Making it Fit: How Science News Gets Remediated for Facebook and Instagram

ABSTRACT

Today’s news users have a wide range of options when it comes to news consumption. Articles can be read on an app, via a news website, on social media or a printed newspaper. To provide these different platforms news media have become integrated newsrooms that shovel news as a standard practice. After posting a news article to the news website, the same news article can later appear on a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. During the transportation from one platform to another the news inevitably undergoes changes. These remediations can be initiated by the platform: format-dependent constraints, e.g., the mandatory addition of a status message; based on preferences of the algorithm; or can be according to the personal preferences of the social media editor. Based on these insights we compiled a unique corpus of 109 news stories that map “a perfect chain” of science news in a one-to-one relationship between the news website, Facebook, and Instagram accounts of three traditional Flemish newspapers. We manually explored the circulation flow of these news posts and identified the corresponding types of news remediation. These results contribute theoretical and practical insights into the affordances, characteristics and constraints of social media news.

KEYWORDS:

• Remediation
• news circulation
• science news
• social media
• affordances
• Instagram

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Jack McMartin for initiating the research project “Circulation of Science News in the COVID-19 Era” (KU Leuven Impulse Fund) that laid the foundation for this paper.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The initial plan of the researchers was to include two outlets from different parent companies. However, due to the absence of science news on the platform “Het Laatste Nieuws”, they were unable to proceed with that selection.

2 The used keywords are: “wetenschap”, “studie”, “universiteit”, “data”, “gegevens”, “ontwikkeling”, “onderzoekers”, “experts”, “expert”, “experten”, “studies”, “onderzoek”, “wetenschappers”, “wetenschapper” en “bestuderen”. These keywords translate roughly to “science”, “study”, “university”, “data”, “development”, “researchers”, “experts”, “expert”, “studies”, “research”, “scientists ”, “scientist” and “study”.

3 The researchers also investigated the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, the largest popular newspaper in Flanders. In the period of one year, the newspaper only posted four Instagram news posts (0,007%). Therefore, we excluded the newspaper from our research.

4 In the context of this study, a “classic news article” is characterised as an online article that adheres to a specific structure, comprising a top photo, a headline, and a lead.