Website Redesign

Redesign is a necessary part of having a news website. The process can be lengthy and costly and there's always some risk involved – will the audience engage with and like the redesigned look? The Center for Media Engagement wanted to test whether online experiments could help news organizations learn more about what their audience wants when going through a redesign.The results show that an online experiment can pick up on many of the same signals as a full deployment of a site redesign. To the extent that these findings continue to replicate, doing an online experiment would provide news organizations with a relatively inexpensive way to test out redesigns before embarking on a full launch

We Should Not Get Rid of Incivility Online

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Incivility and toxicity have become concepts du jour in research about social media. The clear normative implication in much of this research is that incivility is bad and should be eliminated. Extensive research—including some that we’ve authored—has been dedicated to finding ways to reduce or eliminate incivility from online discussion spaces. In our work as part of the Civic Signals Initiative, we’ve been thinking carefully about what metrics should be adopted by social media platforms eager to create better spaces for their users. When we tell people about this project, removing incivility from the platforms frequently comes up as a suggested metric. In thinking about incivility, however, we’ve become less convinced that it is desirable, or even possible, for social media platforms to remove all uncivil content. In this short essay, we discuss research on incivility, our rationale for a more complicated normative stance regarding incivility, and what other orientations may be more useful. We conclude with a post mortem arguing that we should not abandon research on incivility altogether, but we should recognize the limitations of a concept that is difficult to universalize

Selective exposure to partisan information

In contrast to early studies of voting behavior, where selective exposure was proposed as an explanation for limited media effects, this dissertation contends that selective exposure is a cause of potentially significant media effects. This study documents the extent of exposure to politically congenial outlets and identifies some of its key causes and consequences. Data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey are used to examine the contours of partisan media use, supplemented by an experiment investigating whether the media environment\u27s structure influences partisan selective exposure. The results offer strong evidence that people choose political media in accordance with their political predispositions, and that political interest and knowledge are prerequisites for selective exposure. Media offerings appear to matter: findings suggest that when people have more media options from which to choose, their long-term exposure decisions are more apt to be biased toward congenial media. Overtime survey analyses suggest that salient political media events may encourage selective exposure. Turning to the consequences, analyses provide support for the view that partisan selective exposure contributes to political participation, limited evidence that it leads people to settle on their vote choice earlier in the campaign, and strong evidence that it leads to higher levels of political polarization. Partisan media use also appears to contribute to differentiated patterns of agenda setting, such that audience members adopt different issue priorities depending on their news exposure. Limited evidence supports the idea that partisan media use primes the use of different issues in judging the president\u27s performance. Results are discussed in light of two contrasting views of partisan media use in writings on communication and democracy. On one hand, partisan selective exposure inspires citizen participation and facilitates a partisan schema for making sense of the political world. On the other hand, it polarizes opinions and fragments the public. This dissertation proposes that, to the extent that the partisan media use is counterbalanced by forces that unite people into a public, it can serve a democratically beneficial role. The explosion of partisan outlets today and the decline of news outlets garnering diverse national audiences, however, warrant critical attention

Selective exposure to partisan information

In contrast to early studies of voting behavior, where selective exposure was proposed as an explanation for limited media effects, this dissertation contends that selective exposure is a cause of potentially significant media effects. This study documents the extent of exposure to politically congenial outlets and identifies some of its key causes and consequences. Data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey are used to examine the contours of partisan media use, supplemented by an experiment investigating whether the media environment\u27s structure influences partisan selective exposure. The results offer strong evidence that people choose political media in accordance with their political predispositions, and that political interest and knowledge are prerequisites for selective exposure. Media offerings appear to matter: findings suggest that when people have more media options from which to choose, their long-term exposure decisions are more apt to be biased toward congenial media. Overtime survey analyses suggest that salient political media events may encourage selective exposure. Turning to the consequences, analyses provide support for the view that partisan selective exposure contributes to political participation, limited evidence that it leads people to settle on their vote choice earlier in the campaign, and strong evidence that it leads to higher levels of political polarization. Partisan media use also appears to contribute to differentiated patterns of agenda setting, such that audience members adopt different issue priorities depending on their news exposure. Limited evidence supports the idea that partisan media use primes the use of different issues in judging the president\u27s performance. Results are discussed in light of two contrasting views of partisan media use in writings on communication and democracy. On one hand, partisan selective exposure inspires citizen participation and facilitates a partisan schema for making sense of the political world. On the other hand, it polarizes opinions and fragments the public. This dissertation proposes that, to the extent that the partisan media use is counterbalanced by forces that unite people into a public, it can serve a democratically beneficial role. The explosion of partisan outlets today and the decline of news outlets garnering diverse national audiences, however, warrant critical attention

Public Perceptions of Who Counts as a Scientist for Controversial Science

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics scientist labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists

Interactive Features in Online News

The Center for Media Engagement examined a representative sample of 155 newspaper and television news websites in the United States to understand how they were using social media buttons, comment sections, online polls, lists of hyperlinks, and mobile versions

Engaging Audiences via Online News Sites

As the Internet becomes an increasingly prominent medium for news gathering among members of the public, questions arise about whether the Internet can invigorate local constituencies. Hints of opportunity are apparent. The 2012 Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the Media report describes a rise in digital revenues for local newsrooms that may inspire more online innovation. And even while lamenting the state of local reporting, the 2011 FCC report brings several creative, local online projects to light (pp. 80-82). Chapters in this book by Chris Wells and Matt Hindman also illustrate ways of engaging citizens digitally. Wells categorizes organizations’ efforts at encouraging involvement. Several of the approaches Wells mentions are being used by online newsrooms, such as encouraging site visitors to share articles via Facebook, to participate in online surveys, and to discuss site content in comment sections. Hindman describes personalization algorithms that provide visitors with recommended links based on their browsing behavior. These individualized recommendations can increase the amount of time visitors spend on a site even more than flagging the most popular Web pages. Local news outlets also are making use of different strategies for recommending content. By helping site visitors locate content of interest, tailored links could increase time spent with local news. All of these examples signal the potential for engaging citizens online

Like, Recommend, or Respect? Altering Political Behavior in News Comment Sections

Drawing from the stereotype content model, we examine how people respond to likeminded and counter-attitudinal political comments appearing after a news article. We experimentally test how citizens behave when they are able to click on one of three different buttons posted next to others’ comments—“Like,” “Recommend,” or “Respect.” In the experiment, political attitudes predicted button clicking, but the button label affected the strength of the relationship. In some instances, people clicked on fewer buttons associated with likeminded comments and more buttons associated with counter-attitudinal comments when the button was labeled with “Respect” as opposed to “Like” or “Recommend.” The pattern of results for the “Recommend” button differed across two issues. The results suggest that political comments can trigger stereotypical reactions. Although the “Like” button is well known, news organizations interested in promoting less partisan behaviors should consider using a “Respect” button rather than the “Like” or “Recommend” button in comment sections

What Social Media Could Be: Normative Frameworks for Evaluating Digital Public Spaces

Increasing attention has been placed to the societal downsides of social media, and appropriately so. Less attention has been paid to the qualities to which social media should aspire. We contend that this is critically important. Not only must social media, and social media scholars, identify and reduce negative outcomes, but we must also critically engage with what is desirable. The purpose of this theoretical essay is to propose a normative framework for digital public spaces. We lay out four categories, and 14 sub-categories, of normative ideals to which social media could aspire. It is our hope that chronicling these qualities will allow scholars to more critically reflect on their normative assumptions when they research social media and will encourage practitioners to think about how social media could be built with these ideals in mind