Push notifications and their strategic framing, an understudied subject, were examined by Jeremy Saks from Old Dominion University and Ashley Hopkins from California State University, Long Beach. They looked at 3,459 push notifications from 11 major news organizations using data from Project Push. Differences between the organizations were the topic of study.
Technology continuously reshapes journalism, with one recent innovation being native news applications for smartphones and tablets, which also have the additional feature of push notifications, targeted messages to the users. While timing (Wheatley & Ferrer-Conill, 2021), framing (Knauf et al., 2025), and frequency (Newman, 2025) of these notifications have all been studied, their strategical construction has not.
The research questions here were: RQ1: How do news organizations differ in their framing approaches to push notifications across topics, urgency, news type, locality, calls to action, clickbait language, and length? RQ2: What patterns emerge in how specific topics are framed across different variables such as urgency, clickbait language, and calls to action?
A quantitative content analysis was conducted on notifications from 66 different apps from 15 accounts, ABC News (USA, not Australia), Associated Press, BBC, CBS, CNN, Daily Mail, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The Telegraph, USA Today, and The Washington Post. A total of 34,619 were collected from these 11, and the authors randomly selected 10%, meaning a total of 3,459 notifications for analysis.
There were a total of 14 topics: politics, crime and public safety, health and science, business and economy, sports, entertainment and culture, technology, foreign affairs, human interest, weather, religion, accidents and disasters, advertisements, and other. The urgency in tone was rated high or low, and the types included breaking news, non-breaking news, commentary/opinion, advertisement, analysis, soft news / human interest, and other. Further, the locality was split into local, national, international, and other.
Notifications varied in how often the organizations sent them. The Telegraph sent the most (634) while The Washington Post sen the least (119), with the mean number being 314,45. Politics (28,7%), foreign affairs (14,5%), and crime/public safety (11,6%) were the most frequent topics. Advertisement was only mentioned in but one article and weather in just 20 (0,6%).
The coding also revealed that most did not include a call to action, and the division between clickbaits and not clickbaits was fairly evenly distributed. The mean length of a push was 98,37 characters. There were significant differences in the topics that each organization. Most focused on breaking news, but The Telegraph had a wider focus, and The New York Times had the most analysis pushes. It was also the only that focused on local news, most focused on national and international ones.
Other findings were that clickbaits were shorter than non clickbaits (92,3 vs 104,27), and high urgency pushes were longer, but there was no significant difference between those calling for action, and those who did not.
The results demonstrated that news organizations use markedly different strategies across multiple dimensions, with The Telegraph standing out the most, using short notifications (65,11) and many of them. BBC and Associated Press used a more traditional approach. The New York Times was varied in its approach. The Daily Mail heavily relied on clickbait.
Clickbaiting was used more on topics that were not urgent – the organizations used clickbait language to create interest with intrigue and emotion. The study managed to extend framing theory to frame building in micro-framing environments. Here it revealed compensatory frame building strategies. There were also tensions between episodic and thematic framing affordances.
However, the study focused on frame building not its effects – further studies could use a different focus. Nevertheless, it was comprehensive in scale and breadth, with a large dataset and multiple dimensions.
The article “Pushing and Pulling: How News Organizations Frame Push Notifications to Capture Audience Attention” by Jeremy Saks and Ashley Hopkins is in Electronic News. (Free abstract, but Pdf available).
Picture: person holding phone by Jamie Street.
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