News media act as a window to the world. This window is now believed to be shrinking due to developments in digital media such as algorithmic personalization which restricts people to echo chambers in turn affecting citizens’ views on society. It is an example of the moral panics surrounding digital media and obfuscating underlying social dynamics at play. This article seeks to address this issue by looking at news use through the lens of news repertoires. Building on a representative survey of Dutch-speaking Belgian citizens, we identify four archetypical news repertoires (Limited – Panoramic – Traditional – Casual) and investigate how these relate to civic attitudes including civic (dis-) engagement, individualism, and ethnocentrism. In line with previous research, our study shows that age and socio-economic status significantly predict the constellation of one’s news repertoire. Furthermore, variances in news repertoires translate into small but significant differences in views on society, particularly between the media-rich Panoramic and media-poor Limited news repertoires regarding ethnocentrism. Finally, we discuss how in order to appease moral media panics, it is not only necessary to substantiate debates on media power with empirical insights on news use, but also to imagine news audiences in a more nuanced way.

Stephen Reese has been an active communication scholar for four decades (or thereabouts); he is a senior, experienced and influential scholar in the field. He has a deep expertise not just on US jo...

Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-developed, especially given the affordances of digital technologies. We address this gap by connecting theorization on cascades to developments in intermedia agenda-setting. Specifically, we analyze the dynamics surrounding the perceived reluctance by ARD-aktuell, the newsroom of Germany’s public broadcasting consortium, to use its prime-time broadcast “Tagesschau” to report the arrest of a refugee accused of murdering a German woman in December 2016. By presenting finely grained timelines linking content analysis of 5,409 Facebook comments with Tagesschau editorial responses and parallel media coverage of this event, we contribute further conditions under which audience-informed cascades may occur: notably, when publicly funded news organizations are involved, and the issue at stake invokes both domestic and international aspects which sustain disagreement.

This article presents an analysis of how different major news media with different funding models (public service versus private sector media) and different organizational legacies (broadcast versus print) in six different European countries approach the social media platforms that they increasingly rely on for some of their online reach. Based on interviews with senior editors and executives in a strategic sample of 20 news organizations and analysis of their social media activities on Facebook, we find the following: all these organizations have invested significantly in social media, even as they explicitly recognize platforms as ‘frenemies,’ combining characteristics of a friend and an enemy, and they do so in ways that differ in part according to their funding models (public service versus private sector) and legacy roots (broadcast versus print). We argue that publishers’ agency and strategic priorities play a substantial role in determining how individual news organizations adapt to the increasing power of platforms, although structural factors, including power asymmetries and algorithmic incentives, also lead to similarities across otherwise different organizations with different strategies in different countries.

News reports on the Covid-19 pandemic have largely been data-driven, with coverage on infection numbers, deaths, recoveries, tests administered, economic impacts and vaccine trials; data for these stories tend to be disseminated from top-down, by governments and public health organizations, and often viewed as scientific and precise. This article examines critically the “objective” nature of data and discusses the social constructionist nature of data journalism, where data access and presentation may be shaped by power and social relations. This study focuses on Singapore, a global city in Asia that received praise in international media at the start of the pandemic when it was able to keep its infection numbers low while other cities went into lockdown; the turning point came when numerous infection clusters developed in the migrant worker dormitories on the island. Through in-depth interviews with newsworkers, this study maps out the potential extent of state influence on press coverage and journalistic sensibilities during the coronavirus pandemic through the stages of news production – from the news gathering and selection stages, to the newswriting and presentation stage – and offers an assessment of how data “objectivity” may be a powerful tool to shape public opinion in times of crisis.

This article investigates the relationship between digital news coverage of protests and the audience’s willingness to engage with a story about Black Lives Matter on social media. Using a 3x2 experiment, we evaluate if news frames from the protest paradigm literature (riot, confrontation, and legitimizing) and the presence of an accompanying visual would make people more likely to read, like, share and comment on a news story about a street demonstration on social media. We also tested if news portrayal of protests might influence people’s level of support for the movement, which in turn could lead to different types of social media engagement outcomes. Results show that only the presence of visuals has a direct impact on willingness to share a story, with frames having a limited influence on behaviour if compared to other pre-existing attitudes about the police and protesters. However, we also found that the relationship between frames and social media engagement is mediated by a change in these attitudes and increased support for the movement. These findings suggest that engagement outcomes with digital news coverage are contingent on people’s support for the movement portrayed, although legitimizing coverage can influence those attitudes and shape social media behaviour in return.

Over the last decade, top media organizations have restructured their newsrooms and created branded content teams, or studios, devoted entirely to the production of new native advertising formats in order to leverage this business opportunity. The goal of this exploratory study is to analyse how news organizations in Spain implement this strategy and create branded content teams, changing the structure of their newsrooms and shaping the practices and roles of the editors and journalists involved. Semi-structured interviews with professionals (n = 11) who work at news outlets (n = 8) were carried out in order to explain their structural, professional and ethical challenges. The results show that branded content teams can be classified into three organizational models (integrated, autonomous and emerging) and they are usually formed by hybrid professionals, linking commercial, editorial and design practices. The study participants justify the new practice adopting the role of norm entrepreneurs. Despite the warnings and risks, the interviewees asserted that by inserting an appropriate disclaimer in these new formats, credibility and transparency are not endangered. They also believe that sponsored content will become a fundamental pillar for the business models of their news organizations.

In the contemporary media environment, and particularly on social media platforms, people are embedded in multiple, intersecting flows of political information generated by a wide range of curating actors, and two sets of predictions have emerged in the literature to explain these dynamics of political information exposure and engagement. Theory on incidental exposure suggests that it will lead to news engagement, particularly among the least politically interested individuals. Meanwhile, research on news algorithms suggests the reverse temporal ordering and an antecedent role for political interest. The goals of this study are to (a) theoretically integrate these claims into the ‘curated flows’ framework, (b) to test orthogonal predictions about temporal ordering and the role of political interest, and (c) to compare models by testing cross-lagged relationships between incidental exposure and news sharing. Analysing a two-wave online survey of adult internet users in the United States, results show support for both sets of predictions; however, results also show key differences in the role played by political interest. Results are discussed in light of their implications for theory about news exposure and engagement in the contemporary media environment.

Computational journalists who use new technological methods in news production face an uncertain legal and policy landscape. Through data collected from eighteen in-depth interviews with journalists and editors, this article analyzes the legal issues surrounding computational journalism and provides insight into how journalists who use such methods negotiate their autonomy and independence. By utilizing a theoretical framework based in practice theory, this article illustrates how computational journalists perceive their autonomy as both constrained and enabled by legal regulation, organizational policy, and professional journalism norms and values.

Different disciplines have studied the content of online user comments in various contexts, using manual qualitative/quantitative or (semi-)automated approaches. The broad spectrum and disciplinary divides make it difficult to grasp an overview of those aspects which have already been examined, e.g. to identify findings related to one’s own research, recommendable methodological approaches, and under-researched topics. We introduce a systematic literature review concerning content analyses of user comments in a journalistic context. Our review covers 192 papers identified through a systematic search focussing on communication studies and computer science. We find that research predominantly concentrates on the comment sections of Anglo-American newspaper brands and on aspects like hate speech, general incivility, or users’ opinions on specific issues, while disregarding media from other parts of the world, comments in social media, propaganda, and constructive comments. From our results we derive a research agenda that addresses research gaps and also highlights potentials for automating analyses as well as for cooperation across disciplines.