ARTICLE: Clicks really affect what news get promoted

If an online news article produces good metrics, such as clicks, journalists will consider it more newsworthy. University of Antwerp researchers Kenza Lamot and Peter Van Aelst confirmed the effect through an experiment with 136 Dutch political journalists. In their experiment, Lamot and Van Aelst asked participants to rank five news headlines according to how … Continued

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Published: 8 Nov 2019
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ARTICLE: Online journalism rarely meets all audience expectations

When it comes to sourcing practices, online journalism often fails its audience’s expectations, a study from Finland suggests. Ville Manninen, of University of Jyväskylä, compared the expectations of young adult Finns to real-life sourcing practices in Finnish online journalism. An analysis of 36 news items from 3 newsrooms and 12 journalists revealed that, on average, … Continued

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Published: 12 Jun 2019
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ARTICLE: Swedish teenagers feel confident about identifying credible news, but often fail at it

Many teenagers fail to identify the credibility of false or biased news online, a new research article finds. Using an online survey with a test, Thomas Nygren and Mona Guath of Uppsala University seeked to find out how teenagers in Sweden determine the credibility of digital news. They investigated people’s civic online reasoning, meaning “the … Continued

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Published: 22 Feb 2019
Picture: What’s going on here by John Schnobrich, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: How advertising tech firms see fake news, and how this affects the business of journalism

Different online marketing platforms and programmatic advertising has made it possible to profit from producing fake news. On the other hand, also legitimate news organizations use this infrastructure and the same tools for their livelihood. Joshua A. Braun and Jessica L. Eklund, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wanted to find out how the programmatic … Continued

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Published: 1 Feb 2019
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ARTICLE: Mobile apps have become increasingly important for news personalisation

Newsrooms are changing with personalisation of news. “Whether personalisation reinforces the relationship between users and news outlets in the long run is open to debate”, a new study discusses. Jessica Kunert of the University of Hamburg and Neil Thurman of LMU Munich, did a content analysis of 15 major news outlets in the UK, United … Continued

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Published: 24 Jan 2019
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ARTICLE: Online news sharing is an act of relational communication

Online news sharing behaviors are a type of communication used for forming relationships and managing impressions, new research states. Jennifer Ihm, of Kwangwoon University, and Eun-mee Kim, of Seoul National University, studied online news sharing on mobile instant messengers (MIM) and social networking sites (SNS). Researchers did a survey for 400 Korean people who had … Continued

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Published: 16 May 2018
The transformation challenge for the media industry – interview with Lucy Küng

VIDEO: The transformation challenge for the media industry

Lucy Küng, Google Digital News Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute, talked to us about her new research report. She gave a keynote talk at the Median ja viestinnän tutkimuksen päivät conference, in Jyväskylä, Finland, April 2018. For “Going Digital. A Roadmap for Organisational Transformation”, Küng studied several news organizations including The Washington Post, … Continued

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Published: 15 May 2018
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ARTICLE: Communicative aims, perceived privacy and norms determine how people share news in private social media groups

How do people share and talk about news in private social media groups? ask Joëlle Swart and Marcel Broersma, of the University of Groningen, and Chris Peters, of Aalborg University Copenhagen (authors not in original order). In their new study, researchers looked at the role of news by studying six focus groups consisting of people … Continued

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Published: 9 May 2018
Picture: Polar bear by Andy Brunner, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Framing of climate change news has only limited effects to selective exposure

Framing of the stories plays only a limited role in driving exposure to climate change news, a new study finds. Lauren Feldman of Rutgers University and P. Sol Hart of the University of Michigan, conducted two news browsing experiments, testing six different climate change frames. The experiments were done with national samples of adults in … Continued

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Published: 3 May 2018
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ARTICLE: Folk theories help to explain how “news avoiders” get information

Growing numbers of people access information in other ways than by reading newspapers or accessing a news organization’s website. There’s been a shift towards so-called ‘distributed discovery’, where people find information via a range of digital intermediaries and platforms. Benjamin Toff of the University of Minnesota, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the University of Oxford, … Continued

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Published: 24 Apr 2018