The News Sharing Gap

Divergence in Online Political News Publication and Dissemination Patterns across Elections and Countries

Bibliographic Data

ID22010946
AuthorsErnesto De León (0000-0003-3152-0722, University of Bern, corresponding author), Susan Vermeer (0000-0002-9829-8057, University of Amsterdam)
Year2023
Volume11
Issue2
Pages343-362
Publication date2023-02-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDigital Journalism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2167-0811 • E-ISSN: 2167-082X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/21670811.2022.2099920
OpenAlexW4295763062
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited48

Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine periods and (b) across eight countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Analyzing 265,714 articles shared over 12 million times on Facebook, findings show that elections are broadly linked to increases in political news publication, but even larger increases in political news sharing. The study reveals how, overall, political news is shared more often than news publication patterns would suggest, proposing higher political interest by Facebook users than previously thought. In most cases, political news sharing far outpaces political news production in the form of a “negative” news sharing gap, with the relative demand for political news (in the form of news sharing) being higher than the supply. Lastly, building upon previous work, we propose and validate a distant supervised machine learning method for multilingual, large-scale identification of political news across distinct languages, contexts and time periods

Conceptualization · Information sharing · News media · News values · Political communication · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Computer Science · Law · Media Influence and Politics · Media Studies and Communication · Social Media and Politics