Newsworthiness and the Public’s Response in Russian Social Media: A Comparison of State and Private News Organizations

Abstract

Social media have become one of the most important news delivery channels due to their interactivity and large audiences. The content published by news organizations on social networking sites is of particular value to sociologists, because it allows measurement of users’ attitude to certain events. However, we understand that the media choose which events become news in accordance with certain criteria, such as news values. In this study, we decided to examine how news values determine the public’s response as expressed by likes, reposts, and comments. To analyze the characteristics of different media and their audiences, we selected four popular newsgroups on the social networking site Vkontakte: TASS and Russia Today, representing the state media, alongside RBC and Meduza, representing the private media. The posts of the selected newsgroups were coded and analyzed by means of Harcup and O’Neill taxonomy of values (2016). The study showed that news organizations tend to have preferences for some news values rather than others. Regression analysis revealed positive relationships between 1) the sharing of likes and good and entertaining content, 2) the sharing of comments and the presence of celebrities or conflicts in news, 3) the sharing of reposts and comments and significant events. An unexpected discovery was a negative dependency between the number of comments and the presence of exclusive content.

Insta(nt)famous? Visual self-presentation and the use of masculine and feminine issues by female politicians on Instagram

“…Yet, it is important to understand that these different components of engagement have different affordances and can serve different functions (e.g., Ferrer-Conill et al, 2021;Savolainen et al, 2020). Also empirically, it has been shown that the number of, for instance, shares, likes, and comments of political content is not influenced in the same way by the same predictors (e.g., Judina & Platonov, 2019;Larsson, 2018;Trilling et al, 2017). In the particular, liking political content has often been criticised as a means of engagement that takes so little effort that it hardly qualifies as a 'real' political action, as opposed to, for instance, writing a comment, which can require quite some cognitive resources and can lead to a meaningful exchange of opinions (see, e.g., Larsson, 2018).…”

Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis

“…Use-case studies: While these news values are particularly defined for news stories from media channels, they also apply to social media news stories shared across platforms such as Facebook (Bednarek, 2016 ). Some other works consequently apply news value theory to news articles shared on Facebook (Park and Kaye, 2021 ), Twitter (Araujo and van der Meer, 2020 ) and the Russian social media site Vkontakte (Judina and Platonov, 2019 ). Park and Kaye ( 2021 ) studied the correlation between news values of social significance and deviance with social media users' tendency to like, comment and share mainstream news stories on Facebook.…”

“Why attacking the Bureau of Industry and Commerce?”: news value flow to news comments on Chinese social media

“…As Caple and Bednarek (2015) suggest, semantic analysis may help understand the “overlap or mismatch” between news values promoted by news organizations and what the audience perceive as worth reading and responding to. Judina and Platonov’s (2019) investigation on users’ behaviour of likes, reposts and comments shows that a detailed classification of news values such as the DNVA model “seems reasonable” to determine readers’ response (p. 164). Venuti and Fruttaldo’s (2019) corpus analysis of news values constructed in news articles and Facebook users’ responses shows that readers react more to the event than to the news story.…”