News Media's Rhetoric on Facebook

Abstract

While Facebook is an important distribution channel for today's media houses, there is a lack of research on how news outlets choose to present their stories in social media. The present study aims to narrow this gap by analysing two weeks of Facebook updates by the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet and the public-service broadcaster NRK and comparing them to the corresponding stories on their news sites. An important objective is to uncover if and how the Facebook updates depart from established text norms for online papers. The method is triangulated. A quantitative content analysis reveals that newsrooms tend to utilize a wider range of speech acts when writing presentations specifically for Facebook. A follow-up qualitative analysis identifies five rhetorical strategies for unique promo texts on Facebook: adding emojis, posing questions, making requests, expressing emotions and stating subjective points of view. Qualitative interviews with responsible journalists confirm that these strategies are more common the less controversial the stories are. However, the newsrooms have few explicit guidelines for when it is acceptable to transgress traditional journalistic text norms. The findings are summarized in a model that connects the continuum of decreasing story controversy to a corresponding continuum of increasingly interpretative and subjective rhetoric.

Help Yourself: The Individualization of Responsibility in Current Health Journalism

“…When we then examine how general discourses of individual health responsibility are constructed in society, it makes sense to focus upon the two main genres that expose us to news whether we are seeking it or not: print front pages and the news media's Facebook updates. Editors select content specifically for these genres (Hågvar, 2019). Analysing which kinds of health news these genres facilitate will therefore provide important insights into which discourses of health editors would have us stumble upon.…”

“…Kalsnes & Larsson, 2017). Within disciplines such as rhetoric and discourse analysis, however, genres are understood more generally as configurations of text norms that are developed to facilitate recurrent communicative tasks within a text culture (Hågvar, 2016(Hågvar, , 2019. Thus, the print front page is a genre because it is easily recognizable from day to day and performs the task of informing the audience and (particularly for tabloids) selling the newspaper.…”

“…Thus, the print front page is a genre because it is easily recognizable from day to day and performs the task of informing the audience and (particularly for tabloids) selling the newspaper. Likewise, the journalistic Facebook update follows certain conventions that are adjusted to the general discourse of social media, and should be seen as a genre (Hågvar, 2019). News, editorials etc.…”

“…Ekström and Westlund (2019) point out that this "dislocation of news journalism" on social media platforms deprives the newsrooms of their power of contextualization. Recent studies suggest that journalistic Facebook updates adapt to the non-journalistic context by turning more subjective, interpretative and emotional (Hågvar, 2019;Welbers & Opgenhaffen, 2018). Regarding health journalism, this could imply that Facebook would favour stories that call for a personal opinion.…”

Media Health: An Introduction to the Collection

“…their own body, sexual orientation or experiences of suicide in close relations. In social media, journalists present their news even more subjectively and interpretatively compared to legacy media (Hågvar, 2019;Steensen, 2015). It is therefore natural to delve deeper into how these developments affect health issues in the media.…”