Seeing news in a foreign language can stoke racial resentment

The language of news articles can increase racial resentment or -depending on the person- feelings of belonging. The findings come from two online experiments with White Americans (n=620) and supposed Hispanics living in the United States (n=362). In both experiments the participants were shown a total of nine news articles, dealing with politics, sports and … Continued

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Published: 19 Feb 2020

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

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Published: 18 Feb 2020

ARTICLE: Country images are shaped by news sources, not by content

Reading negative or positive news of a particular country alone does not affect the reader’s image of that country. The surprising result was discovered by Chen Yang, of Robert Morris University, and Gi Woong Yun, of University of Nevada. The authors conducted an online experiment with 172 American university students. The participants were directed to … Continued

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Published: 11 Feb 2020

ARTICLE: Journalists still prefer traditional audience metrics

American journalists still find page views and social sharing to be the most useful audience metrics. Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Rodrigo Zamith and Avery E. Holton surveyed 520 American newspaper, magazine and online journalists. The authors represent the universities of Minnesota, Massachusetts Amherst, and Utah, respectively. Aside from the journalists’ metric preference, the authors wanted to investigate … Continued

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Published: 5 Feb 2020

ARTICLE: Online experiments can indicate audience preferences like field research does

Does an experimental setting affect news audiences’ behaviour? The question is a relevant concern to researchers who consider sending participants to a mock news website as part of their methodology: if the knowledge of taking part in a study affects the participants’ behaviour, the method is not externally valid. University of Texas at Austin researchers … Continued

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Published: 4 Feb 2020

ARTICLE: Fact-checkers cannot transcend partisan divides

Americans’ views of fact-checking sites are highly politicized, Michigan State University researchers Craig T. Robertson, Rachel R. Mourão and Esther Thorson write. They surveyed a representative sample of 1 033 Americans over their views on and use of fact-checking sites. People who self-identified as liberals or who consumed liberal or mainstream news were more favourable … Continued

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Published: 14 Jan 2020

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

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Published: 9 Jan 2020

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

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Published: 20 Dec 2019

ARTICLE: Accusations of lying prompt self-reflection in German media

German news media has been recently met with an renewed flurry of Lügenpresse accusations. The term Lügenpresse, or “lying press”, dates back to the First World War, but is best known for its use by the German Nazi party. In recent years, the term’s use has resurged. Michael Koliska, of Georgetown University, and Karin Assmann, … Continued

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Published: 18 Dec 2019

ARTICLE: Civic participation affected more by age than news repertoire

Younger Israelis seem more eager for civic participation than their older peers, regardless of what news they consume. Sagit Dinnar, of the Open University of Israel, and Hillel Nossek, of Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee, studied the matter through so-called Q-sort methodology. It involved asking 36 Israelis to sort various news sources … Continued

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Published: 11 Dec 2019