This study examined the relationship between two mechanisms of online participation – clicking and commenting – as well as the characteristics of heavily clicked versus highly commented-upon news items. Based on 15,431 items from a popular Israeli website, correlations between clicking and commenting were calculated for 12 separately analysed months from 2006 to 2011. In addition, overlap rates were determined, showing that 40–59% of the heavily clicked items in any given month were different from the highly commented-upon items. A subsequent content analysis indicated that while sensational topics and curiosity-arousing elements were more prominent among the heavily clicked items than among the highly commented-upon items, political/social topics and controversial elements were more prominent among the highly commented-upon items. The study contributes to deepening our understanding of the role of user comments in constructing social/group identity and offers a new perspective on a prolonged controversy surrounding audiences’ news preferences.

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In the context of increasing dissatisfaction with the role of publicfacing social media in democratic life, recent years show a growing number of non-public digital spaces in which people can produce, discuss, and share news. This article focuses on what we term a meso news-space: an online space, located between the private and public realms, where a group of people are involved in news-related processes. This space combines aspects that have long drawn participants to online communities-sociability, a sense of intimacy, and creative expression-with news engagement, an aspect considered important in democratic life. Potentially, meso news-spaces can facilitate greater reciprocitymutual exchanges-between news workers and audience members, thereby promoting shared benefits. In this article, we explicate the concept of a meso news-space by considering its four key dimensions: platforms, topics, actors, and rules/guidelines, and discuss its value for journalism studies and practice.

Uncivil user comments have been found to have a negative effect on how people perceive an issue featured in the news, a news story, or a journalist who reports a news story. To advance this line of research, we draw on expectancy violations theory and the concept of heuristic cues to theorize the toxic atmosphere effect. We theorize that incivility in online comment threads could pose an even larger challenge to news organizations by cuing news audience members to perceive an entire news outlet—not just an individual story—as lacking in credibility. Based on two experiments in the United States (Study 1, n = 520; Study 2, n = 1056), we show that exposure to incivility can lead people to perceive a news outlet as less credible even though the incivility did not directly attack the news outlet. Such effects hold true even when people are exposed to comment threads in which the first several comments are civil. Democratic and business implications are discussed.