ECREA16-Abstract

Saturday, November 12

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PN 252

What Feels Like News to You? News Use of Young People on Social Media Platforms

M. Broersma

, J. Swart

University of Groningen, Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, Groningen, Netherlands

This paper examines how millennials define news and public information on social media. What feels like news to them on these hybrid platforms con‑

taining a variety of information such as social updates from friends, entertainment and PR, and – last but not least – news from legacy media? We argue

that confronting the perceptions and patterns of use of millennials with the content offered by news organizations, reveals potential mismatches as well

as clues to better align news as a cultural form with the everyday media consumption of millennials on social media platforms. Now news organizations

increasingly use social media platforms to disseminate their content, increase brand awareness and direct audiences to their products and direct traffic to

news websites is replaced by referrals through Facebook and Twitter. This becomes even more important. Especially millennials are hard to target. Although

they have largely adopted social media platforms, news organizations are having difficulties to become parts of the daily routines of young people, whose

news habits differ significantly from previous generations. However, while the generic usage of social networks by young people has received extensive

scholarly attention (e.g. Boyd, 2014), studies that focus on how they define, consume, redistribute or produce news specifically are relatively scarce. This

study investigates young people’s perceptions of news and use patterns on social media, positioning these novel routines within the context of everyday

life. Firstly, building upon 85 day-in-the-life interviews with young people aged 16 to 25 years old, it discusses how they define news on social media, how

this becomes integrated in young people’s news media repertoires (Hasebrink & Domeyer 2012) and the values attached to these patterns of navigating

news. Secondly, combining think-aloud protocols with the task of scrolling through these 85 young people’s timelines on Facebook, Whatsapp, Pinterest,

Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, it provides a detailed overview of the tactics and strategies the youth employ to appropriate each platform’s affordances,

discussing how such engagement becomes meaningful to users.The findings reveal howmillennials experience different forms of content they encounter in

their various social media feeds and what these users have come to understand as ‘the news’. Therefore, it provides a user perspective on the value of social

media news practices, genres and platforms for young people’s news use, providing insights in how such news is used to maintain social connections online

and offline, and becomes meaningful in everyday life.

PN 253

Reading Facebook Newsfeed as Cross-Media: Implications for Journalism

T. Pavlickova

, D. Mathieu

Roskilde University, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde, Denmark

Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

Audiences do not only consume a variety of narratives, genres and sources through their use of diverse media, but can also turn to a mainstream social me‑

dia, Facebook, to be exposed to such variety. Thus, cross-media uses can also be explored empirically as a single“act of reading”- or consulting - Facebook’s

newsfeed. While research has paid attention to the implied reader that follows from Facebook affordances and algorithms (e.g. Van Dijck, 2013), the com‑

plexity involved in using Facebook has seldom been studied through users’empirical readings.The investigation at the basis of this paper relies on the classic

methodology of reception analysis, with the novelty that the users’reading process is explored via a commented consultation of their Facebook newsfeed

(Gallant et al., 2015). Inspired by the text-reader metaphor, this paper investigates how Facebook users organise their reading of the newsfeed, given its

cross-mediated character. Are Facebook users at ease with the seeming complexity of the newsfeed? Do they embrace the diversity of content? Do they

lean on contextual strategies to organise their experience or do they rely on Facebook’s own organisation and presentation of content (which makes a pre‑

sumption of personal relevance to the individual user)? Our findings suggest that Facebook users invest considerable effort to assemble a coherent reading

experience, but its realisation differs substantially. Some users play along with Facebook features and affordances in order to tame the quantity and quality

of their newsfeed. This reading seems to result in the realisation of the horizon of personal relevance presumed by Facebook, but the resulting experience

is redundant to forms of mediation already found in everyday life. A contrasting reading consists in keeping the newsfeed as open as possible, not relying

upon and even being suspicious towards Facebook apparatus and claims to personalisation. This strategy seems to result in a conception of the newsfeed

as a public space, from which one selects relevant content in a particular reading situation, as one does for a newspaper. These users seem to use Facebook

as a media for“public connection”(Couldry et al., 2007), which typically involves a high consumption of news and other forms of remote mediations. These

findings have implications for how news providers may use Facebook as a platform for dissemination. Attempts to control users’ news diet seem to run

contrary to the idea of openness and publicness that users associate with the consumption of news. Facebook’s ambitions to articulate an era of social con‑

nectivity may result in personal relevance that is not much different than existing and ingrained forms of mediation of everyday life. Conversely, attempts

of Facebook to expand the realm of everyday life towards more remote mediations or towards publicness seem to be challenged by its own apparatus.

PN 254

Contesting Professional Procedures and (Un)Ethical Behavior of Journalists: An Exploratory Evaluation of Public Conversation Arisen on

Twitter After Germanwings Accident

P. Masip

, C. Ruiz

, J. Suau

School of Communication and International Relations Blanquerna. University Ramon Llull, Journalism, Barcelona, Spain

The use of social media as an arena for public debate has been extensively analyzed in the last years. Researchers have privileged the activity of audiences

regarding their political activity and behaviour in election contests (Burgess & Bruns, 2012; Gil de Zúñiga, Molyneux & Zheng, 2014; Graham, Jackson, &

Broersma, 2014). The hope that interactive features of 2.0 platforms will strengthen participation and legitimate the liberal democracies has influenced

the study of political activity of users. However, public conversation brings together more topics than those in the agenda of politicians and hence, we can

ask about the role of journalism as intermediator between the facts in all spheres of everyday life and the end users. This communication aims at extending

the analysis of the public conversation by choosing an event without a priori political connotations: the airplane accident of Germanwings’flight 9525, on