76 research outputs found
Diverse politics, diverse news coverage? A longitudinal study of diversity in Dutch political news during two decades of election campaigns
Although diverse political news has been recognized as a requirement for a well-functioning democracy, longitudinal research into this topic is sparse. In this article, we analyse the development of diversity in election coverage in the Netherlands between 1994 and 2012. We distinguish between diversity for party and issue coverage, and look at differences between diversity in newspapers and television news. Results show that news diversity varies over time. Diversity for party types increased over time. We found no clear trend for diversity of issue dimensions. Compared to newspapers, television news is more diverse for party types but less diverse on issue dimensions. The question concerning whether these findings are an indicator of structural bias is discussed
Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on
the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent
along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral
marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds
a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological
theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The
conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news
media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we
explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information
diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been
shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic
measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is
different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social
relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be
more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative
news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive
sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A
complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of
tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train
a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news
information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in
the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the
relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the
findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet
talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on
Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011
Framing immigration and integration: Relationships between press and parliament in the Netherlands
This article examines how the salience and framing of political issues in the press and in parliament influence each other and how this salience and framing is influenced by key events outside the media and parliamentary realms. The case focused on is the debate on immigration and integration in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2004. The empirical analyses are based on a computer-assisted content analysis of both parliamentary documents and newspaper articles. Results show bidirectional causal relationships between media and parliament. In the case of salience only long-term influence relationships are found, while framing influences follow an interesting pattern: an increase in the use of a frame in one arena leads to an increase in the other arena only if this frame has already been used regularly in the latter arena. External events have more considerable and consistent impact on issue salience and framing in both arenas. Copyright © 2007 Sage Publications
Discussions in the comments section: Factors influencing participation and interactivity in online newspapers' reader comments
Posting comments on the news is one of the most popular forms of user participation in online newspapers, and there is great potential for public discourse that is associated with this form of user communication. However, this potential arises only when several users participate in commenting and when their communication becomes interactive. Based on an adaption of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of newsworthiness, we hypothesized that a news article’s news factors affect both participation levels and interactivity in a news item’s comments section. The data from an online content analysis of political news are consistent with the hypotheses. This article explores the ways in which news factors affect participation levels and interactivity, and it discusses the theoretical, normative, and practical implications of those findings
No news from the East? Predicting patterns of coverage of Eastern Europe in selected German newspapers
The aim of the article is to expand the scope of news flow parameters that can be predicted from country characteristics and to propose an enhanced explanatory model for news flow prediction.Based on the theory of newsworthiness, an unconsidered determinant of international news coverage is identified: it is hypothesized that, next to the generalized interest in high‐status and close countries, there is an issue bound interest in some countries that predicts coverage.To test the model, the study investigated the coverage of Eastern European nations in 2006 in German newspapers. Results showed that, beyond mere amount of coverage, permanence of coverage of a country, topical variability, and variability in journalistic presentation (genres) of a country can be predicted from a country’s status and proximity. Additionally, it was shown that issue bound interest is a key determinant of the amount and continuity of coverage a country receives
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