Speaker
Description
With social media, news outlets have lost control over the production and the distribution of news,
because news is now also generated by news audiences who can share and comment on it (Bruns,
2007; Wadbring and Ödmark, 2016). This collaborative sphere has opened a new door into the
exploration of news values, which from a discursive point of view, are not criteria for news
selection but angles for news treatment (Bednarek and Caple, 2017). Shared news reflects both
how discursive news values resonate in the digital sphere and how they play a role in the selection
of events for audiences to share on social media. From this perspective, news selection and news
treatment become interrelated. Combining a discursive news values approach and a survey
experiment on the most shared news article on six worldwide post Covid19 pandemic
antigovernment protests, this study will explore how news outlets and sharers perceive and shape
an event that has become viral on social media. Triangulating those two research methods aims to
observe first to what extent journalists’ news values correspond to news consumers’ perceived
news values, and to shed light on the social priorities and concerns that have increasingly
concerned governance issues lately (Press and Carothers, 2022). The dataset includes over 5,000
respondents and six news articles reporting political contested elections in six countries: the United
States, Iraq, Peru, Chad, Kenya, and Benin, from the start of 2021 to the end 2022. The
interrelationship between discursive news values and the audience perspective also raises new
considerations on the place and evolution of news values in the digital sphere.
