Discussing the News

The Role of Journalism on YouTube: Audience Engagement with ‘Superbug’ Reporting

“…Audience engagement, demonstrated via shares, likes and comments online, has become a buzzword in the media industry. The economic strain coupled with an uncertain digital media landscape has turned media's focus on audience behaviour and preferences to inform business models for online news (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016;Ksiazek, Peer, & Zivic, 2015;Mersey, Malthouse, & Calder, 2010;Powers, 2015). Editors track figures on a story-by-story basis to try to determine what particular elements of journalistic practices, including story selection, content design, writing style and timing of the publication generate greater or less engagement in terms of views.…”

“…Indeed, further to comments used to inform business models in the media industry, online comments platforms have the potential to serve as spaces where audiences/users express attitudes not only towards the specifics of the journalistic content in question, but broader social and political issues, thereby constituting a public sphere which facilitates the expression of opinion and deliberation of important issues (Ben-David & Soffer, 2018;Ksiazek, Peer & Zivic, 2015;McDermott, 2018;Santana, 2015).…”

Taking Stock of the Toolkit

“…The simple principle behind a dictionary-approach makes it easy to measure a variety of concepts. Within journalism studies, the approach has, for instance, successfully been applied to capture metaphors from news articles (Krennmayr 2014) or hostility in news comments (Ksiazek, Peer, and Zivic 2014). One of the most common research interests to which it is applied, is sentiment analysis.…”

“…From the previous sections it has become clear that automated approaches have much to offer scholars studying journalistic content and, indeed, the approaches are commonly applied in a number of academic fields. Oddly enough, as yet, relatively few studies within the field of journalism studies make use of them (but see, for instance, Gü nther and Scharkow 2014; Kleinnijenhuis et al 2013;Krennmayr 2014;Ksiazek, Peer, and Zivic 2014;Sjøvaag and Stavelin 2012). Particularly inductive and more complex approaches appear to be hardly applied by journalism scholars (a notable exception being Flaounas et al 2013).…”

Review of Journalism and Memorialization in The Age of Social Media, by Peter Joseph Gloviczki

“…Increasingly, though, researchers appreciate that social media should not be inherently viewed as hostile or not per se, but rather the particular content of the media may impact how users relate to it (e.g., Ksiazek, Peer, & Zivic, 2015). While Gloviczki's work deserves credit for appearing to also emphasize the role and importance of content, there may be some disagreement over what is conceptualized and viewed to be "content" that is affecting individual postings.…”