Picture: human eye photo by Vanessa Bumbeers, license Unsplash

Eye tracking study of news interaction on Facebook

The new article by Adrian Vergara, Ignacio Siles, Ana Claudia Castro, and Alonso Chaves, all of Universidad de Costa Rica, explores how Facebook users consume news incidentally through their news feed. The study analyzed the eye movements of 41 social media users, 62% women and 38% men. Participants were university students from different majors. Facebook … Continued


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ARTICLE: Gatekeeping news after publication

Gatekeeping processes online are changing constantly and being affected by so-called secondary gatekeepers. The new article by Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, presents a conceptual framework on the topic. It examines how news items gain attention in the circulation phase: what gatekeeping processes take place after publication. These processes can be observed, … Continued


Picture: untitled by Priscilla Du Breez, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: “News-finds-me” perception is linked to social media use and political knowledge across countries

Social media has become the most important news source for many, and its use for finding news has increased tremendously over the past years. The “news finds me” perception (NFM) refers to the idea some have, that due to the vast amount of information available online and in social media, they don’t have to actively … Continued


Deepfakes do not fool people, but still undermine trust in news

So-called deepfake videos do not deceive the audience, but they increase uncertainty and thus decrease trust in news. The result is reported by Loughborough University researchers Cristian Vaccari and Andrew Chadwick. They conducted an online experiment with a statistically representative sample of the British population (N = 2 005). The participants were first asked about … Continued



ARTICLE: Youth’s digital literacy and civic engagement go together – but only for those who pay attention to news

How do different digital literacy skills and news readership interact in the context of civic engagement? Soo Jung Moon, of Unversity of West Georgia, and Sang Y. Bai, of National Youth Policy Institute, tackled this complex question through a large-scale survey (N = 2 584) of South Korean youths. Moon and Bai asked the respondents … Continued


ARTICLE: Newsrooms still don’t use Twitter’s potential to the fullest

How did different television networks use Twitter in covering the 2016 Orlando mass shooting? Lourdes Cárdenas, of San Francisco State University, with Celeste González de Bustamante and Jessica Retis, both of the University of Arizona, approached the question through a qualitative content analysis. The Orlando attack had targeted a gay night club on a “Latin … Continued


ARTICLE: Running into news by chance might be a bad thing

Encountering news by chance on social media, i.e. “incidental news consumption”, can be detrimental to audiences’ news habits, Chang Sup Park, of State University of New York at Albany, and Barbara K. Kaye, of University of Tennessee, write. They conducted a two-wave panel study on South Koreans, with 1 008 participants completing both surveys. Park … Continued


ARTICLE: Most media inform better than mobile news apps

Citizens gain more political knowledge from almost any other news media than mobile news applications, a study on Danes discovered. Jakob Ohme, of University of Amsterdam, conducted a large-scale survey during the 2015 Danish election campaign. Over 9 000 people participated in the study, but only 1 108 completed both pre- and post-election surveys and … Continued


ARTICLE: Newsrooms neglect WhatsApp’s interactive potential

Few German newsrooms use the messaging application WhatsApp and even fewer use it for interaction with their audience. Karin Boczek and Lars Koppers, both of Technical University Dortmund, investigated newsrooms’ WhatsApp use in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The 17 million inhabitants of North Rhine-Westphalia are served by 78 newsrooms. Only 39 of them … Continued