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.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• social media
• news
• digital journalism
• rhetoric
• text norms
• genre
• shareworthiness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yngve Benestad Hågvar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4114-0750

Notes

1 Number one, the tabloid newspaper VG, is not included here. Dagbladet is known for more “tabloid” Facebook updates than VG, thereby offering a better illustration of the rhetorical span between commercial and public-service media. In week 17, 2017, Dagbladet.no had 595 274 unique visitors, while NRK.no had 958 541.

2 By April 2017, the “Dagbladet” account had received about 285 000 likes, while “NRK Nyheter” had about 267 000.

3 In both newsrooms, they use the Norwegian terms “innsalg” or “følgetekst”.

4 Norwegian: arbeidsleder.

5 Full-story headlines often include as much specific information as possible about who and what the story is about, in order to make it easily searchable on e.g., Google and thereby increase traffic – as opposed to click-bait headlines which consciously retain vital information.