Abstract
The paper explores how the participatory audience disseminates the online content produced by news media. Here, user-distributed content (UDC) acts as a conceptual framework. The concept of UDC refers to the process by which the mass media converge with the online social networks through the intentional use of social media features and platforms in order to expand the number of content delivery channels and maximize visibility online. The focus of the paper is both on the news media’s internal use (social plugins) and external use (Facebook pages, Twitter accounts) of social media tools and platforms in content distribution. The study draws on the examination of fifteen news media in seven countries. The data consists of almost 50,000 news items and the communicative activity surrounding them. The three main findings of the study are: (1) the audience shares online news content actively by using social plugins, (2) the activity of the news media in social media (especially on Facebook and Twitter) impacts the activity of the audience, and (3) the news media are more active on Twitter than on Facebook, despite the fact that the audience is often more active on Facebook. The study suggests that practices related to UDC should be more strongly incorporated into the management strategies of news media as peer-communication among the audience has a growing significance in the consumption and distribution of online media content.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Users’ are generally referred to as Internet actors; in the Internet environment, members of the audience and media consumers are increasingly also users.
- 2.
- 3.
Socialbakers (www.socialbakers.com) is a global social media and digital analytics company that aids in the measurement of activities across all major social media services, such as Twitter and Facebook.
- 4.
‘People Talking About This’ indicates the number of unique users who have created a story about a page in a 7-day period. On Facebook, users create stories when they, for example, post on the page wall, comment on a post or mention the page in a post (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/01/10/people-talking-about-this-defined/).
- 5.
Facebook uses three terms (recommend, like, share) to refer to the sharing and distribution of online content items (Benton, 2011). The basic function behind these terms is the same; therefore, we have combined them under the term ‘recommend’, which is currently most commonly used in the news media that were studied for this paper.
- 6.
In our study, the actual number of tweets and recommends is biased as the harvesting program collected a different share of news items of those published by each media. For Huffington Post, for example, there were almost 4000 news items collected during the reported time period while for CNN the program collected only slightly over 400 news items.
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Acknowledgments
This research has received funding from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. We would also like to thank Vladimir Grigor for his help in the programming of data collection.
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Villi, M., Matikainen, J., Khaldarova, I. (2016). Recommend, Tweet, Share: User-Distributed Content (UDC) and the Convergence of News Media and Social Networks. In: Lugmayr, A., Dal Zotto, C. (eds) Media Convergence Handbook - Vol. 1. Media Business and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54484-2_16
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