Editors versus audiences facing news: Is this discrepancy also repeated on social news networks?

https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919853740 Journalism 2021, Vol. 22(9) 2332 –2349 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1464884919853740 journals.sagepub.com/home/jou Editors versus audiences facing news: Is this discrepancy also repeated on social news networks? Santi Urrutia University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain Begoña Zalbidea University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain Idoia Camacho University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain Jose Mari Pastor University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain Abstract This study examines whether the frequent discrepancy between publishers and audiences over the news that interests them – the former preferring hard news, the latter soft news – is repeated on social networks. Based on a sample of 8,000 news stories uploaded to a Spanish-language news aggregator over 10 years (2006–2015), the number of hard, soft and general news stories published on its front page was calculated. In addition, the news stories that received the most votes, comments and visits were analysed, and correlations were sought among these three variables. The results show that users mainly chose hard news when voting (50.2%), followed by soft news (30.9%) and general news (18.9%). This was in sharp contrast to the results found for news consumption, where visitors access soft news much more than hard news. The investigation offers some clues about the extent to which the disparity of interests Corresponding author: Santi Urrutia, Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Barrio Sarriena, 48940 Leioa, Spain. Email: [email protected] 853740JOU0010.1177/1464884919853740JournalismUrrutia et al. research-article2019 article Urrutia et al. 2333 between journalists and readers facing news poses a real problem, and it also provides a new outlook on how editors can deal with audiences. Keywords Audiences, editors, hard news, social networks, soft news, users Introduction The contrast between the interests of editors and their audiences when selecting news, found in many investigations, is an old concern that continues to be an important issue in media studies. News professionals follow different strategies to satisfy audience demands, especially in the age of new technologies, that make it possible to determine the preferences of the public very quickly. However, to date, there has been no research on the existence of such contradictions within communities of users, where people who edit and people who visit web pages share the same network. This study analyses this aspect by taking into account data proceeding from the most important Spanish-speaking news aggregator, the Menéame social network. This emerged in December 2005, following the earlier pattern of Digg, which was launched in 2004, but nowadays, it has more similarities with Reddit and is accessed by around 9 million unique users each month (Martínez, 2017). The network has a promotion system of linked news, in which users can participate by sending a post with a link and a short description, while the rest of the community votes with the aim of promoting the news story to the front page of the site.1 Only proposals that reach a certain number of users’ votes appear in the main entrance of the web, so these news stories are considered the most relevant by the network’s community at any specific moment and are consequently the only news read by most visitors. Is the discrepancy between editors and audiences of traditional media facing news repeated on this social network? To answer this question, we worked with a random sample of 8,000 news stories taken from 10 years in the history of the site, from 2006 to 2015. The research analyses what kind of news users choose to include on the front page with their votes and which news stories receive more visits. In this way, it asks whether there is disagreement between the decisions they make when generating content and their choices when visiting these entries. The results of the investigation show clearly that members who generate content prefer hard news, while most of the users who visit the site choose soft news. This finding indicates that the traditional opposition between editors and audiences is fully repeated on this news sharing social network. With the aim of understanding and explaining the findings, the theoretical frame of the study involves two main aspects. First, it examines the disparity of interests between editors and media audiences, noting the existence of different approaches to the topic among researchers and scholars. Second, in order to apply the results obtained for the news aggregator Menéame to the field of journalism, it tries to answer the question of whether we can speak about editors and audiences when dealing with users of social 2334 Journalism 22(9) networks. Besides, in the ‘Discussion’ section, we argue the convenience of proposing a new concept to characterise another side of audiences: their dual nature. About the disparity of interests between journalists and their audiences facing news There are at least two different approaches to analysing this question. One line of investigation stresses the involvement of audiences and the importance of their participation, while the other is much more sceptical about this possibility because it considers that while many citizens subscribe to the idea of participatory culture, they shun it in practice (Karlsson et al., 2018). We will call the first line of investigation the participative approach to audiences, and the second, the sceptical approach to audience participation. The participative approach to audiences is rooted in the traditional critical view which maintained that the audience was simply condemned to listen. Media organisations themselves took the audience to be passive, and the role of the editor included the function of speaking in its name. They understood that journalists represented the interests of the public, at a time when there were few options for contrasting different possible interests, a gap that was called the ‘missing link’ (Schlesinger, 1987). During the final decades of the 20th century with the development of reception theory, which evolved from cultural studies and the theory of uses and gratifications, scholars abandoned the view that audiences were passive. The rise of Internet spread a term that was appealing for researchers eager to adapt journalism to the digital era: participation. Scholars asserted their ‘enthusiasm about new democratic opportunities’ (Borger et al., 2013) and expressed their conviction about the possibility of increasing the collaboration of the public. Karlsson et al. (2018) summarise the situation as follows: ‘The main theoretical argument concerning participation in journalism is that the development of digital technologies now enables participation on a scale not previously possible, thus affecting various dimensions of journalism’. In this way ‘participatory journalism’ was constructed as a scholarly object, and researchers carried out a large amount of investigations around it. The Internet also brought changes to the attitude of editors by permitting interaction and enabling the preferences of readers and viewers to be gauged better and faster. Media companies have also adopted the idea of participation because they consider that one way to solve problems in a space that traditional audiences have been abandoning is to connect with them more, and media executives deem that audience engagement ‘is a way of increasing profits’, while consumer loyalty is the general aim (Karlsson et al., 2015). Engagement ‘has become a media industry buzzword and journalists increasingly accept that they have to interact with their audiences’ (Lawrence et al., 2018). Editors ‘seek to reconcile the notions of journalism as a public good and as a commodity’ (Belair-Gagnon, 2018). Many researchers and journalists took for granted that the amount of visits or clicks on the website was an indicator of audience participation and a clear indicator of the public’s interests. However, the results did not satisfy the expectations of scholars about Urrutia et al. 2335 the potential of new technologies for improving democratic values. When using this indicator, a widespread conclusion has been that professionals seek information based on its sociopolitical relevance, while the audience is satisfied with entertainment and trivial news (Boczkowski et al., 2011; Dick, 2011; Domingo, 2008; Lee et al., 2014; MacGregor, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Singer, 2014; Thorson, 2008). ‘The most viewed news’ label foments a higher publication of topics related to such items, although journalists feel that the use of this type of data clashes with their professional standards (Welbers et al., 2015). Contrary to expectations the real situation scholars found in their investigations presented negative outcomes regarding participation. Borger et al. (2013) summarised the reaction expressed by researchers: they felt ‘disappointment with professional journalism’s obduracy’, ‘disappointment with economic motives to facilitate participatory journalism’ and ‘disappointment with news users’ passivity’. The studies pointed to a gap between participation as an ideal construct and its actual practice. However, researchers who can be linked to the sceptical approach to audience participation conducted investigations on the perspective held by the citizens themselves regarding participatory journalism (Karlsson et al., 2018). They found that a large proportion of the public does not have any opinion on readers’ comments (Bergström and Wadbring, 2015), and members of the audience do not want to interact or get in contact with other users as much as journalists expected (Heise et al., 2014). Furthermore, editors and executives of journalism organisations who share this approach express the idea that audience demands are not so important and that responding to the desires of the public is ‘the least important value for journalism’ (Van der Wurff and Schoenbach, 2011). They think that providing entertainment and closely attending to audience demands are not included in the standard conception of the journalists’ role. Karlsson et al. (2018) found that participation is not a prime cause of concern for audiences when asked about what constitutes good journalism, and audience engagement in news media even appears to them to be more of a problem than a benefit. They are quite happy to see journalists continue their traditional work and keep their roles as editors and gatekeepers, and they do not consider the absence of participation to be negative. Useful and verified information is a superior goal for these audiences than participation itself. Depending on which point of view one takes, the participatory approach or the sceptical one, very different conclusions are obtained about how to deal with the disparity between editors and audiences in their news preferences. Basically, the participatory approach stresses the uneasiness produced by the disparity, elevating it to the status of a problem, while the sceptical approach tends to nuance the relevance of this issue. We expect that data proceeding from social news aggregators about news publication and consumption can provide a new outlook on the topic. The findings could provide suitable suggestions that should assist journalists in dealing more appropriately with the demands made by news media audiences. However, it is necessary to establish that the data from the two fields, news media and social networks, are comparable. Therefore, the first task is to contrast the characteristics of social networks users with those of the editors and audiences of news companies. 2336 Journalism 22(9) Editors, audiences and users In the pre-Internet age, the selection, production and distribution of content was exclusively in the hands of traditional editors, but with the emergence of the new technologies, the boundaries of conventional journalism are melting down (Singer, 2014). Does the activity of social network users in promoting content match the role-played by editors in traditional media? Media editors filter a lot of information to select a certain amount of news each day, a process known as gatekeeping since Shoemaker gave it that name (1991), and like them, users of social networks decide which content is worthy of attention. However, in this case, the decisions may also be in the hands of mechanical editors that decide by means of algorithms the topics and entries that deserve inclusion in the information flow (Braun, 2015), while users do not have full control over the process because sites are governed by technological and social protocols (Galloway, 2004). Production of content, an essential feature of the traditional editor, is called ‘usergenerated content’ (UGC) in the context of social media. UGC has certain characteristics that blur the traditional lines between producers and consumers (Manosevitch and Tenenboim, 2017), one of which being that it is created ‘outside the realm of a profession and professional routines’ (Naab and Sehl, 2017). This peculiarity places such content outside the work carried out by media editors, and it often leads to poor quality production (Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Mackiewicz, 2014; Rello and Baeza-Yates, 2012; Singer, 2014; Thurman, 2008). Another exclusive responsibility of the news editor was distribution, which is now in the hands of any user of the network under the name of sharing. The effect is that audiences can access information that they would not otherwise have reached (Kümpel et al., 2015); sometimes, they prefer to share news with high informational value or relevance (Rudat et al., 2014), but many times, new consumption is ‘incidental’, that is, they are shared out of the need to socialise (Boczkowski et al., 2018). However, there is a basic aspect in which the activity of the traditional editor differs from that of the user. He or she is someone who places herself in the position of the audience and estimates whether or not something is important to it (Greenberg, 2010). In that sense, users do not act with the kind of responsibility that includes institutional roles, ways of telling the truth, and ways of responding to ethical problems (Hanitzsch, 2007). The main difference between the editor of a medium and a user who publishes content on a social network is the institutional and professional character attributed to the former. The conclusion is that users perform many of the activities of editors, but they are not linked to any corporation or company that pays them for their work; they do not have to follow strict rules to generate content in order to meet various standards, and they do not need to receive formal training to carry out their activity on the network. How should we speak about audience on social networks? It refers to a way of understanding media consumers that presents them as composed of ‘others’, from whom information must be gathered to know how they are to be served. It has remained in operation for a long time due to the needs of news companies and researchers (Heikkilä and Ahva, 2015). Media industries, advertisers and audience measurement firms have shaped a socially constructed ‘institutionalized audience’ (Napoli, 2011). Urrutia et al. 2337 Adapting this concept to social networks presents difficulties because users, in theory, apart from being part of some kind of audience can also become editors at any moment. This does not prevent such social networks from actually being corporate entities, but their administrators and owners must commercialise the users’ practices in a way that does not compromise their goodwill. The positions of editor and audience are not exactly applicable in social networks, but neither are completely extraneous to them, so data proceeding from an analysis of the news aggregator Menéame could be valuable for obtaining results to apply in the journalism field. How the news aggregator Menéame works Like many networks, Menéame has a protocol which aims to create a comfortable site for users because a ‘virtual community abandoned to its fate cannot survive for long’ (Grimmelmann, 2015). It has a team of administrators who guarantee that users will fulfil the ‘conditions of use’. The list of conditions is composed of several articles that, on one hand, indicate the basic elements for editing news stories with respect to how to write and link them. On the other hand, it sets out prohibitions: not sending in racist and pornographic writings and links, not using the services of the social network for illicit or promotional purposes, not disclosing the private information of third parties and so on. Failure to comply with these conditions results in the user’s account being blocked. Users of Menéame can carry out activities directly related to editing. They have to make a written presentation of the news story following a series of recommendations on how to write the text. In the ‘Terms of use’ section of the website it states, The title, entry, geolocation and labels of the text, as well as the category in which it is inserted, must reflect and not distort the content of the link. Menéame is not a microblogging site, or a place to generate new information or opinion columns in the space reserved for the description of the subject. By means of their votes, users promote relevant news stories that deserve to move to the front page. The administrators of the network call for responsibility when voting. They encourage voting positively on information that is of interest to users, but recommend previously reading comments and visiting the linked site. They ask users to ensure that the site complies with the rules: it must describe the linked content correctly (i.e. the title and description should agree with the site indicated) and the author of the submission should not give an opinion or alter the content. When users consider that the news story presents some kind of problem, they can cast a negative vote with nine different options: irrelevant, old, tiring, sensationalist, spam, duplicated, microblogging, erroneous and plagiarism. Therefore, votes can be positive or negative, but users have an unequal weight since each one has a score (called karma by the network itself) that goes up or down based on various criteria, for example, the amount of news stories they have proposed that have made it onto the front page, the number of news stories that users voted positively for and that have also gone to the front, the acceptance or rejection that their comments have 2338 Journalism 22(9) received and so on. This can be interpreted as meaning that each user’s score (karma) is related to their ability to connect with the sensibility of other users and propose and vote on news that they consider important; that is, in a certain way, the score represents the validity of their editing criteria. As they say on the social network itself, the score ‘aims to measure the instinct to know if a story deserves to reach the front page’. The algorithm is quite complex but basically it determines how many votes are necessary at each moment for a story to appear on the front page, and the number varies depending on the category in which it is included: current news, leisure, culture, and technology. A current news story usually needs more votes than one of the rest of categories. The aim of the algorithm is not to enable a similar proportion of news in each category but to try to obtain a balance between the number of stories sent in and the stories published in each one.2 Analysing the type of information included in those categories, we see that ‘current news’ is the one which includes more hard news. It can be observed that in many instances, the other three categories (technology, leisure and culture) need less votes than the first one and are mostly made up of soft and general news.3 It seems that the algorithm tends to prioritise those three categories, producing a tendency to underrepresent ‘current news’ and, consequently, the proportion of hard information would be even higher if the algorithm were to treat all four categories in a similar way. Research questions and hypotheses Based on the above review, which considered the two approaches to audience participation and the comparison between news media and social networks, four research questions were examined: RQ1. How many users proposed news that reached the main page of Menéame over the 10 year period (2006–2015)? RQ2. What kind of news receives the most votes from users for publication on the front page? RQ3. What kind of news is most visited? RQ4. What kind of news is most commented on? In addition to the research questions, four hypotheses were tested. H1. The amount of users who propose news in the network is very small compared with the number of visitors. Although new technologies have been seen as a key element for increasing user participation, the point is that only a small portion of users in a network shares information or comments on content, while the vast majority only visits the site (Karlsson et al., 2015). Therefore, it is wrong to think that access to digital technologies automatically converts people into active participants (Van Dijck, 2009). A basic arrangement, called the ‘1% rule’, seems to be at work here: if there are 100 people connected online, one Urrutia et al. 2339 will be dedicated to creating content, 10 will interact with it through comments or contributions and the other 89 will simply read it (Arthur, 2006). In addition, this active minority may have differentiated characteristics in terms of ideology and gender with respect to the majority of users (Friemel and Dötsch, 2015), which makes them a select group that comes close to having some of the peculiarities attributed to editors. H2. Soft news will receive the most votes for appearing on the front page. H3. Soft news will be the most visited. When researchers talk about the type of news social network users are generally interested in, it is soft news that stands out (Baumgartner and Morris, 2010). The social interaction factor is the main reason for taking part in these networks (Ancu and Cozma, 2009), so soft news will presumably be the most widely published and receive the most visits. H4. Hard news will be the most commented on. In recent investigations, authors, instead of only taking the number of clicks into account to measure the interest of the audience, have used other kinds of indicators (Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2017). It was found that the news stories receiving the most comments in online media do not coincide with the most visited, so that sensational topics and curiosity-arousing elements get many more clicks, but, however, political and social issues are the items that receive many more comments (Tenenboim and Cohen, 2015). People with greater interest in hard news are more likely to comment on both news websites and social media (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2017). In this context, researchers assume that the decision to write on a story and thus share ideas in a public forum, indicates a special concern for the news, so comments can be understood as an expression of a deeper interest (Ksiazek, 2018). Method The analysis considered the first 10 full years of Menéame’s activity, from 2006 to 2015. The universe under study consists of 156,800 news items that appeared during that period, which are grouped into 7,840 top pages. Due to this peculiarity, cluster sampling was used to select the units: 400 top pages were chosen at random, each of which contains 20 news items, which add up to a total of 8,000 units. This means that the sample works with a 99 per cent confidence level and a 1.5 per cent margin of error. One of the first tasks was to decide how to classify the news. As said above, the social network itself requires that the editing user include the information in one of four possible categories: current news, leisure, culture and technology. However, this classification is not useful for the study for several reasons: (a) the categories include both hard and soft news to different degrees, while distinguishing between the two is essential in this investigation; (b) the categorisation is left in the hands of the user, so the reliability of the coding cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, it was necessary to build a list of categories that would later allow their easy assignment to the classic distinction between hard and soft news. Following an 2340 Journalism 22(9) arduous process of establishing a convincing classification, on which the team worked using different thematic series, a final list of 14 categories was produced. Nine of them coincide with those frequently used in the analysis of the media: Politics, Economy, Justice, Health, Education, Society, Culture and shows, Science and technology, and Sports. Four of them were included due to their special importance in the Spanish context during the period analysed: Corruption, LGBT, Immigration, and Violence and discrimination against women. Finally, the category ‘Others’ includes the news that cannot be entered in the previous categories. To evaluate the reliability of the coding of these categories, we measured the degree of agreement between the different coders using the Kappa coefficient, which achieved a score of 0.78. Therefore, the degree of agreement approaches the level of ‘very good’. These 14 categories were relocated in a wider classification, related to hard and soft news. For this purpose, a list of three types was used, following the methodology proposed by Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky (2010), who argue the need to create a third intermediate type between the two because the one reserved for soft news has to date included very heterogeneous thematic blocks. Following their criteria, a type called ‘general news’ was added. In this way, the 14 thematic categories were assigned as follows: (a) Hard news: Politics, Economy, Justice, Education, Corruption, LG, Immigration, Violence and discrimination against women; (b) Soft news: Society, Culture and shows, Sports, Others; and (c) General news: Science and technology, Health. Several thematic categories could be included under different types. For example, LGBT could fall under soft news, but we decided to include it under hard information for two reasons: (a) the topic has been given a high sociopolitical relevance in Spain in recent years and (b) most news stories related to it that appear on the front page of Menéame do not refer to celebrities and gossip but, essentially, to its political and social treatment. Another example is Health. It can eventually be included under any of the three types, but in the case of this social network news stories related to it are mostly information about diseases, medicines, procedures for healthy living and so on, so in certain way they are close to the Science and technology category. Three more variables containing information available on the aggregator’s own site were taken into account to answer the research questions. The first two were used as indicators of newsworthiness, that is, the interest or importance that users give to the news: (a) the number of votes received to decide whether a news story deserves to be uploaded to the front page and (b) the number of comments made on each news story. The third variable was the number of clicks, which is an indicator of the preferences of users as consumers. Results Users who engage in editing tasks on Menéame From the publication of the first news on this social network on 7 December 2005, until the end of 2015, users sent in 170,364 news stories that received the necessary amount of votes to reach the front page. According to the administrators, a relatively small group of users, 21,138 of them to be exact, uploaded all of them.4 Most users contributed only one news story, but there was a reduced group of 41 people who contributed 15.6 per cent of Urrutia et al. 2347 Braun J (2015) Social media and distribution studies. Social Media + Society. 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She is also the Head of the Department of Journalism. Her research focuses on Ethics of Journalism and Quality of News. Idoia Camacho is a Professor of Journalism at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication. Her research focuses on Specialised Journalism, Health Communication, Information Ethics and Corporate Communication. Jose Mari Pastor is a Professor of Journalism at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. His research focuses on Television and Online Media News.