How Message Features and Social Endorsements Affect the Longevity of News Sharing
This study examined how message features and social endorsements affect the longevity of audience news sharingby analyzing behavioral data of social retransmission of New York Timeshealth news articles, and associated article content and context data.The results showed that information utility-related message features increased the duration for which articlespromptedemail-based sharing, whereas emotional positivity and controversiality increased the longevity of social media-based sharing. Expressed emotional evocativeness and the absence of death-related words lengthened the duration for which articles prompted both email- and social media-based sharing. Newsretransmission, viaeither email or social media, was more likely to persist when the articles stayed on the "most-emailed" list for a longer time, showingsocial endorsement-driven cumulative advantage effects. The results further revealed synergistic interaction effects between social endorsements and message features. While social endorsements produced strong cumulative-advantage effects on the longevity of news sharing, articles with certain message features that are diagnostic of their inherent share-worthiness generated even stronger effects than those articles that appeared on the "most-emailed" list for the same amount of time but without such features. These features were expressed emotional evocativeness (email-based sharing), the absence of death-related words and exemplification (social media-based sharing).
Safeguarding the Journalistic DNA: Attitudes towards the Role of Professional Values in Algorithmic News Recommender Designs
In contrast to the extensive debate on the influence of algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) on individual news diets, the interaction between such systems and journalistic norms and missions remain under-studied. The change in the relationship between journalists and the audience caused by the transition to personalized news delivery has profound consequences for the understanding of what journalism should be. To investigate how media practitioners perceive the impact of ANRs on their professional norms and media organizations' missions, and how these norms and missions can be integrated into ANR design, this article looks at two quality newspapers from the Netherlands and Switzerland. Using an interview-based approach conducted with practitioners in different departments (e.g. journalists, data scientists, and product managers), it explores how ANRs interact with organization-centred and audience-centred journalistic values. The paper's findings indicate a varying degree of prominence for specific values between individual practitioners in the context of their perception of ANRs. At the same time, the paper also reveals that some organization-centred (e.g. transparency) and most audience-centred (e.g. usability) values are viewed as prerequisites for successful ANR design by practitioners with different professional backgrounds.
"Saving Journalism from Facebook's Death Grip"? The Implications of Content-Recommendation Platforms on Publishers and Their Audiences
Previous research on the platformization of news has mostly been devoted to considering the effects of social media on the news industry. The current study focuses on Taboola and Outbrain, two leading content recommendation platforms. The companies form "partnerships" with news organizations, through which they take over a designated space on news websites and curate news, sponsored content, and advertisements, creating a blend that-the companies claim-maximizes monetization. We argue that the unique business model and distribution mechanism of these companies has a distinct effect on news sites, their audiences, and ultimately the journalism profession. An empirical analysis of 97,499 recommended content items, scraped from nine Israeli news sites, suggests that the spaces created by these partnerships blur the distinction between editorial and monetization logics. In addition, we find the creation of indirect network effects: while large media groups benefit from the circulation of sponsored content across their websites, smaller publishers pay Taboola and Outbrain as advertisers to drive traffic to their websites. Thus, even though these companies discursively position themselves as "gallants of the open web"-freeing publishers from the grip of walled-garden platforms-they de facto expose the news industry to the influence of the platform economy.