Shares, Pins, and Tweets

Abstract

This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the topics emphasized by newspaper editors and social media users. While users of social media platforms favor opinion pieces, along with national, local, and world news, in sharp contrast the decision of news editors emphasized sports and the economy, but also entertainment and celebrity news. Common to social networking sites is the prevalence of items about arts, technology, and opinion pieces. Niche social networks like StumbleUpon and Delicious presented a greater volume of articles about science and technology, while Pinterest is mostly dedicated to fashion, arts, lifestyle, and entertainment. Twitter is the only social network to have presented a statistically significant correlation with the distribution of news items per section by The Guardian and The New York Times. The results of this study provide a bridge between journalism and audience research and present evidence of the differences between readership in social and legacy media.

Who Shares and Comments on News?: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation

“…According to more recent studies, hard news stories tend to attract more attention than soft news ones in social media. A recent content analysis of the stories published in The Guardian's and The New York Times' social media pages showed that users engaged more with hard news stories than soft news even though the editors of these newspapers prioritized soft news content in social media (Bastos, 2015). Another study suggests that apart from receiving more comments in general, hard news also attracts more uncivil comments than soft news stories (apart from sports) (Coe, Kenski, & Rains, 2014).…”

Web Third-Person Effect Hypothesis: Do likes and Shares Affect Users’ Perceptions?

“…The fact that they are engineered to attract human emotions such as curiosity, hopes and fears as well as the optimization for social media facilitate the creation of content that drives engagement (Moses, 2014). In the same vein, feedback to article may depend on the appeal of the article (Bastos, 2014). A recent study by psychologists found that misleading headlines have a significant effect on readers' memory for news articles as well as their inferential reasoning (Ecker et al, 2014).…”

“…In another relevant study, informativeness was the strongest motivation regarding news sharing intention in social media, followed by socializing and status seeking (Lee, Ma, & Goh, 2011). Finally, social media users tend to favor hard news (opinion pieces, national and world news) over soft and general news (Bastos, 2014). To sum up, the new features provided by social media have the potential to change the nature of news sharing.…”

“…Gratifications of information (seeking) and status seeking were also proven strong motivating factors. In this context, feedback to articles may depend on the appeal of the article rather than the topic per se (Bastos, 2014). Studying the news processes related to the use of Facebook, Bro and Wallberg (2014) revealed that two factors were particularly important in understanding the news stories that audiences receive: actors and actions.…”

Re-dissemination of news and public debate on social networks

“…Most of the previous studies have used quantitative methodologies and have focused on analyzing the type of news shared, as well as the social network used (Bastos, 2015). According to these studies, Facebook is more widely used to share material relating to entertainment, while Twitter is more closely linked to current affairs or hard news (Newman, 2011), and the users sharing material on Twitter are older than those sharing on Facebook (Newman;Levy, 2014).…”