News 2.0

Оглавление

Ahmed Al-Rawi. News 2.0

Table of Contents

List of Tables

List of Illustrations

Guide

Pages

News 2.0. Journalists, Audiences, and News on Social Media

About the Author

Preface

1 News 2.0 and New Technologies

References

2 Social Networking Sites and News. Introduction

News Values and Social Media News

Researching News on Facebook and Twitter

Facebook News Analysis

Twitter News Analysis

Conclusion

References

Note

3 Fake News Discourses on SNS vs. MSM. Introduction

Fake News on Social Media

Networked Gatekeeping

References

Note

4 Social Media News Audiences. Introduction

Selective Exposure on Social Media

Radio News Analysis

TV News Analysis

References

Note

5 Viral News on Social Media. Introduction

What Is Viral Content?

Emotions and Virality

Viral News and Newsworthiness

YouTube and Twitter News Analysis

Facebook News Analysis

References

Note

6 Celebrity Journalists 2.0 and Branding. Introduction

Celebrity Journalists

Journalists and Social Media Use

References

Note

7 Who Is Breaking News on Social Media? Introduction

What Is Breaking News?

Metajournalistic Discourses and Breaking News

References

8 Mobile News Apps as Ethnic Mediascapes. Introduction

Theoretical Framework

Mobile News Apps as Cultural Sites

Non‐English Mobile News Apps

Conclusion

References

Notes

Index. a

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Ahmed Al‐Rawi

The book focuses on three main areas, with emphasis on non‐Western media outlets: content (news), audiences or “prosumers” (networked audiences), and producers (news organizations and journalists). Prosumers are not only consumers of news but also producers of data (posts and comments) and metadata (clicks) who exhibit their engagement with news organizations and their news productions in different ways. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the meaning of News 2.0 and the advent of new technologies that are shaping the way news is produced and packaged, while Chapter 8 discusses mobile news: the future of news consumption.

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The other problematic issue with News 2.0 is that some indicators of popularity may be deceiving because of the use of bots, troll armies, and paid users. In addition, relying on one indicator may not always be a good option when studying News 2.0. For example, the public Facebook pages of news organizations show their number of likes or followers. This can be an important indicator of the popularity of some pages or outlets, but it does not necessarily reflect real engagement with news. To provide a clearer picture, I used Netvizz, a social media mining tool, in mid‐2017 to extract data from 26 Facebook pages belonging to different Arabic and English news media outlets. In total, I retrieved the metadata of 157 844 Facebook posts made between January 20, 2010 and April 13, 2017, which generated 326 257 464 reactions. The digital tool has a 10 000‐news‐stories limitation, and it is not clear whether all or most of the stories were retrieved, so there is a clear research limitation here. Regarding the more than 300 million Facebook reactions, they refer to the total number of likes and emotional reactions (wow, anger, haha, awe, and sad) but do not include the number of comments and shares. A whopping 91 out of 100 of the top posts belonged to Fox News (Table 1.1), despite the fact that its Facebook page has far fewer likes than CNN and the BBC. These top 100 posts got 31 893 875 reactions, which is a useful reminder that researchers have to analyze several indictors before judging the popularity of, and audience engagement with, news organizations and their content.

In this book, I examine News 2.0 on different platforms, approaching the phenomenon from different angles using a variety of digital methods and computational journalism approaches. From the side of content and its producers, I mostly use news values theory to examine differences and similarities in news coverage, providing important insight into the nature of global and regional news flow. There are several studies that examine the comments sections of news sites using, for example, content analysis (Abdul‐Mageed 2008; McCluskey and Hmielowski 2012), but there are few empirical studies that have investigated the content of news stories posted on news organizations' SNS channels, especially from a cross‐national comparative perspective. Sonia Livingstone outlines the challenges of this type of research, but also highlights its many benefits, including “improving understanding of one's own country; improving understanding of other countries; testing a theory across diverse settings; examining transnational processes across different contexts … etc.” (2003, p. 479). This book purposefully uses many non‐English and non‐Western case studies. For decades, many scholars have been calling for a de‐Westernization of journalism, media, and communication research (Park and Curran 2000). Waisbord and Mellado define de‐Westernization as follows: “It is grounded in the belief that the study of communication has been long dominated by ideas imported from the West …. Underlying this position is the argument that ‘Western’ theories and arguments are inadequate to understand local and regional communication processes and phenomena” (2014, p. 362). The main premise behind the de‐Westernization trend is not a wholesale rejection of Western theories or media studies, but rather the “enrichment” of the available theories and methods (Wang 2010, p. 3). According to Shelton Gunaratne, de‐Westernization should refer to “the addition of multiple approaches to investigate problems in their proper context, so that factors such as culture, environment, ideology and power are not omitted from the theoretical framework or held to be constant (ceteris paribus)” (2010, p. 474). This is an issue on which Wasserman and de Beer principally agree, calling for in‐depth theoretical research rather than the mere provision of “descriptive comparative studies of journalism” (2009, pp. 428–429). One of the main problems of mainstream, Western media studies is its limited, Eurocentric and Anglo‐American coverage. For example, in their review of previous research done on news sharing, Kümpel, Karnowski, and Keyling surveyed a total of 461 research papers published between 2004 and 2014, and found that there was an obvious focus on studies that dealt with the United States (about 79%), with “only a few that addressed other countries and almost none that discussed possible cultural differences or actually made cross‐country comparisons” (2015, p. 10). Kümpel et al. recommend expanding news sharing studies “to multiple countries and cultural settings” (2015, p. 10). This suggestion was echoed by Wilkinson and Thelwall, who recommended examining “international differences in news interests through large‐scale investigations of Twitter” (2012, p. 1634). Hanitzsch, among others, has noticed obvious Western bias in the selection of academic research topics, which “giv[es] scholars from the Global North a considerable advantage” (2019, p. 214). Instead of relying on social media data in the English language alone, this book attempts to fill a major gap in the literature by examining data in the Arabic language as posted by a variety of news organizations, allowing a closer examination of international news.

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