Grasping the digital news user

Author(s):  
Ike Picone
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Matthew Hindman

The Internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits from the attention economy. This book explains how this happened. It sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else—and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them. The book shows how seemingly tiny advantages in attracting users can snowball over time. The Internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences—it has merely shifted who pays and how. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, the book explains why the Internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open Internet. It also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today's online economy. The book shows why, even on the Internet, there is still no such thing as a free audience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Reinald Besalú ◽  
Carles Pont-Sorribes

In the context of the dissemination of fake news and the traditional media outlets’ loss of centrality, the credibility of digital news emerges as a key factor for today’s democracies. The main goal of this paper was to identify the levels of credibility that Spanish citizens assign to political news in the online environment. A national survey (n = 1669) was designed to assess how the news format affected credibility and likelihood of sharing. Four different news formats were assessed, two of them linked to traditional media (digital newspapers and digital television) and two to social media (Facebook and WhatsApp). Four experimental groups assigned a credibility score and a likelihood of sharing score to four different political news items presented in the aforementioned digital formats. The comparison between the mean credibility scores assigned to the same news item presented in different formats showed significant differences among groups, as did the likelihood of sharing the news. News items shown in a traditional media format, especially digital television, were assigned more credibility than news presented in a social media format, and participants were also more likely to share the former, revealing a more cautious attitude towards social media as a source of news.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110271
Author(s):  
Nick Hagar ◽  
Johannes Wachs ◽  
Emőke-Ágnes Horvát

Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the contributors they share. Using connections between outlets, we demonstrate how contributors’ publishing trajectories tend to align with outlet political leanings. We also show how polarized clustering of outlets translates to differences in the topics of news covered and the style and tone of articles published. In addition, we demonstrate how contributors who cross partisan divides tend to focus on less explicitly political topics. This work addresses an important gap in the media polarization literature, by highlighting how structural factors on the production side of news media create an ecosystem shaped by political leanings, independent of the priorities of any one person or organization.


Author(s):  
Pedro Lázaro-Rodríguez

A study of digital news on public libraries is presented through media mapping and a thematic and consumption analysis based on Facebook interactions. A total of 7,629 digital news items published in 2019 have been considered. The media mapping includes the evolution of the volume of news publications, the most prominent media outlets and journalists, and the sections in which most news items are published. For the thematic and consumption analysis, the top 250 news items with the highest number of Facebook interactions are considered, defining 15 thematic categories. The most published topics include: new libraries and spaces, collections, and libraries from a historical perspective. The topics that generate the most interactions are the value of libraries (social, human, and cultural capital), libraries from other countries, and new libraries and spaces. The value and originality of the current study lie in the measurement of the consumption of news and digital media through Facebook interactions. The methods used and results obtained also provide new knowledge for the disciplines of Communication and Media Studies by developing the idea of media mapping for its application to other topics and media in future work, as well as for Librarianship, particularly the information obtained on public libraries. Resumen Se presenta un estudio de noticias digitales sobre bibliotecas públicas en España mediante un mapeo de medios y un análisis temático y de consumo basado en las interacciones en Facebook. Se han considerado 7.629 noticias publicadas en 2019. El mapeo de medios incluye la evolución del volumen de la publicación de noticias, los medios y periodistas más prominentes, y las secciones en las que más se publica. Para el análisis temático y de consumo se consideran las 250 noticias con mayores interacciones en Facebook definiendo 15 categorías temáticas. Los temas sobre los que más se publica son: nuevas bibliotecas y espacios, la colección y las bibliotecas desde la perspectiva de su historia. Los que más interacciones y consumo generan son: el valor de las bibliotecas (capital social, humano y cultural), bibliotecas de otros países y las nuevas bibliotecas y espacios. El valor y la originalidad del estudio consisten en considerar las interacciones en Facebook como medida del consumo de noticias y medios digitales. Los métodos y resultados alcanzados aportan además nuevo conocimiento para dos disciplinas: la comunicación y los medios de comunicación, por el desarrollo de la idea del mapeo de medios que puede aplicarse a otros temas y medios en futuros trabajos; y para la biblioteconomía y la documentación, por la información alcanzada sobre las bibliotecas públicas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anette Novak

User participation in the journalistic context has theoretically been possible since the emergence of the Internet. The few interface formats which have been developed to link newsrooms and citizens have, however, not followed the same explosive development as other parts of the media landscape. One reason often referred to by the scientific community is the defensive newsroom culture. This essay presents an alternative interpretation and argues that bridging the gap between interaction design research, media and communications research, and practitioners within digital news media, could shed new light on the stalled process of newsroom co-creation with users.


JOMEC Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Gabriel Moreno Esparza ◽  
Rosa Angélica Martínez Téllez

This article argues that explorations of interactive spaces afforded by digital news media provide a dynamic platform to visualize the prospects for the political participation of diasporas in their countries of origin and residence. In this case, a breakdown of the frequency of comments across a variety of news sections about Mexico and the U.S. in Univision.com uncovered a lively range of interactions between news forum participants, signalling simultaneous interest in on-going events and processes in the two countries. The dual national orientations highlighted by these findings ‘touch base’ with the body of literature about media and migration, which has in recent times recognised the interconnectedness of immigrants-sending and receiving societies, whilst offering a more refined conceptualization of the concept of simultaneity in regard to diasporic public spheres.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Posada

Abstract In 2007, Captain America, or Cap to his peers, died outside the courthouse where he would answer for leading a band of superheroes against the government’s Superhuman Registration Act in a plot line Fox and Friends took issue with, condemning Marvel Comics for killing Cap “while we’re at war,” referring to President George W. Bush’s war on terror. In 2008, former sidekick Bucky took up the Cap banner. Legacy characters are common in comics, but fans noted an unexpected addition to the costume: a handgun. Cap’s shield, a symbol of defense, now had an offensive accent. News media outlets lauded the new gun as a “sign of the times,” as Rolling Stone said, considering it a critique on the post-9/11 cultural landscape, but fan communities felt uneasy about the decision. The gun’s presence on Bucky Cap’s belt marks a continuous period of exceptionality, the kind Giorgio Agamben warns against in State of Exception. When Bucky’s predecessor would return to the role of Captain America, the sidearm would no longer remain, but the character would confront issues related to guns, and media and fans would once again respond. Even though Cap only encounters guns a few times during the 2010s, reception to these moments is more significant than that of characters who regularly use lethal weapons. Fetishistic emphasis on Captain America’s gun exposes the state of exception inherent in all superhero media, prompting a digital discourse across professional and amateur platforms on gun-related subjects. This project analyzes how superhero media portray gun use and the subsequent reception from both news media and digital fandom. A sampling of comics, television series, and films are textually analyzed, along with digital news media and online fan forums pertaining to those examples.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
pp. 11328
Author(s):  
Alfonso Vara-Miguel ◽  
Cristina Sánchez-Blanco ◽  
Charo Sádaba Sádaba Chalezquer ◽  
Samuel Negredo

Digital news publishers strive to balance revenue streams in their business models: as standard advertising declines, alternatives for sustaining digital journalism arise in the forms of sponsored content, user donations and payments—one-off purchases, subscriptions or memberships, public or private grants, electronic commerce, events and consulting. An exhaustive study found 2874 active online news publications in Spain, and it observed the adoption of such models in early 2021. Advertising remains the most popular source of income for digital news operations (85.8%) and most sites rely on just one or two revenue streams (74.5%). We compare the cases in our census by their origin (digital-native or non-native), geography (local/regional or national/global) and topic scope (generalist or specialized). We find that traditional, national and specialized online media have a broader and more innovative revenue mix than digital-native, regional or local and general-interest news outlets. The comprehensiveness of this pioneering study sheds light for the first time on the risk that the lack of diversification and innovation in funding sources may imperil the financial sustainability of some online news operations in Spain, mostly those with a smaller scope and no backing from a traditional business, according to the results we present here.


Tripodos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Carlos Lopezosa ◽  
Lluís Codina ◽  
Mario Pérez-Montoro

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the visibility, and of other SEO indicators, of the culture sections of Spain’s leading digital newspapers —specifically, elmundo.es, elpais. com, lavanguardia.com, abc.es, el­confidencial.com and 20minutos.es— based on data collected by the media analytics company, comScore, and the web traffic metric, Alexa Rank. The analysis employs a set of positioning in­dicators: namely, a visibility index, keywords, social signals, keyword profiles, URLs, SERP-Snippets, reference domains and best anchor texts, as made availa­ble by SISTRIX, an SEO analytics audit toolbox. Thus, we were able to deter­mine which of the digital newspapers’ culture sections has the best visibility. Likewise, we were able to identify which of these media are best positioned on Google, presumably as a result of more effective positioning strategies. We con­clude with a discussion of our results and, on the basis of these findings, re­commend ways in which the visibility of journalistic information can be optimi­sed in search engines.   SEO i cibermitjans: visibilitat de la informació cultural dels principals diaris d’Espanya Aquest article realitza una anàlisi com­parativa de visibilitat i altres indicadors SEO de la secció de cultura dels principals cibermitjans espanyols: elmundo.es, elpais.com, lavanguardia.com, abc. es, elconfidencial.com i 20minutos. es. Les anàlisis s’han dut a terme amb la utilització d’un conjunt d’indicadors de posicionament (visibilitat, paraules clau, senyals socials, paraules clau, url, snippets, dominis de referència i mi­llors textos àncora) utilitzant l’eina de auditoria i anàlisi de posicionament en cercadors, SISTRIX. Ens preguntem quin d’aquests mitjans té millor una secció de notícies culturals amb millor visibilitat. L’estudi dut a terme amb els indicadors seleccionats permet, d’aquesta manera, presentar una anàlisi comparativa del periodisme cultural i identificar quins d’aquests mitjans presenten millors posicions a Google, presumiblement, com a resultat d’estratègies de posicio­nament. Finalitzem amb una discussió dels resultats juntament amb unes re­comanacions finals per optimitzar la vi­sibilitat de la informació periodística en els cercadors.


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