Interactive Potential of News Narratives in Communities Formed Around News Media

Abstract

The paper describes how the narrative features of highly shared news publications allow predicting the strength of their influence on social media communities. The Interactive potential was used as an indicator for measuring the strength of influence of news, which were classified on four levels of inner and external narrative structure. News stories published by popular Ukrainian media were taken as examples to show that the share of publications with inner narrative is low among high-influential articles, and the same holds for the share of publications that are parts of long or short media stories. In contrast, the articles, which could be embedded into the national narrative, and publications with certain issues of media agenda more often have high influence.