Worth to Share? How Content Characteristics and Article Competitiveness Influence News Sharing on Social Network Sites

Abstract

We investigated how sharing performance on Facebook and Twitter is influenced both by news articles’ content characteristics and the availability of additional news articles reporting on the same news topic. We conducted a multi-method study, integrating automated data collection and manual/automated content analyses of 1,764 German online news articles. Our findings show the influence of news factors and, more importantly, news outlets on sharing performance, while simultaneously highlighting differences between the logics of news sharing on Facebook and Twitter. We also find that the first article reporting on a news event is shared more often than subsequent articles.

The News Sharing Gap

“…Results confirmed this hypothesis by showing that news routines and formal variables are more relevant to explain news sharing than are content variables. This is in line with previous studies that have demonstrated the strong impact that news outlets characteristics (Karnowski et al, 2020), as well as other aspects of online news routines, like the boosting of videos, and other visual cues produced on news sharing (Bastos, 2015;Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2012;Bright, 2016;Salgado & Bobba, 2019). This phenomenon can be traced back to studies that investigated the content characteristics associated with recipients' news selection and information recall from reading newspapers.…”

“…52-53). Bastos (2015), Christin (2015), Kalsnes and Larsson (2018), Karnowski et al (2020) found similar results by analyzing data from different countries.…”

“…As suggested above, there is little room for uncontested answers to this question because the available evidence is rather heterogeneous and even conflicting. Some studies will identify Facebook as infertile soil for hard news and PA articles (Bright, 2016;Karnowski et al, 2020;Trilling et al, 2017), others will suggest alternative accounts (Lycarião & Leite, 2020;Martin, 2019;Ørmen, 2019). Bright's (2016) analysis of news interactions on the SNSs of the BBC News showed that politics, government, economics, and social issues had a negative impact on news sharing on Facebook (p. 353).…”

“…An influential strain of this literature explains online news sharing as a function of how platform affordances make each SNS unique in its dynamics and characteristics (Bastos, 2015;Christin, 2015;Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018;Karnowski et al, 2020;Trilling et al, 2017). Alternatively or additionally, news sharing is also explained by journalism studies in terms of general human selection criteria or similar concepts from evolutionary psychology and cognitive accessibility theories (Trilling et al, 2017).…”

Do News Actually “Find Me”? Using Digital Behavioral Data to Study the News-Finds-Me Phenomenon

“…Importantly, while more passive users less regularly click the "follow" button for news outlets than more active news consumers (Leonhard et al, 2020), more news could also be included in one's social media feeds because of friends' engagement with news outlets (Boczkowski et al, 2018). Driven by the perceived "shareworthiness" (Karnowski et al, 2021;Trilling et al, 2017) of news items, this diffusion of news via SNS "is a continuous process involving journalists, users, intermediaries, and algorithms" (Brosius et al, 2019, p. 133), which equally affects and is affected by a user's surrounding social network. News on SNS are, thus, brought to one's attention through the "interactive features and affordances of various social media platforms, particularly those which reduce attentional effort" (Oeldorf-Hirsch & Srinivasan, 2021, p. 11).…”