R K Nielsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 17413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R K Nielsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | R K |
| FAMILY NAME | Nielsen |
| SIGNATURE | NIELSEN R K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3376-4918 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 929 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Inequalities in Offline and Online News Media Environments Across Six Countries: The Role of Social Class and Interest in News
In this article, we present a comparative analysis of inequalities in online and offline news media systems across a strategic sample of six countries. Using survey data from 10 annual Digital News Report surveys (2015–2024), we compare inequalities in news use in traditional offline and online news media environments over time among internet users. Our results show that: (1) across all countries in our sample, the online news environment is more…
Do News Media Want to Disentangle from Platforms
The link between changing news use and trust: Longitudinal analysis of 46 countries
Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends i…
How perceiving oneself as an altruistic person can motivate one to spread misinformation on social media
Social media offers a mix of factual, contested, controversial, and misleading information on medicine and health-related issues. This study focuses on people who shared information that contradicted official information during the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark and uses the Meaning Maintenance Model to analyze how this made sense to them according to their self-perceived altruistic identity, and further how negative responses from people in their ne…
Ritual Reinforcement: Habit, Emotion, and Identity as Attributes of Trust in News
Theory and research about trust in news typically draws on normative understandings of news as a conduit for information transmission in the service of the media’s role as the Fourth Estate in democratic systems. These approaches rely on a narrow top-down view of trust, and of how and why people use news in their daily lives. In this study, we offer a complementary audience-centric view of trust in news, which foregrounds three attributes beyond …
Exposure to Partisan News and Its Impact on Social Polarization and Vote Choice: Evidence From the 2022 Brazilian Elections
Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened social divisiveness. This article investigat…
Trust is key: Determinants of false beliefs about climate change in eight countries
Science has established the human-caused nature of climate change, yet the prevalence of climate-related misinformation persists, undermining public understanding and impeding collective action. Strikingly, existing research on belief in misinformation about climate change has disproportionately focused on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. To move beyond this, our online survey (N = 8541) includes high-inc…
News participation is declining: Evidence from 46 countries between 2015 and 2022
Digital media are often praised for having offered new ways to participate with news. But how has participation with news changed in recent years? A pre-registered analysis of survey data from 2015 to 2022 in 46 countries ( N = 577,859) shows that participation with news has declined. This decrease is observed in most countries and for most forms of participation, including liking, sharing, commenting on news on social media and talking about the…
News Can Help! The Impact of News Media and Digital Platforms on Awareness of and Belief in Misinformation
Does the news media exacerbate or reduce misinformation problems? Although some news media deliberately try to counter misinformation, it has been suggested that they might also inadvertently, and sometimes purposefully, amplify it. We conducted a two-wave panel survey in Brazil, India, and the UK ( N = 4732) to investigate the effect of news and digital platform use on awareness of and belief in COVID-19 misinformation over time (January to Febr…
Examining Assumptions Around How News Avoidance Gets Defined: The Importance of Overall News Consumption, Intention, and Structural Inequalities
News avoidance research has been hampered by confusion about how to define and operationalize the concept. Here we intervene in two ongoing debates: first, what is the relationship between selective news avoidance—that is, when people say they sometimes or often avoid news—and overall rates of news consumption? Second, how well do terms intended to distinguish between types of news avoidance based on underlying motivations, such as “intentional” …
Comparing the platformization of news media systems: A cross-country analysis
Platformization has been used to describe how platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp and TikTok have become increasingly important for how people communicate and access information, including news. But to what extent have news media systems in different countries become platformized? Using online survey data from 46 countries, we show that: (a) although over 90% of internet users use at least one social platform, there are large co…
Fair and Balanced: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News
Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-of-view, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 132 individuals in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, conducted in early 2021. Our results show while the idea of imparti…
“Inextricably intertwined”?: Publishers Dealing with Platforms
This chapter analyzes how publishers across France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States have adapted to the rise of platforms and how they handle their relationship with these players. It examines the direct and indirect impact platforms have on publishers, as well as publishers’ different strategies, tactical responses, and practical relations with platform companies. It identifies the shared underlying key concerns among publishe…
“Our futures are tied together”: Platforms Dealing with Publishers
This chapter examines how the two most important platforms for news, Google and Facebook, approach news as part of their wider activities and the ways they handle their relationship with publishers. It documents how platform companies leverage their success with ordinary users to incentivize publishers to make content available via their platforms and examines their direct dealings with publishers, including the different kinds of incentives thes…
The Rise of Platforms
This chapter focuses on how the rise of platforms is changing our media environment, where publishers still control the production of news content, but platform companies increasingly control the channels through which people access it. It identifies the new, distinct, generative, and relational forms of power that platforms, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, exercise and examines how news publishers have responded. It argues that previous…
“An epochal debate over the value of content”: Tracing Google’s Relations with Publishers
This chapter charts the history of the relationship between platforms and publishers from the early 2000s to 2015, focusing on the case of Google as the oldest and biggest of the platforms, and documents how publishers became increasingly concerned about Google’s power for more than a decade but nonetheless continued to actively engage with the company across a growing number of products and services. It also shows that while key aspects have rem…
Platform Power
This chapter discusses the implications of the development analyzed throughout the book for news specifically and societies more widely. The chapter argues platform power is a defining feature of relations between platforms and publishers, and that the way in which this power is exercised is becoming increasingly relevant for every other type of actor who seeks to capture people’s attention and communicate with them, whether for political, commer…
The role of news media knowledge for how people use social media for news in five countries
Concern over misinformation on social media has amplified calls to improve the public’s knowledge about how news is produced, distributed and financed. This study investigates the relationship between people’s news media knowledge and the ways in which they use social media for news using online survey data in five countries: the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain and Sweden ( N = 10,595). We find that people with higher news media kno…
How News Feels: Anticipated Anxiety as a Factor in News Avoidance and a Barrier to Political Engagement
This study uses an inductive, qualitative approach to examine the perspectives of lower- and middle-class people in the United Kingdom who regularly access little or no professionally-produced news. Findings suggest that people’s preexisting perspectives about what news is (anxiety-inducing) and offers for them (little practical value) play an important role in shaping attitudes toward news and subsequent behavior. These perspectives highlight th…
The Role of Suspended Accounts in Political Discussion on Social Media: Analysis of the 2017 French, UK and German Elections
Content moderation on social media is at the center of public and academic debate. In this study, we advance our understanding on which type of election-related content gets suspended by social media platforms. For this, we assess the behavior and content shared by suspended accounts during the most important elections in Europe in 2017 (in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany). We identify significant differences when we compare the behavior …
Do Not Blame the Media! The Role of Politicians and Parties in Fragmenting Online Political Debate
Democratic politics builds on both clear differences and shared common ground. While the rise of digital media may have enabled more differences to be articulated, common ground is often seen as threatened by fragmentation of political debate, which some see as driven by news media. The relative importance of political actors (parties and politicians) in driving fragmentation has received less attention. In this paper, we compare how news media a…
More diverse, more politically varied: How social media, search engines and aggregators shape news repertoires in the United Kingdom
There is still much to learn about how the rise of new, ‘distributed’, forms of news access through search engines, social media and aggregators are shaping people’s news use. We analyse passive web tracking data from the United Kingdom to make a comparison between direct access (primarily determined by self-selection) and distributed access (determined by a combination of self-selection and algorithmic selection). We find that (1) people who use…
Misinformation Concerns and Online News Participation among internet Users in India
The rise of misinformation often circulated in various social media platforms has not only raised concerns among the policymakers and civil society groups, but also among citizens. Drawing upon a cross-sectional survey ( n = 1,013) among English-language internet users in India, this paper tries to identify factors that affect concerns for online misinformation among citizens and how online news participation is affected by the rise of misinforma…
Beyond (Mis)Representation: Visuals in Covid-19 Misinformation
This article provides one of the first analyses of visuals in misinformation concerning COVID-19. A mixed-methods analysis of ninety-six examples of visuals in misinformation rated false or misleading by independent professional fact-checkers from the first three months of 2020 identifies and examines six frames and three distinct functions of visuals in pieces of misinformation: how visuals illustrate and selectively emphasize arguments and clai…
Balancing Product Reviews, Traffic Targets, and Industry Criticism: UK Technology Journalism in Practice
Despite growing expectations that technology journalists serve as critical watchdogs of the technology industry, technology journalism remains under-studied in journalism studies. Drawing on the hierarchy of influences model to analyze semi-structured interviews with UK technology journalists and editors, this article investigates how journalists strategically navigate relationships with the technology industry and how these relationships influen…
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015
This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia. This year's data shows a quickening of the pace towards social media platforms as routes to audiences, together with a surge in the use of mobile for news, a decline in the desktop internet and significant growth in…
Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis
Scholars have questioned the potential for incidental exposure in high-choice media environments. We use online survey data to examine incidental exposure to news on social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in four countries (Italy, Australia, United Kingdom, United States). Leaving aside those who say they intentionally use social media for news, we compare the number of online news sources used by social media users who do not see it as a news…
Dealing with digital intermediaries: A case study of the relations between publishers and platforms
The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries a…
Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns
Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008. Rasmus Kl…
Mundane internet tools, mobilizing practices, and the coproduction of citizenship in political campaigns
The internet’s potential for political mobilization has been highlighted for more than a decade, but we know little about what particular kinds of information and communication technologies are most important when it comes to getting people involved in politics and about what this means for the active exercise of engaged citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in two congressional campaigns in the USA, I will argue that specific mundan…
How News Feels: Anticipated Anxiety as a Factor in News Avoidance and a Barrier to Political Engagement
This study uses an inductive, qualitative approach to examine the perspectives of lower- and middle-class people in the United Kingdom who regularly access little or no professionally-produced news. Findings suggest that people’s preexisting perspectives about what news is (anxiety-inducing) and offers for them (little practical value) play an important role in shaping attitudes toward news and subsequent behavior. These perspectives highlight th…
The Media Covers Up a Lot of Things”: Watchdog Ideals Meet Folk Theories of Journalism
The idealized view of the press as an institution that operates independently from private and political interests and tries to hold power to account is central to many journalists’ self-conception and extensive academic scholarship on news. Yet surveys find significant numbers of citizens reject such views about the role of news in society. This article draws on in-depth interviews with a strategic sample of 83 news avoiders in Spain and the UK …
How Polarized Are Online and Offline News Audiences? A Comparative Analysis of Twelve Countries
Polarization is a key area of interest for media and communication scholars. We develop a way of measuring how polarized news audience behaviour is at the national level. Then, we analyze survey data from twelve countries and find (1) that cross-platform (online and offline) news audience polarization is highest in the United States, and within Europe, higher in polarized pluralist/southern countries than in democratic corporatist countries. Furt…
News brand attribution in distributed environments: Do people know where they get their news
The digital media environment is increasingly characterized by distributed discovery, where media users find content produced by news media via platforms like search engines and social media. Here, we measure whether online news users correctly attribute stories they have accessed to the brands that have produced them. We call this “news brand attribution.” Based on a unique combination of passive tracking followed by surveys served to a panel of…
Investing in Online Video News: A cross-national analysis of news organizations’ enterprising approach to digital media
Research on news organizations’ approach to digital media in the 1990s and 2000s generally found that most organizations adopted a defensive approach. Since then, both digital media and news organizations have continued to develop, and we cannot simply assume that the approach remains the same. In this paper, we analyse how a purposive sample of 19 news organizations across three different countries approach online video news—chosen as a paradigm…
Examining Assumptions Around How News Avoidance Gets Defined: The Importance of Overall News Consumption, Intention, and Structural Inequalities
News avoidance research has been hampered by confusion about how to define and operationalize the concept. Here we intervene in two ongoing debates: first, what is the relationship between selective news avoidance—that is, when people say they sometimes or often avoid news—and overall rates of news consumption? Second, how well do terms intended to distinguish between types of news avoidance based on underlying motivations, such as “intentional” …
The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries
Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people's media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically…
More diverse, more politically varied: How social media, search engines and aggregators shape news repertoires in the United Kingdom
There is still much to learn about how the rise of new, ‘distributed’, forms of news access through search engines, social media and aggregators are shaping people’s news use. We analyse passive web tracking data from the United Kingdom to make a comparison between direct access (primarily determined by self-selection) and distributed access (determined by a combination of self-selection and algorithmic selection). We find that (1) people who use…
Beyond (Mis)Representation: Visuals in Covid-19 Misinformation
This article provides one of the first analyses of visuals in misinformation concerning COVID-19. A mixed-methods analysis of ninety-six examples of visuals in misinformation rated false or misleading by independent professional fact-checkers from the first three months of 2020 identifies and examines six frames and three distinct functions of visuals in pieces of misinformation: how visuals illustrate and selectively emphasize arguments and clai…
What Drives Politicians' Online Popularity? An Analysis of the 2010 U.S. Midterm Elections
The number of Web site visits, Facebook friends, or Twitter followers that politicians attract varies greatly, but little is known about what drives politicians' online popularity. In this article, we use data from a systematic tracking of congressional candidates' popularity on four Web platforms in the 112 most competitive congressional districts in the 2010 U.S. midterm elections to address that question. Using multivariate regression models, …
News Can Help! The Impact of News Media and Digital Platforms on Awareness of and Belief in Misinformation
Does the news media exacerbate or reduce misinformation problems? Although some news media deliberately try to counter misinformation, it has been suggested that they might also inadvertently, and sometimes purposefully, amplify it. We conducted a two-wave panel survey in Brazil, India, and the UK ( N = 4732) to investigate the effect of news and digital platform use on awareness of and belief in COVID-19 misinformation over time (January to Febr…
Fair and Balanced: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News
Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-of-view, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 132 individuals in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, conducted in early 2021. Our results show while the idea of imparti…
Who Shares and Comments on News: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who u…
No One Cares What We Know: Three Responsesto the Irrelevance of Political Communication Research
Keywords: political communicationpublic engagementrelevancesociology of science2016 U.S. Presidential Elections2016 U.K European Union Referendum2017 U.K. General Election
Trust is key: Determinants of false beliefs about climate change in eight countries
Science has established the human-caused nature of climate change, yet the prevalence of climate-related misinformation persists, undermining public understanding and impeding collective action. Strikingly, existing research on belief in misinformation about climate change has disproportionately focused on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. To move beyond this, our online survey (N = 8541) includes high-inc…
Political communication research: New media, new challenges, and new opportunities
The rise of new media and the broader set of social changes they are part of present political communication research with new challenges and new opportunities at a time when many think the field is at an intellectual impasse (e.g., Bennett & Iyengar, 2008). In this article, I argue that parts of the field's problems are rooted in the way in which political communication research has developed since the 1960s. In this period, the field has moved …
The Absence of Structural Americanization: Media System Developments in Six Affluent Democracies, 2000–2009
Several comparative media researchers have hypothesized that the media systems of affluent Western democracies are becoming more and more structurally homogeneous—that they are becoming “Americanized.” This article uses data on newspaper industry revenues, commercial television revenues, Internet use, and funding for public service media from a strategic sample of six countries to test the structural version of the convergence hypothesis, looking…
The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload
This article analyzes the use of Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Whereas the literature on political activism has generally argued that the Internet provides low-cost communication that facilitates collective action, this case highlights the labors that accompany Internet-assisted activism. The analysis, based upon parti…
Exposure to Partisan News and Its Impact on Social Polarization and Vote Choice: Evidence From the 2022 Brazilian Elections
Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened social divisiveness. This article investigat…
The role of news media knowledge for how people use social media for news in five countries
Concern over misinformation on social media has amplified calls to improve the public’s knowledge about how news is produced, distributed and financed. This study investigates the relationship between people’s news media knowledge and the ways in which they use social media for news using online survey data in five countries: the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain and Sweden ( N = 10,595). We find that people with higher news media kno…
Hegemony, Radical Democracy, Populism
This article demonstrates what it means to construe Ernesto Laclau's work as precisely political theory. By analyzing his work in terms of the relations between ‘hegemony’ as a theory of the political, ‘radical democracy’ as a normative theory, and the ever-present but of ten overlooked element of ‘populism’ as a theory of a form of politics, it captures the full-fledged political character of his work (as opposed to simply moral theory). Though …
The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload
This article analyzes the use of Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Whereas the literature on political activism has generally argued that the Internet provides low-cost communication that facilitates collective action, this case highlights the labors that accompany Internet-assisted activism. The analysis, based upon parti…
Mundane internet tools, mobilizing practices, and the coproduction of citizenship in political campaigns
The internet’s potential for political mobilization has been highlighted for more than a decade, but we know little about what particular kinds of information and communication technologies are most important when it comes to getting people involved in politics and about what this means for the active exercise of engaged citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in two congressional campaigns in the USA, I will argue that specific mundan…
What Drives Politicians' Online Popularity? An Analysis of the 2010 U.S. Midterm Elections
The number of Web site visits, Facebook friends, or Twitter followers that politicians attract varies greatly, but little is known about what drives politicians' online popularity. In this article, we use data from a systematic tracking of congressional candidates' popularity on four Web platforms in the 112 most competitive congressional districts in the 2010 U.S. midterm elections to address that question. Using multivariate regression models, …
Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns
Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008. Rasmus Kl…
Mundane Internet Tools, the Risk of Exclusion, and Reflexive Movements—Occupy Wall Street and Political Uses of Digital Networked Technologies
Comparative Perspectives on the Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy
The last decade has seen tremendous change in the commercial news media that play a central role in political processes in democracies around the world, as well as considerable progress in cross-national comparative media research. But despite the impact of Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s book Comparing Media Systems , empirical research into the institutional and systemic preconditions of journalism and news production has not kept pace wit…
The Absence of Structural Americanization: Media System Developments in Six Affluent Democracies, 2000–2009
Several comparative media researchers have hypothesized that the media systems of affluent Western democracies are becoming more and more structurally homogeneous—that they are becoming “Americanized.” This article uses data on newspaper industry revenues, commercial television revenues, Internet use, and funding for public service media from a strategic sample of six countries to test the structural version of the convergence hypothesis, looking…
Frozen’ media subsidies during a time of media change: A comparative analysis of media policy drift in six Western democracies
Media systems around the world have changed in significant ways in the early 21st century. In this article, I analyse how various forms of media subsidies have changed in response to these transformations in a sample of six different affluent democracies. On the basis of interviews, official documents and secondary sources, I show that media subsidies have largely remained frozen in their late-20th century form. The absence of major reform means …
The Relative Importance of Social Media for Accessing, Finding, and Engaging with News: An eight-country cross-media comparison
The growing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter is in the process of changing how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed. But so far, we have only a preliminary understanding of (1) how important social media are as sources of news relative to other media, (2) the extent to which people use them to find news, (3) how many use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use, and (4) whether these developments are similar wi…
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age by Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Jennifer Stromer-Galley’s Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age is a welcome and important book. It consists of two elements: (1) an empirical analysis of developments in how U.S. presidenti
Political communication research: New media, new challenges, and new opportunities
The rise of new media and the broader set of social changes they are part of present political communication research with new challenges and new opportunities at a time when many think the field is at an intellectual impasse (e.g., Bennett & Iyengar, 2008). In this article, I argue that parts of the field's problems are rooted in the way in which political communication research has developed since the 1960s. In this period, the field has moved …
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015
This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia. This year's data shows a quickening of the pace towards social media platforms as routes to audiences, together with a surge in the use of mobile for news, a decline in the desktop internet and significant growth in…
Social Media and Bullshit
To understand the role of social media in society, we have to understand how social media are understood. We need to analyze how different actors and organizations see and think about technology, the forms of knowledge that people draw on as they make sense of, develop, and use social media. Central among these is bullshit. This short essay discusses bullshit as defined by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as statements made with little or no conce…
The Business of News
Analysis of the Relation Between and Impact of Public Service Media and Private Media
Paying for Online News: A comparative analysis of six countries
Private news media across the world are trying to develop pay models for news. Our understanding of what drives behaviour and attitudes to paying for online news, however, remains limited. We use survey data from six countries (France, Germany, Japan, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States) to investigate three hypotheses: (1) those who use public service media for online news are less likely to pay for/express a willingness to pay because they…
Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication: Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented
The move to high-choice media environments has sparked fears over audience fragmentation. We analyze news audiences across media platforms (print, television, and online) in 6 countries, going beyond platform-specific, single-country studies. We find surprisingly high levels of news audience duplication, but also that cross-platform audiences vary from country to country, with fragmentation higher in Denmark and the United Kingdom than in Spain a…
Who Shares and Comments on News: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who u…
Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis
Scholars have questioned the potential for incidental exposure in high-choice media environments. We use online survey data to examine incidental exposure to news on social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in four countries (Italy, Australia, United Kingdom, United States). Leaving aside those who say they intentionally use social media for news, we compare the number of online news sources used by social media users who do not see it as a news…
Dealing with digital intermediaries: A case study of the relations between publishers and platforms
The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries a…
Investing in Online Video News: A cross-national analysis of news organizations’ enterprising approach to digital media
Research on news organizations’ approach to digital media in the 1990s and 2000s generally found that most organizations adopted a defensive approach. Since then, both digital media and news organizations have continued to develop, and we cannot simply assume that the approach remains the same. In this paper, we analyse how a purposive sample of 19 news organizations across three different countries approach online video news—chosen as a paradigm…
No One Cares What We Know: Three Responsesto the Irrelevance of Political Communication Research
Keywords: political communicationpublic engagementrelevancesociology of science2016 U.S. Presidential Elections2016 U.K European Union Referendum2017 U.K. General Election
News brand attribution in distributed environments: Do people know where they get their news
The digital media environment is increasingly characterized by distributed discovery, where media users find content produced by news media via platforms like search engines and social media. Here, we measure whether online news users correctly attribute stories they have accessed to the brands that have produced them. We call this “news brand attribution.” Based on a unique combination of passive tracking followed by surveys served to a panel of…
Generalised scepticism: How people navigate news on social media
Social media is an increasingly widely used and important source of news. News on social media is ‘selected’ by a variety of actors, including the editors and journalists that produce the content, and the algorithms developed by technology companies to make automatic display decisions based on users’ past behaviour and the actions of their friends. We analyse how people navigate news on social media, and focus on their perception of the different…
Political science (47 works) · Social Media and Politics (38 works) · Media Studies and Communication (32 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Business (26 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Advertising (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Media studies (19 works)