scholarly journals From Consumer Demand to User Engagement: Comparing the Popularity and Virality of Election Coverage on the Internet

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Jacob Ørmen
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Consumer Demand ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Election Coverage ◽  
News Web Sites

Previous research has identified a strong consumer demand for sensationalized and conflict-oriented news coverage. With the rise of social network services as central spaces for encountering news, there is a need to move beyond the notion of consumer demand (measured by attention to news stories) to a broader conception of user engagement (encompassing attention as well as social interactions online). This article seeks to remedy this by analyzing which parts of election coverage tend to become popular and go viral. It develops a concept of user agendas that include popularity (news stories that receive most clicks on news Web sites) and virality (stories that users share most intensively on social network sites). The article then applies the concepts in a case study of online news coverage during the 2015 Danish parliamentary election. Through an analysis of frames, sentiments, and actors, it is shown that game-strategic and personalized coverage tend to attract large-scale attention on news Web sites, whereas issue-oriented coverage fares better on social network sites. This suggests that what users demand depend on where they encounter news. Users tend to engage with one kind of news in private settings and another in the public settings on the social Internet.

scholarly journals Public Opinion Polls and Experts in Election News

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Guðbjörg Hildur Kolbeins
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Election News ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls

By employing the theoretical framework of framing, the present paper attempts to examine the Icelandic media’s coverage of the 2013 parliamentary election by paying particular attention to coverage of public opinion polls and the policies of the political parties, i.e. the “horse-race” frame and the issue frame, and to examine media’s reliance on experts for interpretation of election news. Seven online news media, two newspapers, two radio stations and two television channels were monitored for 25 days prior to Election Day, i.e. from April 2 to April 26, 2013, - resulting in 1377 election news stories. The findings show, for example, that 29.8% of all the election news stories had public opinion polls as their primary angle while 12% of the stories were primarily issue-oriented. In addition, the media rely on experts for interpretation of the polls; five of the 10 most interviewed or quoted sources on public opinion surveys were political science experts who were affiliated with universities. Finally, news coverage of polls was generally amplified as media outlets had a tendency to report on public opinion polls that were commissioned by other media.

scholarly journals Social Media and the Changing Information Environment

2020 ◽  
Vol 84 (S1) ◽  
pp. 195-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W Kraft ◽  
Yanna Krupnikov ◽  
Kerri Milita ◽  
John Barry Ryan ◽  
Stuart Soroka
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Information Environment ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Positive Direction ◽  
News Stories

Abstract  There is reason to believe that an increasing proportion of the news consumers receive is not from news producers directly but is recirculated through social network sites and email by ordinary citizens. This may produce some fundamental changes in the information environment, but the data to examine this possibility have thus far been relatively limited. In the current paper, we examine the changing information environment by leveraging a body of data on the frequency of (a) views, and recirculations through (b) Twitter, (c) Facebook, and (d) email of New York Times stories. We expect that the distribution of sentiment (positive-negative) in news stories will shift in a positive direction as we move from (a) to (d), based in large part on the literatures on self-presentation and imagined audiences. Our findings support this expectation and have important implications for the information contexts increasingly shaping public opinion.

But her emails! How journalistic preferences shaped election coverage in 2016

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 1052-1069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Searles ◽  
Kevin K Banda
Keyword(s):  
News Coverage ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Unique Case ◽  
News Values ◽  
Horse Race ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Cable Networks ◽  
The Us ◽  
Election Coverage ◽  
Relative Utility

While existing work explains how journalists use news values to select some stories over others, we know little about how stories that meet newsworthiness criteria are prioritized. Once stories are deemed newsworthy, how do journalists calculate their relative utility? Such an ordering of preferences is important as higher ranked stories receive more media attention. To better understand how stories are ordered once they are selected, we propose a model for rational journalistic preferences which describes how journalists rank stories by making cost-benefit analyses. When faced with competing newsworthy stories, such as in an election context, the model can generate expectations regarding news coverage patterns. To illustrate model utility, we draw on a unique case – the US 2016 presidential election – to explain how reporters order newsworthy stories (e.g. scandal and the horse race) by observing changes in the volume. Our content data captures coverage featuring Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on major broadcast and cable networks over 31  weeks. We find that the rational journalistic preference model explains the imbalance of scandal coverage between the two candidates and the dominance of horse race coverage. In 2016, such preferences may have inadvertently contributed to a balance of news stories that favored Trump.

scholarly journals The Impact of Social Network Sites on Students’ Psychological Problems

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (09) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Elda Tartari ◽  
Lindita Lutaj
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
Psychological Problems ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Quantitative Descriptive ◽  
The Impact

Students in recent years spend a considerable amount of time on social networking web-sites. They have made online access and navigation through these sites part of their daily activities. The impact of social network sites in particular has become a major subject of discussion among various studies, because some of them see these pages as a threat or obstacle, while the rest argue that them affects positively the age of adolescence. A quantitative, descriptive and exploratory survey was conducted to identify the impact of this involvement on adolescents’ behaviour that affect their psychological development. The research sample consisted of 893 students, between the ages 10-15 years, users of the social network sites. This champion has been taken from middle school institutions from different cities of Albania. The analysis of the study results confirmed that students are using social network sites for a long time during the day. They have become addicted to them and they already display some behaviour patterns. As a conclusion, the study found that the inclusion in social network sites, if students spend a considerable amount of time on them, has a negative impact in their psychological problems. Parents, teachers and students need to communicate with each other in order to identify and avoid the risks of social network sites and also other studies should be done in this field and suggest different strategies to manage the psychological problems caused by the use of social networking sites.

Enhancing User Engagement with Elected Officials

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Marc Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Network Applications ◽  
Government Web Sites ◽  
The Government

Keenly aware of the growing number of people using social networks to communicate, governments have begun to provide this popular form of communication on their own web sites in an effort to promote engagement among residents and public administrators. Yet despite the growing popularity of social networks on government web sites, it is unclear whether municipalities have begun providing links to social network sites on their homepage that allow users to discuss salient issues directly with elected officials. Furthermore, for cities that do offer this heightened level of engagement, it is unclear if an implementation strategy was followed. This exploratory study examines the factors impacting U.S. local governments to provide social network applications that allow users to communicate directly with elected officials on the government website. The study then explores the benefits and challenges elected officials face when determining the extent of their public communication efforts. Finally, a social network application strategy is developed to assist elected officials when deciding whether or not to use social networks to communicate with the public.

A tracking and summarization system for online Chinese news topics

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (6) ◽  
pp. 687-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsien-Tsung Chang ◽  
Shu-Wei Liu ◽  
Nilamadhab Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Blind Test ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Term Frequency ◽  
News Content ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Web Sites ◽  
Summarization System ◽  
Topic Tracking

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design and implement new tracking and summarization algorithms for Chinese news content. Based on the proposed methods and algorithms, the authors extract the important sentences that are contained in topic stories and list those sentences according to timestamp order to ensure ease of understanding and to visualize multiple news stories on a single screen. Design/methodology/approach – This paper encompasses an investigational approach that implements a new Dynamic Centroid Summarization algorithm in addition to a Term Frequency (TF)-Density algorithm to empirically compute three target parameters, i.e., recall, precision, and F-measure. Findings – The proposed TF-Density algorithm is implemented and compared with the well-known algorithms Term Frequency-Inverse Word Frequency (TF-IWF) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Three test data sets are configured from Chinese news web sites for use during the investigation, and two important findings are obtained that help the authors provide more precision and efficiency when recognizing the important words in the text. First, the authors evaluate three topic tracking algorithms, i.e., TF-Density, TF-IDF, and TF-IWF, with the said target parameters and find that the recall, precision, and F-measure of the proposed TF-Density algorithm is better than those of the TF-IWF and TF-IDF algorithms. In the context of the second finding, the authors implement a blind test approach to obtain the results of topic summarizations and find that the proposed Dynamic Centroid Summarization process can more accurately select topic sentences than the LexRank process. Research limitations/implications – The results show that the tracking and summarization algorithms for news topics can provide more precise and convenient results for users tracking the news. The analysis and implications are limited to Chinese news content from Chinese news web sites such as Apple Library, UDN, and well-known portals like Yahoo and Google. Originality/value – The research provides an empirical analysis of Chinese news content through the proposed TF-Density and Dynamic Centroid Summarization algorithms. It focusses on improving the means of summarizing a set of news stories to appear for browsing on a single screen and carries implications for innovative word measurements in practice.

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