News sharing across different social media platforms is increasingly impacting on our news habits, write Bente Kalsnes, of Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, and Anders Olof Larsson, of Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology. They study what types of news stories are shared the most on Facebook and Twitter. The study is based on a qualitative content analysis and comparing data from four Norwegian media outlets.

The results show that most shared stories on Twitter are characterized by “hard” news and the stories shared on Facebook are better categorized as “soft” news. Overall, Facebook emerges as the dominating platform for news sharing. The results also reveal that emotional stories and provocative comment articles received high levels of sharing.

The article “Understanding News Sharing Across Social Media: Detailing distribution on Facebook and Twitter” was published online by Journalism Studies. The study is available here.

Picture: IMG_4488 by Ted Sakshaug, licence: CC BY 2.0

 
Edited on 6.4.2017: Bente Kalsnes’ affiliation was corrected.