Social Media Metrics in the Digital Marketplace of Attention: Does Journalistic Capital Matter for Social Media Capital?

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, this study investigated how the quality and reputation of news outlets were related to their social media capital. Social media capital is conceptualized as the resources that news organizations can generate via social media efforts, and measured by examining each outlet’s audience size and engagement metrics on Twitter. To triangulate findings, we used social media metrics extracted from (1) the entire population of Twitter users, as well as (2) a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users whose demographics were identified through a survey. Our results suggest that journalistic reputation is a reliable predictor of a news outlet’s social media capital. News site quality, however, was not significantly associated with social media metrics. In fact, the quality of news sites was at times related negatively to social media capital, such that, controlling for other factors, news from low-quality sites received more retweets than news from high-quality sites. This pattern was especially pronounced among politically conservative users.

Keywords:

• News media
• social media capital
• quality
• reputation
• metrics
• social media

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions to improve the paper. We also appreciate the comments offered by the chairs and participants of SSRC’s workshop on “news quality in the platform era.”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Original content posted by the news outlets, as opposed to retweets.

2 Out of 312 news outlets, 232 (74%) were rated by NewsGuard.

1 For a full list, see https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-categories

2 Except for two outlets, all had a Twitter account.

3 This item measures whether the site produces inaccurate information repeatedly.

4 More information can be found in https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/rating-process-criteria

5 Liberal media have received more journalism awards (M = 0.90, SD = 3.11) than conservative media (M = 0.01, SD = 0.12) in the past 10 years, t(117.51) = 3.09, p < 0.001.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida.