover effect of repeated listening to natural sounds for psychological restoration may more than compensate for the diminishing returns in within-day pre-post changes over the course of a week.

Reading Medium and Epistemic Emotions in the Continued Influence Effect of Misinformation

It is well known that misinformation’s effects on memory linger, referred to as the continued influence effect, even after reading corrections. However, it is uncertain how the reading medium and epistemic emotions (relevant to knowledge construction) relate to the continued influence effect. In this study, college students (N = 84) read about fictional news events, each with the first article stating misinformation and the second providing corrected updated information and then indicated their emotions experienced. This was a within-subjects experiment in that two events were read on paper and two on screen to compare effects of reading medium. There were no reliable differences in the continued misinformation effect by reading medium. However, the associations between epistemic emotions and misinformation ratings appeared to be more robust when reading from paper than screens. There were no reliable differences in epistemic emotions experienced by reading medium. The findings indicate that reading news online does not appear to relate to susceptibility of misinformation.

Learning academic vocabulary through reading online news

Abstract Although corpus-driven studies have suggested that non-academic texts such as online news can be a potential resource for learning specialized words and multiword sequences, no intervention studies have been conducted to examine whether learning actually happens from exposure to these texts. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, the present research investigated the potential of online news for incidentally learning academic words and multiword sequences. Fifty-three university students in China were divided into an experimental group (n = 28) or a control group (n = 25). Students in the experimental group read six pieces of online news containing 16 academic words and 26 academic multiword sequences. Students in the control group were not exposed to such online news. This study showed that reading online news resulted in learning gains of both academic single words and multiword sequences. Frequency of occurrence significantly contributed to the learning outcomes of academic words, but not multiword sequences. Learners’ previous vocabulary knowledge did not play a significant role in explaining the learning gains of academic single words nor multiword sequences.

Deliberating Issues or Discharging Feelings? A Closer Look at “Below-the-Line” Reader Comments on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands Dispute

The study addresses a concern over the quality of online news reader comments. Specifically, it examines how online reader comments contribute to deliberation from cognitive and interactive perspectives. The results of content analyzing, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the comments from an online publication The Diplomat suggest that comments were mostly deliberative and serious, and they were more neutrally oriented than degrading in terms of feelings. There was some association between reasonings and feelings but not very strong. The study concludes that comment fields can be a good platform for participatory journalism and enrich deliberation on issues. Keywords: comment fields, reader comments, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute, User Generated Content (UGC), analytic process, social process, public deliberation

Lexico-Syntactic Study of English Usage in Online News Responses and Their Implications for 21st-Century Pedagogy

Online news reading is becoming a part of people’s daily lives, and this medium gives readers the opportunity to comment and share their opinions. It is noteworthy that the comments posted in response to online news articles encompass the entire Nigerian populace of over 250 ethnic groups and more than 400 languages for whom English is a second language. Therefore, this study examined the diverse ways in which Nigerians use English in their comments on online news articles and how these usages affect the teaching and learning of English in the 21st century. A study corpus of about 100 sentences was collected from Opera news responses over a period of three months. Analysis revealed that the use of English in online news responses differs from standard English usage due to users’ habits to code switch and mix, translate directly from their mother tongue to English, give different meanings to existing words, or coin words to represent things that are new to ease their communication. In the attempt, grammar, punctuation, and spelling were either badly used or omitted. This linguistic habit, when transferred by students to their academic work, influences how they are subsequently evaluated. Therefore, there is a critical need for teachers to identify and distinguish between the usages of English that are “incorrect,” “dialectical,” and those that conform to “Standard English” so that students do not mistakenly interchange them.

Positive Unlabeled Fake News Detection via Multi-Modal Masked Transformer Network

Fake news detection has gotten continuous attention during these years with more and more people have been posting and reading news online. To enable fake news detection, existing researchers usually assume labeled posts are provided for two classes (true or false) so that the model can learn a discriminative classifier from the labeled data. However, this supposition may not hold true in reality, as most users may only label a small number of posts in a single category that they are interested in. Furthermore, most existing methods fail to mask the noise or irrelevant context (i.e., regions or words) between different modalities to assist in strengthening the correlations between relevant contexts. To tackle these issues, we present a curriculum-based multi-modal masked transformer network (CMMTN) for positive unlabeled multi-modal fake news detection by jointly modeling the inter-modality and intra-modality relationships of multi-modal information and masking the irrelevant context between modalities. In particular, we adopt BERT and ResNet to obtain better representations for texts and images, separately. Then, the extracted features of images and texts are fed into a multi-modal masked transformer network to fuse the multi-modal content and mask the irrelevant context between modalities by calculating the similarity between inter-modal contexts. Finally, we design a curriculum-based PU learning method to handle the positive and unlabeled data. Massive experiments on three public real datasets prove the effectiveness of the CMMTN.

Discourse integration in positional online news reader comments: Patterns of responsiveness across types of democracy, digital platforms, and perspective camps

Online discourse integration, or the degree to which online user comments are responsive, that is, address or refer to other debate participants, is a normatively valued yet neglected quality dimension of online discussions. This preregistered study features the first cross-country/cross-platform investigation of online discourse integration, using manual and computational content analysis ( N = 9835 and N = 30,753 positional news reader comments). Unexpectedly, about one quarter of the comments was responsive in both majoritarian and consensus-oriented democracies (Australia/United States vs Germany/Switzerland) and on platforms that separate or mix public and private contexts (websites vs Facebook pages of mainstream media), even though other deliberative quality criteria were previously shown to vary by country and platform. Comments that are responsive to fellow commenters in the opposing perspective camp were more likely to contain negative evaluations of those addressed, whereas comments responsive within the same perspective camp were more likely to contain positive evaluations.

Child Maltreatment: Neglect of Child Welfare After Sexual Violence

The treatment of children receives after experiencing sexual abuse incidents often results in acts of child maltreatment from the family, community, and school. This child maltreatment indicates that there has been a neglect of the well-being of children after experiencing sexual abuse incidents. This study aims to explain and analyze cases, treatment, and conditions in a group of girls after experiencing sexual abuse incidents. Because so far there are only a few studies that pay special attention to the condition of children after experiencing sexual abuse incidents. This study is descriptive qualitative. Data collection was carried out through the process of reading online news using the search keyword "Sexual abuse against children in Indonesia" through the Google search engine. This study shows that the child maltreatment that children receive after experiencing sexual abuse incidents appears in the form of expulsion of children from their homes, being dismissed from school, and being forced to marry the perpetrators. This context is clear evidence that the welfare of children after experiencing sexual abuse incidents has been ignored by their social communities. This study also recommends the importance of comparative studies of cases, treatment, and conditions of children after experiencing sexual abuse incidents by interviewing groups of girls and boys who are more empirical.

The Influence of Motives for Media Use, News Selection, and Attractiveness Level of Online Media on Reader Engagement

Efforts to increase online media traffic can be realized by increasing reader engagement. The high frequency and intensity of readers and interactions in reading news online, such as commenting and sharing the article, indicate a high level of reader involvement. The article attempts to show the influence between the motives of using online media, news selection, and news attractiveness on the level of reader involvement. Through distributing questionnaires to 95 students, the study uses a survey method with an explanative quantitative approach. Data are analyzed using multivariate analysis techniques with correlation coefficient test and multiple linear regression. The results show a strong and positive correlation between the motive for media use, news selection, the level of media attractiveness, and the level of reader involvement of 0.659. The multiple linear regression test also proves a significant influence between the three independent variables on the level of reader involvement with an influential contribution of 43.4%.

“Because I have my phone with me all the time”: The role of device access in developing Singapore adolescents’ critical news literacy

AbstractGiven constant online access to information, critical news literacy, or the ability to access and critically evaluate the news, is essential for adolescents to learn about the world and obtain civic knowledge to participate as national and global citizens. Although there has been much research focusing on how youths critically read and produce media, less attention has been paid to the issue of access as an essential element of news literacy. Drawing on survey data (N = 5732) and focus group discussions (N = 67) with Singapore adolescents aged 13–17 years old, this study examines (1) whether adolescents access the news and if so, via what technologies, and (2) the factors that influence their news access. Findings show that adolescents prefer to read news online and that older adolescents (aged 15–17 years old) read more than younger adolescents (aged 13–14 years old). Factors shaping access to news include technological (portability, personalization, curation, and notifications), social (families, peers, and schools as sponsors), and personal factors (active seeking of news vs. incidental news exposure). Policymakers, scholars, and educators should consider the physical, social, and curatorial dimensions of news reading to implement policies and design practices to encourage news access and exposure. Educators can foster adolescents' motivation to read news by engaging them with news of interest to them, creating opportunities for them to receive the news through their smartphones and other devices, and developing their civic knowledge base.

Implication Of Malaysia’s Movement Control Order Towards Online News Reading Preference Among Public University Students

Online news publication had undergone revolutionary changes since the fall of Berlin Wall, 09 November 1989. When Malaysian Government regulated the Movement Control Order (MCO) beginning 18 March 2020 till 03 January 2022 to curb the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of online news reading became much more significant. This phenomena has brought massive implications to media audience, predominantly among university students – of which, utilizing most of the online news material for their academic references. The online news became major reading materials for the university students in deriving latest information, especially on COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this study was conducted to identify its implications, news preferences, and satisfaction levels. This purposive random quantitative study had been conducted by disseminating questionnaires via online, due to the restriction of movements. A total of 400 respondents were involved in this study, and interesting findings had been discovered. The study was purposively focused on random public university students within The Klang Valley, due to the fact that students from these universities had been the nation’s catalyst of change ever since. Conclusively, this paper provides significant insights for media practitioners and consumers in developing pertinent strategies for better maneuvering such challenges in our digital future.

Metaverse And Hajj: The Meaning Of Muslims In Indonesia

This study describes and explains the meaning of Muslims in Indonesia in the discourse of the pilgrimage through the metaverse space. The description in this study will provide a more comprehensive discussion of the discourse of the pilgrimage through metaverse in the meaning of Muslims in Indonesia. This study uses a virtual ethnographic method, which emphasizes data collection through reading online news texts through the Google search engine using the search keyword “Wacana Ibadah Haji melalui Metaverse". The findings in this study show that the discourse of the pilgrimage through metaverse space such as visualization of Hajj symbols and imitation of Hajj practices through virtual reality (VR) methods, such as visualization of the Kaaba and the Grand Mosque. The two forms have significantly influenced the meaning of Muslims in Indonesia in evaluating the discourse of the pilgrimage through the metaverse space. This evaluation was shown by several religious organizations in Indonesia, such as the Indonesian Ulama Council, Nahdlatul Ulama, and Muhammadiyah.

News Recommender System Based on User Log History Using Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction

There are many ways to find information; one of them is reading online news. However, searching for news online becomes more difficult because we should visit multiple platforms to find information. Sometimes, the recommended news doesn't match the user's interests. In many prior works, news recommendations are based on trending. Thus, the recommended news may not necessarily match the user's interests. To overcome this, we built a web-based news recommender system to make it easier for users to find news. We use the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) method in the recommendation process because this method can recommend news based on user preferences by utilizing user history logs. RAKE converts the title and content of the news into vector representation using Count vectorizer and applies the Cosine Similarity function to compare similarities between news. The test results show that the average performance of our proposed system is 90.8%, this accuracy outperforms earlier systems in terms of performance by the purpose of the recommender system, i.e., diversity, novelty, and relevance.

College Students’ Fake News Discernment

The purpose of this study was to investigate variables that may be related to college students’ fake news discernment, inspired by Potter’s cognitive media literacy model (2004). The investigated variables included college students’ ability to discern fact from opinion, critical thinking skills, beliefs in their control over situations or experiences (locus of control), and the degree to which they engage in and enjoy thinking (need for cognition). The study employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods research design.
 The survey quantitatively measured 296 college students’ fact and opinion discernment, critical thinking skills, need for cognition, and locus of control. Critical thinking was a variable positively correlated with the fact and opinion discernment, as well as the need for cognition respectively. The follow-up interview data with 19 college students further explained the survey results and their media literacy practices. They described how they discern fact from opinion and evaluate information when reading news online. They stated that polarized media environments and their prior knowledge made information evaluation difficult when reading news online. The participants also described the importance and motivation of discerning fact and opinion and evaluating information in news reports.
 The study findings inform considerations for media literacy education which strengthens students’ skills regarding fake news discernment. This study suggests future work that further investigates the studied variables, such as developing the fact and opinion discernment instrument with borderline statements and developing a media literacy model in the context of news reading.

The Role of Online News Consumers in Lessening the Extent of Misinformation on Social Media Platforms

This study looks into how people who read news online think about it and helps to reduce the amount of false information spread on social media. The goal of this study was to identify the tactics used by the media when confronted by opposing opinions from their audience in the social media sphere. Social media platforms are essential when people want to debate and get more information on news stories they believe to be false. This study focuses on the importance of a YouTube channel run by a global media outlet that broadcasts a conflicting story. The study used a thematic content qualitative analysis on a sampled comments and used ExportComments.com, a data extraction tool, to extract qualitative data from the YouTube channels. The study revealed that positive comments were followed by positive comments and vice versa. The commenters on these media also frequently search other social media for stories with a similar theme and compare the veracity and coherence of those stories' reported themes. Additionally, these commenters were prepared to defend stories that they believed to be inaccurate and assert that the media should uphold the principle of professionalism. Social media acts as a public sphere. It is not only a political sphere but also a place that is free from private ownership and censorship. The study established that the concept of the public sphere is likely to be abused when the media report conflicting stories that may not auger well with their audience. Although this theory guides the participation of users on the social media platforms, since most are free from the censorship of different players, the media tend to mute the comment sections of their pages for fear of further misinformation and criticism. Social media platforms offer people a reason to speak freely and demonstrate their sentiments openly. The study's results demonstrate that audiences play a significant role in correcting stories on social media, and that constructive journalism is required, with the media needing to play a better role. To cite this article (7th APA style): Ong’ong’a, D. O. (2022). The role of online news consumers in lessening the extent of misinformation on social media platforms? Journal Communication Spectrum: Capturing New Perspectives in Communication 12(2), 96-111. https://doi.org/10.36782/jcs.v12i2.2155

Predicting News Article Popularity with Multi Layer Perceptron Algorithm

Nowadays, news media seems to have been digitized. One of them is printed news which has now turned into online news. The increasing use of social media has made people interested in reading news online. News needs to attract readers with their headlines. Various online news media businesses want to know the future demand of readers, as well as whether the released news can reach more readers so that the news becomes popular. Therefore, with the increasing interest in online news today, this paper will analyze the performance of the Neural Network Algorithm and other artificial intelligence techniques in predicting the popularity of news articles that can help the media to know whether their news will become popular. The news article popularity prediction system can increase its revenue if there are advertisements in the news. The test results show that the accuracy of the Multi Layer Perceptron is 76% and Random Forest gives an accuracy of 70%.

Forms of Using the Internet to Support Student Activities in Online Classroom Learning in Higher Education

One of the adjustments made in the learning process during the Covid-19 pandemic was the use of internet media. With the presence of the internet as a source of information, it is very possible for someone to search for and disseminate all science and technology including writing inventions throughout the world easily, quickly, and cheaply. The purpose of this study was to find out how the use of internet media and the role of internet media on student achievement majoring in Islamic Broadcasting Communication at Imam Bonjol State Islamic University, Padang. This study uses a qualitative research method with a phenomenological approach, data sources are taken through in-depth interviews with thirty informants. All data were analyzed thematically using the Miles and Huberman technique. Mass Communication Theory which is used in this research is Uses and Gratificition Theory. The results of the study found five activities carried out by students on the internet to support lectures: (i) looking for assignment references through journals, (ii) reading online news, (iii) watching Youtube tutorials, (iv) searching Google, Blogs, Web, (v) discuss and learn together like in a WhatsApp group. Furthermore, overall, the informants stated that the use of the internet network could support their learning achievement in higher education.

ONLINE NEWS PATRONAGE AMONG STUDENTS OF UNIVERSITY FOR DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, AND ITS PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVES FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS

There are studies on Students’ Internet use within the framework of online news reading, however, none seems to have effectively explored the practice for teaching. Recognising this gap, this study assessed the online news patronage among students of UDS-Ghana with the aim of galvanizing the practice for pedagogical gains. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 180 students selected randomly from six faculties, followed by an interview of 10 language teachers chosen from the Department of Languages. The quantitative data was interpreted descriptively using percentages, while content analysis was adopted for processing the qualitative data. The findings showed that online news reading was high among students. Out of 180 participants, 127(71%) read online news daily or weekly and Operanews.com, Ghanaweb.com, and Myjoyonline.com were the most preferred sites. Most participants, 49(27%), read news online for entertainment and fashion, while a few read it for language acquisition and other purposes. The teachers interviewed concerning possible exploits of the practice, indicated that they knew of it, however, they could not effectively explore it in classroom teaching. They did, however, acknowledge that the practice could be useful as basics for teaching vocabulary, reading comprehension, and others. In view of the findings, it is recommended that stable Internet is ensured on campuses to enhance students' good use of the practice. Teachers are also urged to explore the practice in language teaching activities and educate students on the benefits of reading online news.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0938/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Advertisement Format and Sexual Content as Heuristic Cues for the Credibility of News Delivered to South Korean Audiences Through Mobile Devices

We tested the heuristic processing of online advertisements embedded in a mobile news site. Based on the bias hypothesis of the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) of information processing, we investigated whether the advertisement format (i.e., banner vs. pop-up) and sexual content serve as heuristic cues. Specifically, we looked for heuristic cues negatively associated with the evaluations of online news readers, including the credibility of the news agency and the news content, their perceived importance of and interest in news stories, and their intention to revisit the news website. The results of online experiments indicated that participants’ perceived credibility of news articles, perceived news importance and interest in news stories were negatively associated with the appearance of online advertisements showing sexually provocative content in the news stories. However, we found no association among the advertisement format, perceived credibility of the news agency and intention to revisit a news website. Our findings suggest that an advertisement featuring sexual appeals in mobile environments can function as a negative heuristic cue.