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DCC08
News Consumption and Production
PP 272
Apps Before Breakfast: Exploring Users’ News Consumption Practices as Media Rituals
S. Willemsen
1
, M. Stevenson
1
1
University of Groningen, Journalism and Media Studies, Groningen, Netherlands
How we access news and information is increasingly mobile, networked, and personalized. This changing ‘micro’media landscape is represented by smart‑
phones, browsers, buttons and clicks, and is generally studied within frameworks related to cognition, attention and distraction. At the same time, a range
of scholars have analyzed and diagnosed the larger economic, technological and cultural transformations that have led to - depending on who one asks
- a more participatory, connective and open media landscape or one that is increasingly atomized, narcissistic and controlled. What is largely missing
today is a framework for connecting the micro-context of our everyday media practices to the macro-context of a changing media landscape, in particular
as this relates to shifting concentrations of media power. This paper seeks to fill this gap by analyzing users’ online news consumption in terms of ‘media
rituals.’ Defined by Nick Couldry as formalized patterns of media-related practice that enact and naturalize the concentration of symbolic power in media
institutions, the concept offers an important but underutilized touchstone for analyzing new media practices at a time when media power is supposedly
challenged or at least redefined in a participatory landscape. A media rituals approach to media consumption requires going beyond identifying ‘habits’
and instead seeks to understand how particular practices occur within ‘the ritual space of media,’ which consists of various media-related categories (e.g.
liveness, reality), boundaries (e.g. hierarchies of ‘ordinary’ and ‘media’ persons) and values (e.g. fame/celebrity). To begin to identify media rituals within
a digital media environment, this research consists of a qualitative analysis of users' online news consumption and related practices. In-depth interviews
were carried out with a convenience sample of ten people between the ages of 20 and 30. Participants were asked to track their web browsing and app
usage over a period of a week, and this data was used to loosely structure the interviews and aid in identifying common patterns of action. Although such
a small sample cannot be representative, it does allow for a level of familiarity and depth that would be very difficult to achieve otherwise. Three broader
categories of news-consumption rituals emerged from the analysis. The first is 'presence/absence,' characterized by embodied rituals such as checking for
news in certain public settings but also negating potential intrusions (e.g using a phone’s 'airplane mode'). The second is 'following/unfollowing,' which
refers to regular rituals of aggregating and editing the stream(s) of information one receives. The third is 'scrolling/engaging,' which refers to the various
relatively passive or active 'states' users enter while consuming news online. As we argue, the various individual and collective rituals identified here can be
seen to resonate with and legitimize various digital media categories (e.g. connectivity), boundaries (e.g. the lack of hierarchy supposedly created by social
media) and values (e.g. participation). However, as the themes' labels suggest, these rituals do not simply affirm the categories and values suggested by
social media, but also points to their constructed nature by highlight contradictions and indeterminacy.
PP 273
Sharing the News – Facebook Shares as Relevance Indicators
J. Hassler
1
, P. Jost
1
, M. Maurer
1
1
University of Mainz, Department of Communication, Mainz, Germany
In recent years, social media have become an important source of information. For example, during this year’s US primaries, Americans name social media as
the second most helpful source to learn about the upcoming election (PEW, 2016). This increased importance as a news source not only affects the produc‑
tion routines of journalists. By offering a platform for users to immediately share information social media has changed the process of distribution of mass
media content between citizens as well (Olmstead at al. 2011). Therefore, news diffusion in social media should be understood as a two-step selection pro‑
cess. Research on the motives of sharing information indicates that users tend to share information that seems relevant for themselves or their peer-group
(Bobkowski 2015). In the tradition of news selection research news factors explain journalistic attribution of relevance towards issues or events; this holds
true for recipients as well (Eilders 2006). Studies show a significant positive relation between several news factors and perceived relevance of news stories
(Weber/Wirth 2013). Since news media provide buttons to directly share news content from their original websites, we are able to measure non-reactively
how often articles are not only read but also shared with someones facebook friends. We thus ask, which news factors and news article characteristics
influence the amount of shares. Furthermore we discuss whether facebook shares can be understood as indicators of relevance within the online context.
To answer this research question, we conducted a content analysis of news coverage and the amount of shares on eight far reaching journalistic news
websites in Germany. Therefore, we analyzed the amount of shares from the information displayed on the original news websites not from facebook. Our
sample contained the websites of two national TV news shows, two quality daily newspapers, one local newspaper, one weekly newspaper, one tabloid
newspaper and the news section of an e-mail provider, as an original online news site. We analyzed the news on politics during six weeks in the years 2011,
2012 and 2013. Altogether we analyzed 4.177 online news articles. About half of these articles contained buttons that displayed the total amount of shares.
Our results, first, show that news factors tend to influence the amount of shares. Negative-binomial regression analysis reveals that news factors such as
personification and negativism determine the tendency to share news articles with your facebook friends. Thus, facebook shares can be interpreted as
relevance indicators, since factors that have been identified as influencing the attentiveness of recipients also empirically determine the amount of shares.
Second, our analysis shows, that multimediality determines the likeliness of shares. Articles that contain e.g. pictures are shared more often. This indicates
the need to consider formal context characteristics as boundary conditions when analyzing shares as relevance indicators. Methodically, when analyzing
relevance indicators on the basis of shares, it needs to be taken into account that not all media allow sharing for all articles and that far reaching media
articles are generally shared more often.