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Newsworthiness and the Public's Response in Russian Social Media: A Comparison of State and Private News Organizations
[journal article]
Abstract
Social media have become one of the most important news delivery channels due to their interactivity and large audiences. The content published by news organizations on social networking sites is of particular value to sociologists, because it allows measurement of users’ attitude to certain events.... view more
Social media have become one of the most important news delivery channels due to their interactivity and large audiences. The content published by news organizations on social networking sites is of particular value to sociologists, because it allows measurement of users’ attitude to certain events. However, we understand that the media choose which events become news in accordance with certain criteria, such as news values. In this study, we decided to examine how news values determine the public’s response as expressed by likes, reposts, and comments. To analyze the characteristics of different media and their audiences, we selected four popular newsgroups on the social networking site Vkontakte: TASS and Russia Today, representing the state media, alongside RBC and Meduza, representing the private media. The posts of the selected newsgroups were coded and analyzed by means of Harcup and O’Neill taxonomy of values (2016). The study showed that news organizations tend to have preferences for some news values rather than others. Regression analysis revealed positive relationships between 1) the sharing of likes and good and entertaining content, 2) the sharing of comments and the presence of celebrities or conflicts in news, 3) the sharing of reposts and comments and significant events. An unexpected discovery was a negative dependency between the number of comments and the presence of exclusive content.... view less
Keywords
Russia; social media; social network; news; selection; news value; news channel
Classification
Media Contents, Content Analysis
Interactive, electronic Media
Free Keywords
audience; media agenda; news organizations; newsworthiness
Document language
English
Publication Year
2019
Page/Pages
p. 157-166
Journal
Media and Communication, 7 (2019) 3
Issue topic
Public Discussion in Russian Social Media
ISSN
2183-2439
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed