The Role of Journalism on YouTube: Audience Engagement with ‘Superbug’ Reporting

Abstract

Journalism has gradually become ‘normalized into social media’, and most journalists use social media platforms to publish their work (Bruns, 2018). YouTube is an influential social media platform, reaching over a billion users worldwide. Its extensive reach attracts professional and amateur video producers who turn to YouTube to inform, entertain and engage global publics. Focusing on YouTube, this study explores the place for journalism within this media ecology. This study uses a mixed-method approach to examine forms of audience engagement to YouTube videos about antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or so called “superbugs”, caused by overuse and misuse of antibiotics. The analysis focuses on the most viewed YouTube videos about AMR between 2016 and 2018, and compares engagement themes expressed in comments to journalistic videos with popular science videos. The most viewed videos about AMR on YouTube are professionally produced educational popular science videos. The qualitative analysis of 3,049 comments identifies seven main forms of high-level engagement, including expressions of emotions, blame and calls for action. This study shows that journalism plays an important role on YouTube by generating audience discussions about social and political accountability. Our findings demonstrate that journalism videos were associated with propositions for political, economic and social/lifestyle actions, while popular science videos were associated with medicines, scientific or pseudo-scientific, and medical practice changes.

Making sense of “superbugs” on YouTube: A storytelling approach

“…The second implication relates to future efforts to produce engaging communications about AMR. The two approaches identified in this study have evidently been successful in engaging audiences, at least with “low-level” engagement such as views ( Djerf-Pierre et al, 2019 ). Both the fictionalized and personalized ways of telling stories about complex AMR issues clearly attract many viewers on YouTube.…”

“…This distancing of viewers risks obscuring the issue as a generalized, global threat that should be a concern for all humans. A closer look at the user comments about this type of videos shows that the personalized storytelling approach indeed has potential for generating both empathy and solidarity, but also risks creating fear and hopelessness or even inciting religious and ethnic resentment, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories ( Djerf-Pierre et al, 2019 ). To be sure, not all engagement in social media is “good” from a civic or democratic point of view.…”

“…The producers clearly aim for a broad, predominantly young, and reasonably educated audience by employing storytelling techniques familiar to video games and popular movies. This fictionalization of the AMR issue—connecting antibiotic resistance to fast-paced action games, superhero movies, and funny cartoons—does, however, have the unintended consequence of diverting the interest from the AMR issue to the fictionalized elements (cartoon figures, popular culture references) in the video per se ( Djerf-Pierre et al, 2019 ). When health communicators turn to YouTube to get a targeted health message across, fictionalized storytelling may stir interest and engagement among younger audiences, but still fail to make reasonable sense of a global crisis.…”

“… Basch et al’s (2018) quantitative content analysis of videos about Clostridium difficile focuses on information quality. Djerf-Pierre et al’s (2019) study of forms of audience engagement to YouTube videos about AMR identified seven main forms of high-level engagement, including expressions of emotions, blame, and calls for action. This study shows that journalism plays an important role on YouTube by generating audience discussions about social and political accountability.…”

“…Humans use stories to communicate and make sense of the world around them, but stories also tell us something about the social conditions and relations of the society that produces them. The AMR issue rests heavily on science and expert medical knowledge, and we are specifically interested in how this complex issue is made sense of in and through the stories presented in videos on YouTube ( Davis et al, 2018 ; Djerf-Pierre et al, 2019 ; cf. Moscovici, 2000 ).…”