News engagement logics : examining practices of media outlets and their audiences on social networking sites

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2020-12-04

Authors

Tenenboim, Ori

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Abstract

In an attempt to build relationships with audience members in the digital media environment, news organizations operate beyond their proprietary platforms. On non-proprietary platforms, such as Facebook, they occupy spaces that are termed here triple-party news-spaces: digital spaces that involve a news publisher, a platform owner, and users. The proposed dissertation seeks to identify and explicate the underlying logics of media production and usage in these spaces. On the production side, it draws on 28 interviews to investigate how 14 news organizations in the United States of America and Israel produce messages for triple-party news-spaces. On the media usage side, it employs a content analysis of 1,600 messages and an analysis of engagement metrics for 157,962 messages to examine to what extent and how news organizations’ messages differ in the modes of engagement they generate: commenting versus sharing versus liking/reacting. By examining media production and usage in triple-party news-spaces, the dissertation develops conceptually and empirically news engagement logics that are employed in these spaces—logics by which news organizations act to evoke audience interaction with their content, and audience members actually interact with it. While audience engagement is generally important for news organizations, it is particularly important on social networking sites where algorithms prioritize posts that generate engagement. In developing news engagement logics, the dissertation uses the theoretical construct of media logics, news value theory and literature on engagement enhancers, and the participatory paradigm in audience research, suggesting that certain content characteristics are associated with each of the examined modes of engagement in more than one country and other content characteristics are associated with particular modes of engagement. The dissertation also suggests that the news organizations under study strive to balance between perceived journalistic imperatives or standards and perceived rules of the social media “game” by combining older and newer logics in selecting content, deciding when to post it, choosing expression style, signaling which content deserves more attention, and determining the organizations’ approach toward user-generated content. Business implications for news organizations and democratic implications for civic life are discussed.

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