Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SNSNEWS (The new flow of news : how social network sites transform news organization and citizens political behavior)
Teaser
Politically informed citizens are considered pillars of the democratic regime. Yet, traditional news consumption has steadily declined as of late. Thus, knowledge gaps between citizens have arisen, endangering informed democratic processes and participation. To accommodate the...
Summary
Politically informed citizens are considered pillars of the democratic regime. Yet, traditional news consumption has steadily declined as of late. Thus, knowledge gaps between citizens have arisen, endangering informed democratic processes and participation. To accommodate the changed landscape, news organization and news production are undergoing profound changes. This proposal points to the emergence of such a fundamental shift in news distribution according to which professional news organizations are partnered with digital social network sites (SNSs) as sources of political information. Consequently, news transforms into a social product and audience members are now its distributors, blurring the distinction between consumers and producers. As a result, news flow is changing since SNSs are not governed by standards of professional journalism, but rather by the strength of social ties. Thus, the current prevailing \'logic\' is a horizontal ‘network’ one, replacing the vertical logic that described news flow from news organizations to audiences. By implication, this transformation is bound to have a significant social impact on having an informed citizenship and on citizens\' political behavior. Consumers receive different blends of information, governed by unprofessional curators – their SNSs ‘friends’. The quality, and more importantly heterogeneity of this information, eventually impact their political behavior and beliefs. While these developments are in their early stages, SNSs are rapidly gaining dominance, radically changing news consumption. Therefore, it is imperative to capture this phenomenon at the outset and to explore its evolution via longitudinal research. This will enable us to point to future trajectories of news production and consumption. More so, by radically changing scholarly conceptualization of media consumption and production, a more precise understanding of media influence on citizenship can be achieved. Thus, this proposal outlines a model of news distribution and consumption, which takes into account the proliferation of SNSs with respect to the following important issues: (1) What are the effects of the SNS proliferation on news production, and especially on the quality and diversity of the information presented? (2) What characterizes SNS audiences? (3) What longitudinal effects will the distribution and consumption of news via SNSs have on citizens\' political knowledge, behavior and beliefs?
Work performed
So far, we have collected various types of data concerning users engagement with news on social media. These data included behavioral data, experiments, interviews and social media traces. Together this allowed us to start deciphering the delicate relationship developed between media organizations and audiences, via social media.
Thus far our results suggests that:
1) News organization adopted social media as a tool to reach audiences. As such they are bound to social media rules. Trying to promote their content organically (without paying) they have to adjust news content to fit social media algorithms and audience preferences. This means that content that being posted is ‘soft news’, emotional, short, designed as an immediate attention-grabber. Financially, aligning with social media generate less and less profit over-time, leading news organizations to see social media (mainly Facebook) as the ‘enemy; Generally these findings might be considered as normatively disruptive . When high proportions of citizens receive news via social media and the quality of the information is declining, we are furthering away from the ideal informed citizen. Likewise, when news organizations are unable to develop a new sustainable business model, their independence is at risk.
2) Young audiences express two strong contradictory motivations: on the one hand, users want to rely on other users’ social traces (likes, comments, shares) to reduce their own personal effort in seeking news content; but on the other hand, they refuse to leave such social traces themselves, because they wish to avoid overt opinion expression publicly. This was attributed to the fear of heated discussions and abuse. Additionally, many users avoided associating themselves publicly with news content, because they wanted to avoid “sending a message†about their beliefs.
Final results
The project offers a conceptual framework for studying changes in the production and dissemination of news media as they emerge, as well as their immediate and putative long-term impact. The progress beyond the state of the art is of the following:
1. The proposed methodology includes sophisticated data collection techniques, some of which have not been applied previously in media studies. For these reasons this project can to contribute to research into both political behavior and media audiences. Crucially, by introducing into the field of media research new methods, which have the potential to offset some of its disturbing limitations in the position to influence the future methodological direction of audience research.
2. Identify the long term effects of changes in news consumption in terms of political behavior: this includes changes in consumption of news per-se, as well as tracking down the upshot of these changes in terms of political participation and attitude change. While research thus far testified as to the link between users’ news feed and their behavior researcher were unable to testify as to the development of these relations, and identify causes and effects. This project aims at doing exactly that.