From Newsworthiness to Shareworthiness

Abstract

People increasingly visit online news sites not directly, but by following links on social network sites. Drawing on news value theory and integrating theories about online identities and self-representation, we develop a concept of shareworthiness, with which we seek to understand how the number of shares an article receives on such sites can be predicted. Findings suggest that traditional criteria of newsworthiness indeed play a role in predicting the number of shares, and that further development of a theory of shareworthiness based on the foundations of newsworthiness can offer fruitful insights in news dissemination processes.

What’s in a post? How sentiment and issue salience affect users’ emotional reactions on Facebook

“…In fact, negativity increases users' willingness to engage in online discussions (Weber, 2014;Ziegele, Breiner, & Quiring, 2014). Further, negative online news is more likely to be shared on both Facebook and Twitter (Trilling, Tolochko, & Burscher, 2017). The impact of negative sentiment on user interactions also applies to political communication on Facebook, where negative posts of political candidates and parties may lead to an increase in "Shares" and comments.…”

“…Furthermore, personal relevance seems to trigger online commentary behavior (Ziegele et al, 2014). While some studies find that domestic compared to foreign issues are shared more often (Trilling et al, 2017), others find the effect to be inverse , indicating that the issue or policy field alone may only tell half the story and that its importance to the users themselves may, in fact, be more informative.…”

Hypernarrativity, Storytelling, and the Relativity of Truth: Digital Semiotics of Communication and Interaction

“…Such memes may tell more about circulating representations than about the production of lies, fakes news, or bullshit on social networks, yet the discursive situation is more complex: such representations reveal a lot about the social object gilets jaunes and how narratives may be produced regarding this social movement. It is important to state that the production of meaning has changed in the digital age, and that verifiable texts do not always represent the main source of information, especially when Facebook groups become prominent in terms of knowledge sharing (Pi et al 2013) or when articles are frequently shared without being read, only according to their titles (Trilling et al 2016). According to West, the way people interact on social media is mostly linked to the fact that these media mostly stimulate narrative telling in order to foster interaction, which provides for the increasing use of storytelling formats, thus slowly pushing aside factual information:…”

Journalism on Social Media: Different Profiles of Journalistic Content on the Facebook Pages of Brazilian Newspapers

“…Moreover, it arouses curiosity to catch the readers' attention and generates informational traffic (Hong, 2012). Additionally, there are structural characteristics that stimulate the public to share news on social media (Trilling et al, 2017), like the use of videos and photos, and that can be emphasized by producers to have more access to their websites, which goes beyond the content choice process 2 . As pointed out by Johnson (2015) and Massuchin and Carvalho (2016), SNS have presented new forms and themes even more soft, focused on entertainment and curiosity facts.…”

“…Therefore, we can highlight that there is a balance on this case among entertainment, social and political themes. Despite the aim of calling public attention by the use of entertainment and curiosities, which interferes on the choice of themes to be published on SNSs (García-Perdomo et al, 2017;Trilling et al, 2017;Johnson, 2015), this newspaper do not disconnects from the social and political context to which it is attached. This means two points: a) posts on curiosities are not the only that matters (even though they are 'click catchers'); b) entertainment linked to local/regional appeal also call the audience's attention, so newspapers invest on this kind of content on their Facebook fan pages.…”