HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA GATEKEEPING DIFFERENT? A MULTI-PLATFORM COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
Philip M Napoli, David Duquette, Petra Ronald, Peter Andringa, Deborah L. Dwyer
News audiences are increasingly fragmented across different media platforms. Consequently, individual news organizations simultaneously disseminate their content across different media. Each of these media has different user bases, interface characteristics, and distribution systems. Given these substantial differences, the dynamics of the gatekeeping process – and the news values that guide this process – vary across different media technologies/platforms.
As audience attention migrates from older to newer platforms (such as social media), it is increasingly important that we understand how the nature of the news that is disseminated – and thus consumed – may be different from the news disseminated through more traditional means. The ramifications of these differences can be profound if the news disseminated on the newer platforms is, for example, more or less substantive, more or less diverse, or more or less plentiful than the news disseminated on older technologies/platforms.
This study addresses these issues through a comparative gatekeeping analysis of the New York Times. For this study, a month’s worth of New York Times front page, home page, and Facebook page story output are comparatively analyzed across dimensions such as story quantity, story duplication, hard versus soft news, and content diversity. The primary goal is to determine if or how the nature of the news that is prioritized for news consumers differs between the social media context and older contexts such as the print front page and the web home page.
THE RISE AND FALL OF HASHTAG TRENDING TOPICS IN POLITICAL ISSUES. BETWEEN THE LEADING ROLE OF THE MEDIA, FRAMES, CAMPAIGNS AND NEUTRAL TOPICS
Oscar Coromina, Emili Prado, Andreu Casero-Ripollès
Twitter's trending topic is one of its algorithmic mechanisms that provides real-time information on the most discussed topics in a particular geographic area. As well as reporting the most commented facts of the moment, it also directs user attention to these same events and helps to set the public agenda. This article seeks to understand how Trending Topics are formed, their ability to build audiences and also how they are falling into disuse. Our goal is to trace the origin, volume of activity, evolution and life cycle of the Trending Topics linked to political events.
The methodological design is based on the capture and analysis of tweets tagged with the Trending Topics related to a political event - the referendum on the independence of Catalonia held on October 1, 2017 - that was able to generate several Trending Topics on a local, national and global scale. Specifically, our tracking protocol identified 90 different hashtags that enabled extraction of more than 6 million tweets for a period of 20 days. These hashtags were classified into 4 categories according to their main functions: topics, frames, campaigns and media. By analyzing the dynamics of publication and the properties of the captured tweets we have deepened our understanding of how they play a key role in the flow of information on Twitter and also in an increasingly hybrid media ecosystem.
RENAMING AND REFRAMING: EXPLORING THE SHIFT FROM "BLACK PRESS" TO "BLACK MEDIA" IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Miya Williams
The black press has traditionally been categorized as an advocacy press, but the transition from print to digital media has necessitated a reconceptualization of how the nearly 200-year-old medium is defined. Given that the term black press conjures historical conceptualizations of black-owned newspapers and magazines, black media may best describe digital outlets that target a black audience. Since the majority of black press publications also have a digital presence, the term black media broadens and contemporizes understandings of a medium that ultimately seeks to be more inclusive than exclusive.
The redefinition of the black press has both limitations and affordances. Using the word media instead of press inherently lessens the emphasis on traditional journalism practices and simultaneously allows for a greater variety of outlets. The diversity of content allows for more voices to be heard; yet, black audiences can become fragmented. This then calls into question whether the absence of a centralized black voice advances or hinders the interests of the African-American community. Similarly, as legacy print publications no longer monopolize credible content produced for and by African Americans, definitions of legitimacy are now in flux.
This paper puts journalism, digital technology, and race into conversation with each other to provide insight into how black communal discourse in the US endures and evolves. Given that most scholarship only examines the black press historically, I push research forward by evaluating the 21st century black press in order to determine the sustainability of a historic and influential institution in the African-American community.
DISCOURSE ARCHITECTURES OF GERMAN NEWS WEBSITES
Christian Strippel, Sünje Paasch-Colberg
This paper provides a differentiated operationalization of and detailed insights in the technical discourse architectures of 175 German news websites. On the basis of the ranking "Digital Outlets" of the $2 (IVW) we conducted a standardized content analysis to investigate, how the technical discourse architectures are organized and which characteristics are the most popular. The individual components of these technical discourse architectures – such as registration, comment sorting, anonymization, comment evaluation and the reporting of problematic comments – are important instruments to civilize user discussions in comment sections. They are the technically manifested part of the regulations and policies for public user comments on news websites. As current challenges in comment sections like hate speech – as well as the (technical) solutions developed so far – are quite similar in many countries, and we therefore deal with transnational phenomena, we need to have a closer look onto such technical frameworks. This paper addresses this challenge. First results show that the comment sections on German news websites are (still) quite inclusive and that the technical possibilities that could help to better deal with offensive and other problematic comments are not fully used so far.