News Users on Facebook: Interaction Strategies on the Pages of El Paìs, la Repubblica, Le Monde, and The Guardian

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to study journalistic production and how news users interact with it. More specifically, the approach adopted is an attempt to bridge the gap between the analysis of how news outlets disseminate their news on social media platforms, and that relating to the use of such news within social contexts. To achieve this twofold objective, the content published on Facebook, as well as the interactions of users of four newspapers published in Spain (El Paìs), Italy (la Repubblica), France (Le Monde), and the UK (The Guardian), were analyzed during a period of six months (1 November 2016 – 30 April 2017). The newspapers were selected as quality daily newspapers, in view of their liberal or center-left political orientation, and their common editorial experience, resulting from the production of special issues. The analysis highlights a widespread trend towards light engagement. These readings are supported not only by the data on various interaction practices (likes, sharing, and commenting), but also by those that describe the use of Reactions – or rather, the chance to go beyond the simple Like.

KEYWORDS:

• News users
• social media
• Facebook
• journalism studies
• news consumption
• news sharing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sara Bentivegna http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8609-4244

Rita Marchetti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5740-1962

Notes

1 We refer to the “Europa” project, i.e., a project for editorial sharing, implemented to produce three special issues. El Paìs, Le Monde, The Guardian are partners of this project together other news outlets from different European countries.

2 Data accessed on 7 May 2017.

3 The intercoder reliability for the analysis was tested with a randomly selected subsample (5% of the total). Overall, the result was good. The reliability score for the average pairwise Cohen’s kappa was 0.79.

4 This data is reported on Wired, a year after the introduction of Reactions: “A year of Reactions on Facebook: the heart wins all”, https://www.wired.it/internet/social-network/2017/02/24/reaction-facebook-cuore/.