Engaging the Social News User

The Imagined Audience for and Perceived Quality of News Comments: Exploring the Perceptions of Commenters on News Sites and on Facebook

“…However, Rowe (2015b) found that comments on the news site were more likely to be relevant to the topic, be ideologically balanced, offer alternative perspectives, include sources for their arguments, and pose questions for getting more clarity, compared to news comments on its Facebook page. Hille and Bakker (2014) also found that commenters on news sites provided more elaborate comments, but Facebook news commenters provided more personalized comments on news. These mixed results suggest that the platform is not the only factor affecting news commenters' behaviors.…”

“…So far, there have been few studies on the differences between news organizations' websites and their Facebook pages in terms of the quality of news comments. Unlike studies that compare two conditions-for example, commenting spaces with versus without anonymity-on the same news sites (e.g., Santana, 2014), there has been conflicting evidence regarding the quality of news comments across the two platforms (Hille & Bakker, 2014;Rowe, 2015aRowe, , 2015b. Rowe (2015a) compared news comments on political news between the Washington Post site and the Washington Post Facebook page and found that comments on Facebook showed more civility and politeness than the news site.…”

“…Indeed, despite a widespread belief that anonymity has a bad influence on the quality of news comments, some news commenters still prefer anonymous comment sections (Hille & Bakker, 2014). They argue that anonymity helps facilitate free speech among news commenters by reducing the feeling of any threat or the fear of social disapproval or isolation (Cho & Kwon, 2015).…”

Mediatization and the Language of Journalism

“…Inviting user comments, too, either on news websites or on the Facebook fan pages of news media, makes the vernacular more visible, but still maintains the boundaries: a study of user comments about two major Dutch news events in 2013 found no instances of interaction between users and journalists (Hille and Bakker, 2014). Similarly, few journalists involve Twitter users in the co-creation of the news (Hermida, 2013: 300).…”

Journalism Design: The NewsCube, Interactive Technologies and Practice

“…Journalists' use of Twitter in particular, reveals how making personal connections has become a key aspect of reporting and disseminating news, as well as engaging with audiences (Broersma & Graham, 2013;Hille & Bakker, 2014;Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012;Vis, 2013 Twitter has also been exploited during social uprisings and popular protests, revealing a type of storytelling that is co-constructed by journalists, bloggers and activists. Studying information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, Lotan et al (2011) observed that Twitter served both as a common medium for professional journalism and citizen journalism, and as a site of global information flow.…”