Source: own elaboration.
10.4185/RLCS-2020-1429
Research
Clicks and comments as expressions of the dilemma of users’ news interests: the case of the Spanish-language social news aggregator, Menéame
Clics y comentarios como expresiones del dilema de intereses de los usuarios ante las noticias: el caso del agregador de noticias de lengua hispana Menéame
Begoña Zalbidea-Bengoa1
Santiago Urrutia1
Idoia Camacho-Markina1
José María Pastor-González1
1University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain
ABSTRACT
Introduction. The study aims to analyse the diversity of the interests of users of social networks by identifying what kind of information audiences visit and what kind of news they comment on. To this end, the activity of the users of the most successful Spanish-language news aggregator, the Menéame social network, was investigated, by examining audience behaviour with respect to the content published on the network.
Methodology. The research was carried out using a sample of 3,720 news items randomly selected from a total of 51,520 items published on the front page of Menéame throughout more than five years (2010-2015). The number of visits and comments that each item received was analysed, and the two variables, clicks and comments, were related to the type of content and its thematic categories.
Results. The results show that there is a clear opposition between clicks and comments in terms of content types, with two main trends with respect to hard and soft news items. On the one hand, on average the latter receive almost 4,000 visits more than hard items, which on average receive around 5,500 clicks. However, hard news tends to provoke a greater amount of comments than soft news. The average for the former is 66 comments, while soft news receives 10 less (55.7).
Discussion and conclusions. Data suggest that clicks and comments express two main interests of users in front of news and that they are both opposing and complementary.
KEYWORDS: users; clicks; comments; hard news; soft news.
RESUMEN
Introducción. El estudio tiene como objetivo analizar la diversidad de intereses de los usuarios de las redes sociales identificando qué tipo de información visitan las audiencias y qué tipo de noticias comentan. Con este fin, se investigó la actividad de los usuarios del agregador de noticias en español de más éxito , la red social Menéame, examinando el comportamiento de la audiencia con respecto al contenido publicado en la red.
Metodología. La investigación se llevó a cabo utilizando una muestra de 3.720 noticias seleccionadas al azar de un total de 51.520 artículos publicados en la portada de Menéame durante más de cinco años (2010-2015). Se analizó el número de visitas y comentarios que recibió cada ítem , y las dos variables, clics y comentarios, se relacionaron con el tipo de contenido y sus categorías temáticas.
Resultados. Los resultados muestran que existe una clara oposición entre clics y comentarios en términos de tipos de contenido, con dos tendencias principales con respecto a las noticias duras y blandas. Por un lado, en promedio, estos últimos reciben casi 4.000 visitas más que los artículos de temática dura, que en promedio reciben alrededor de 5.500 clics. Sin embargo, las noticias duras tienden a provocar una mayor cantidad de comentarios que las noticias blandas. El promedio para el primero es de 66 comentarios, mientras que las noticias suaves reciben 10 menos (55,7).
Discusión y conclusiones. Los datos sugieren que los clics y los comentarios expresan dos intereses principales de los usuarios frente a las noticias y que son opuestos y complementarios.
PALABRAS CLAVE: usuarios; clics; comentarios; noticias duras; noticias blandas.
Correspondencia.
Begoña Zalbidea Bengoa. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
bego.zalbidea@ehu.eus
Santiago Urrutia. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
santi.urrutia@ehu.eus
Idoia Camacho-Markina. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
idoia.camacho@ehu.eus
José María Pastor. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
josemari.pastor@ehu.eus
Received: 15/05/2019.
Accepted: 10/09/2019.
Published: 15/01/2020.
This article is a product of two Research projects, entitled “Reactions from Citizen’s Ethics on the Menéame Social Network, to the contents of conventional and social media in Spain” and “Ethics, information and social networks”. These are the grant numbers: CSO2014-59077-R and GIU15/27. They are funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and the University of the Basque Country, respectively.
How to cite this article / Standard reference: Zalbidea, B., Urrutia, S., Camacho-Markina. I. & Pastor, J. M. (2020). Clicks and comments as expressions of the dilemma of users’ news interests: the case of the Spanish-language social news aggregator, Menéame. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 75, 327-339. https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2020-1429
CONTENTS
1. Introduction. 2. Methodology. 3. Results. 3.1. Which kind of news do users click more. 3.2. Which kind of news do users comment more. 3.3. Relationship between clicks and comments. 4. Discussion and Conclusions. 5. References.
Article originally written in English by the research teamand reviewed by translator Robert Curwen.
1. Introduction
A notable amount of investigations conducted over the last decade found a disparity of interests among journalists and audiences regarding news. It is frequently noted that the former show a preference for hard news, while readers seek news that is softer. Researchers reached that conclusion based on the number of visits or clicks received by news as an indicator of audience interest. In this study we want to analyse if we have to persist sustaining this idea, or it is necessary to change it and conclude that the behaviour of audiences and users in front of news is more complex than previously thought.
In that sense, another factor apart from clicks has been used to measure interest in recent years, namely, the number of readers’ comments. Based on this indicator, audiences attach more importance to public issues than the earlier measurements had indicated. In the investigation we want to analyse the diversity of interests of users by examining both indicators, clicks and comments, and seeing what does each of them mean.
Our assumption is that clicks and comments are expressions of two kinds of interests of users in front of news. We analyse which kind of news visit more users and which kind of news do they comment to test if several types of news are more likely to be only visited and other types reveal a trend to be more commented.
To carry this task the investigation examines clicks and comments using data from the most important Spanish-speaking news aggregator, the Menéame social network. This web site begun at the end of 2005, after the release of Digg, but now it is more alike to Reddit, having each month around 9 million unique visitors (Martínez, 2017). The users can write a post with a link to the origin of a news in order to promote it to the front page seeking the votes of the rest of users. If the proposal gets a certain number of votes the news will appear in the main page of the site. These information items are considered the most important by the network at each moment, so they are the only news read by many users.
To carry on the study we took a probabilistic sample of 3,720 news corresponding to more than five years from the beginning of the click’s counter’s work on the network (from September 2010-to December 2015). The research analyses what type of news users visit the most and which ones are the most commented on.
The findings show that users prefer soft news to visit and hard news to comment. In order to understand and explain this result, the theoretical frame of the study involves several aspects. It examines the nature of interests in front of news, seeking the environment surrounding them. In the Discussion section we try to advance some insights about the implications of this reality for the fields of journalism and news media.
The interest of audiences in front of news stories can be analysed from two perspectives, although both are closely intertwined: it can be considered as something that is boosted among the readers, or something that has its source in the attitude of the readers themselves. For the first point of view, we can hold on the tradition of the agenda setting and for the second, on the uses and gratifications theory.
The agenda setting theory has been proven in many studies and it says that media have the power to stablish the public agenda (Carazo, 2018, p. 17). It states that the public takes into account and keeps in mind the issues or topics that news organizations spread. From this point of view media have had traditionally the capacity to diffuse the topics that public should look at on a certain moment. It is said that online sites promote agendas that are largely comparable to traditional news media (McCombs, 2005, p. 545).
If we locate the source of the interest in the audience’s own attitude, the emergence of computer-mediated communication has revived the significance of uses and gratifications theory (Ruggiero, 2000: 3). An important principle of this theory of audience behaviour is that media use is selective and motivated by rational self-awareness of the individual’s own needs and an expectation that those needs will be satisfied by particular types of media and content (Katz et al., 1974, p. 30). Regarding our study, news promoting political integration can conciliate a kind of activity from users as more comments, while news related to entertainment could have a tendency to attract only clicks.
The needs mentioned by the theory of uses and gratifications can be connected closely to “interests” and these can be classified as “interests to use media for important things” and “interests to use mass media as escape.” With respect to the first type, it was found that newspapers fill the need for political integration (Katz, Gurevitch & Haas, 1973, p. 2). We have to see if comments of users, as expression of higher activity, can be specially related to public issues. On the other hand, people use the media for diversion and entertainment (Katz & Foulkes, 1962, p. 377). We can approach the analysis of clicks from this side, to examine if they are more linked with news for diversion.
Although new technologies are seen as a key element for increasing participation, there is an important concern about the differences in the level of activity of users. Many investigations, based in information gathered from clicks counters and the number of shares and comments made by users, say that the amount of those that comment on news articles is relatively small in comparison with the number of readers (Diakopoulos and Naaman, 2011, p. 3). These authors found in their study about a web site of a Californian newspaper that most comments were made by a very little group of contributors, so the distribution in commenting frequency is very skewed. The same conclusion has been reached by other researchers, reiterating that only a small portion of users in a network shares information or comments on content, while the vast majority simply visits the site (Karlsson et al., 2015). From this finding, it is wrong to think that access to digital technologies automatically converts people into active participants (Van Dijck, 2009).
This viewpoint has been summarized in a basic arrangement called the “1% rule” (Arthur, 2006). Just 1% of people create content, 10 % participate by means of comments or contributions and the other 89% consume the content (Arthur, 2006). Furthermore, the most active users usually have several particularities related to their views and gender, which differentiates them from the rest of the users (Friemel and Dötsch, 2015).
However, using survey data on the wider population of online news users from six different countries, several investigators have indicate that the activity of users is much more large than said before. They say that commenting on and sharing news in most countries are significantly more widespread than the so-called “1% rule”. A significant minority of Internet users take a more active part in the news and information and, particularly, commenting and sharing via social media are very widespread (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2017, pp. 1-2).
In their study they found that (1) people who use a high number of different social media platforms and use social media for news are significantly more likely to also engage more actively with news outside social media by commenting on news sites and sharing news via email, (2) that political partisans on both the left and the right are significantly more likely to share and comment on news on social media, and (3) that people with high interest in hard news are significantly more likely to comment on news on both news sites and social media.
Many scholars and professionals believe that the number of clicks expresses clearly the interest of the users and the audience. Analysing data from this source they conclude that journalists want to publish information with socio-political significance and that the public prefer entertainment (Boczkowski et al., 2011; Dick, 2011; Domingo, 2008; Lee et al., 2014; MacGregor, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Singer, 2014; Thorson, 2008).
However, other authors, instead of only taking the number of clicks into account to measure the interest of the audience, have used other kinds of indicators. They say that “clicks only tell part of the story” (Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2015, p. 14). For example, headlines can tell users interested in particular topics too little and then these users click the story, while other times the headline gives them enough information, and they do not need to click.
One early example about the nature of comments in online news media and their connection to socio-political topics (hard news) was the BBC’s Election 97 Web site, what showed to political experts that the audience was highly interested about electoral issues (Ruggiero, 2000, p. 22).
Paradoxically, news stories receiving the most comments in online media do not coincide with the most visited, so sensational topics and curiosity-arousing elements get many more clicks, but, on the other hand, political and social issues are the items that receive many more comments (Tenenboim and Cohen, 2015). In this context, researchers assume that the decision to write on a story and thus share ideas in a public forum, indicates a special concern for the news, so comments can be understood as an expression of a deeper interest (Ksiazek, 2018).
Several investigations sought the factors to explain the amount of comments. The number of users supplying comments in a news article may be indicative of the importance, interestingness, or effect of the said news article (Tsagkias et al., 2009, p. 1765). Negative news articles receive much more comments than positive news articles, and readers do not like to comment on the odd news, which may be because most of them are deviated from facts (Liu et al., 2015, p. 774). This reinforces the idea that comments are specially connected with news considered most relevant.
In a qualitative study, MacGregor (2007, p. 1097) interviewed online journalists and found that gatekeepers monitor audience data to re-weigh their editorial priorities. According to this study, in response to a story with more clicks, some journalists would expand the coverage of it, provide additional analysis for it, or publish information of the same type.
In the Internet era journalists can know very quickly how is acting the audience regarding how many are reading a story, what stories they prefer or what they comment (Vu, 2014, p. 1094). Technology makes it possible for news companies to register news consumption by tracking clicks, and how much time they spend reading or viewing. It is a wide conclusion that “the most viewed news” label incites a higher edition of topics related to such items, although professionals can feel that to base their work in this kind of data is not according to their professional demands (Welbers et al., 2015).
2. Methodology
This study of clicks and comments and their relation to hard and soft news in the social news network Menéame is conducted with the aim to answer these two main questions:
In order to answer both questions, two hypotheses have been established closely related to the insights given by the theoretical frame presented above:
Although the social network Menéame started on December 2005, the click counter began to work on the network on September 15, 2010, and consequently this analysis considers the following five years until the end of 2015.
The universe under study consists of 51.520 news items that appeared during that period. They were included in 2,576 top pages, each of which contained 20 news items. Due to this peculiarity, cluster sampling was used to select the units: 186 top pages were chosen at random, which add up to a total of 3,720 news units. This means that the sample works with a 99% confidence level and a 2% margin of error.
Two main variables of the study were taken using available information on the aggregator’s own site: a) the number of comments made on each news story and, b) the number of clicks.
The third main variable, news type, presented us with the laborious task of deciding how to classify the news. The social network itself requires that the editing user include the information in one of four possible categories: current news, leisure, culture, and technology, but this classification was nor adequate for the study. On the one hand, the categories included both hard and soft news to varying degrees, while distinguishing between the two is essential in this investigation. On the other hand, users themselves choose the category for their news, so the reliability of the coding cannot be guaranteed.
Keeping in mind the importance of suitably ascribing hard and soft news, we worked to stablish a good set of categories, which raising the final rank to 14. Nine of them are commonly used in news media publishing: Politics, Economy, Justice, Health, Education, Society, Culture and shows, Science and technology, and Sports. Four more were selected because their importance in the Spanish context in those years (Corruption, Immigration, LGBT and Violence and discrimination against women). All of them were completed with the category “Others”. The Kappa index gave a score of 0.78, so the level of agreement between coders can be considered as excellent, following the proposal of Fleiss et al. (1981, p. 604).
Next, these 14 categories were redistributed depending on whether they were hard, soft, and general news, following the methodology proposed by Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky (2010), who argue the need to create a third intermediate type because the one reserved for soft news has to date included very heterogeneous thematic blocks. The final distribution was as follows: a) Hard news: Politics, Economy, Justice, Education, Corruption, LGBT, Immigration, Violence and discrimination against women; b) Soft news: Society, Culture and shows, Sports, Others; c) General news: Science and technology, Health.
3. Results
3.1. Which kind of news do users click more
The Menéame social network shows the number of clicks that each news story receives, which serves to establish the number of visits to that story. Clicks are an indicator of the preferences of the majority of users as consumers, as opposed to the number of comments, which are indicative of the motivation for socio-political issues of the most active members.
Table 1. Thematic of news and type of news ordered by the average number visits.
Source: own elaboration.
Three thematic categories included in soft news receive much more visits. A pointless category, “Others”, composed mainly by humorous stories and oddities, gets the most, 10,516 in average. Then, two categories follow, “Society” and “Culture and shows.” On the opposite, most of the hard news categories get less visits: “Justice”, located at the end of the list, is the one that gets the smallest average number, with almost 7,400 less clicks than “Others”. The categories included in general news, “Science and Technology” and “Health” are located in the middle of the list.
Table 2. Hard, soft and general news and average number of clicks.
Source: own elaboration.
The summary in Table 2 show that soft news receive in average almost 4,000 more clicks than hard news (9,562.7 and 5,599.4 clicks, respectively).
3.2. Which kind of news do users comment more
Six thematic categories included in the hard news type get the highest amount of comments. They are Violence and discrimination against women, LGBT, Education, Politics, Economy and Immigration.
Table 3. News by thematic category and type ordered on average comments.
Source: own elaboration.
On the other end, a soft news type category, others, which had the higher amount of visits, obtains the lower number of comments in average (51.5), while Politics, a category included in hard news type, having been the third with less clicks, is now the fourth category with more comments.
Table 4. Average comments by news type.
Source: own elaboration.
A clear difference between types of news can be seen in Table 4: hard news get more comments than soft news on average (83.3 and 69.5 respectively) and general news are the ones that get least comments (75.5).
3.3. Relationship between clicks and comments
It seems that clicks and comments work in an opposite way. As it is seen in Graphic 1, if we correlate the average of comments of the thematic categories with their average of clicks the result is R = -0.31. This means that there is a negative correlation, with a moderate strength, showing this tendency: an increase in clicks means a decrease in comments, and vice versa.
Source: own elaboration.
Graphic 1. Correlation between clicks and comments by thematic categories in the news of the front page of Menéame.
This negative correlation points that comments and clicks are the indications of very different interests of the users of the network. The interest for public matters, expressed by the comments, has a tendency to work disregarding the interest for entertainment, manifested by the clicks.
3. Discussion and conclusions
The findings indicate that clicks and comments are indicators of two kind of interests of the readers. If we examine these motivations in the light of the uses and gratifications theory, the conclusion is that clicks are more connected with entertainment while comments relate to participation in public issues.
The findings indicate that both elements work with an opposite logic in the social network Menéame. There is a clear tendency: as comments increase, clicks decrease, and vice versa. If we project this result to the field of news media, the implication for journalists is that it is not convenient to rely only on one of the elements to make decisions for gatekeeping and edition, especially on clicks. Users can visit massively several kind of news, but actually commenting means much more concern and interest for public issues. The fact that hard news get more comments leads us to think that the criteria for relevant news of these users are more close to those traditionally attributed to journalists.
Contrary to this, clicks are the manifestation of the motivation for entertainment and scape. Users enjoy leisure given specially by soft news, knowing that they have been promoted with the votes of other users so, presumably, even these news can have some guarantee that they will respect several basic requirements.
The community of users of the social news network Menéame moves in a permanent dilemma to choose among the engagement with the most relevant news from the socio-political point of view and the foray into the news for scape. The first ones are worth for them to engage in a higher participation while the last ones only deserve a click. Further investigations are needed to see if these characteristics attached to this community are common in other social networks.
References
AUTHORS
Begoña Zalbidea Bengoa: Journalism Department. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
She holds degrees in Information Sciences and Law, and a PhD in Journalism for which she won an Extraordinary Doctoral Prize. She is a Professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Before dedicating herself to teaching, she worked as a journalist for different mass media. Between 2007 and 2011, she edited Zer. Revista Científica de Comunicación Social. At present she is a member of its Editorial Board. She is also a member of the Scientific Committees of Comunicació. Revista de recerca i d’anàlisi and Fonseca. Her research and teaching activity (degree, postgraduate and master’s courses) has basically been focused on the ethics and deontology of professionals and the media, content analysis, journalistic specialisation and the history of journalism. She has been a visiting lecturer at different Latin American universities, where she taught on master’s courses and training courses aimed at teachers and professionals of communication. As well as being the Director of the Journalism Department, she is a member of the Postgraduate Committee of the UPV/EHU. She is also a member of the Board and Permanent Committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication. She directs the Ethics and Information research group. In addition to her participation in other projects, she is the principal researcher of three projects funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and of a fourth project funded by the UPV/EHU. Her work of scientific divulgation.
bego.zalbidea@ehu.eus
H Index: 7
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9518-5180
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?hl=es&user=5uyNX7MAAAAJ
Santiago Urrutia: Department of Sociology and Social Work. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
Degree in Political Sciences and Sociology from the University of Deusto (1983) and PhD from the University of the Basque Country (1999). He has been head of the Master in Multimedia Communication UPV/EHU-EITB, and he continues to form part of the Board of Directors of this Master. His teaching activity is mainly focused on Methods of Research in Communication. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Universities of Reno and Glasgow. His main areas of investigation are: 1) Communication and Journalism in European Minority Languages; 2) Media Ethics and, especially, the analysis of visual representations of sex and violence. With respect to the first area, he is a former member of the ‘European Minority Language Media and Journalism Research Group’, directed by Professor Iñaki Zabaleta. Regarding the second area, he is now in the group Ethics and Information Excellence, directed by Professor Begoña Zalbidea. He has collaborated on some 50 communications presented at national and international conferences and on 25 articles and book chapters published in journals and other publications. He has one research sexennium recognised by the CNEAI.
santi.urrutia@ehu.eus
H Index: 6
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0571-3363
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?+user=ShqcOJcAAAAJ&hl=es&pli=1&user=2_IgYxsAAAAJ
Idoia Camacho-Markina: Journalism Department. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
She is currently the Vice-Dean of Communication and Foreign Relations of the Faculty of Social and Communication Sciences of the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea – UPV/EHU). She has a Degree (1996) and a PhD (2002) in Information Sciences from the UPV/EHU, and she is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social and Communication Sciences of this university. She was in charge of the Doctoral Program in Social Communication (2009-2017) and edited the scientific journal ZER. Revista de Estudios de Comunicación (2014-2018). She has two sexennia recognised by the CNEAI. She is a member of the research group Ética , Información y Ciudadanía (GEIC – Ethics, Information and Citizenship), which is carrying out the research project “Reacciones desde la ética ciudadana en la red social ‘Menéame’ ante los contenidos de los medios de comunicación convencionales y sociales en España” (Reactions from citizen ethics on the ‘Menéame’ social network to the content of the conventional and social media in Spain), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government. Since December 2006 she has participated uninterruptedly in funded research projects, in one of which she was head researcher: “La información de salud en la prensa diaria vasca” (Health information in the Basque daily press). She is directing three doctoral theses and is the author of the book Formación de portavoces: Cómo conseguir una comunicación efectiva ante los medios y otros públicos (Training spokespersons: how to achieve effective communication with the media and other publics) and of publications on how diverse health issues are treated in the press, the educational function of the mass media, and press offices in the local administration, amongst others.
idoia.camacho@ehu.eus
H Index: 10
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2296-9472
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=ShqcOJcAAAAJ&hl=ens
José María Pastor González: Journalism Department. University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Spain.
Jose Mari Pastor González is a Professor in the Journalism Department of the Faculty of Social and Communication Sciences of the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea – UPV/EHU). He has a Degree in Journalism from the same faculty; he received a PhD from the UPV/EHU for the thesis La Información política vasca en el informativo Gaur Egun de ETB (Televisión Vasca) (Basque political news on the Gaur Egun news program of ETB [Basque Television]). He has worked at the University of the Basque Country since 2007, where he teaches News Writing in the Press, and Interpretative Genres. In the last five years he has participated in four research projects and has published articles in diverse social and communication studies journals. He is currently a member of the consolidated research group Ética , Información y Ciudadanía (GEIC – Ethics, Information and Citizenship). Pastor began his career in the mass media in 1981, working on the journal Anaitasuna and subsequently on the supplement Egunon of the newspaper Egin. He worked for Euskal Telebista, (1985-1986 and 1988-1991)) and for Euskaldunon Egunkaria and Berria, the only newspapers published in the Basque language, until 2007. As international editor of the latter newspaper, he travelled to Northern Ireland, Algeria, Western Sahara, Iraq, Serbia, Montenegro, Israel and Palestine, amongst other places. He has also won the Rikardo Arregi prize for journalism in 2004, the Argia Press prize that same year in recognition of his work for the international section of Berria and, finally, the Joan Cendrós prize (2006) for his news coverage of the Catalan elections that same year.
josemari.pastor@ehu.eus
H Index: 1
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4687-7935
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=m8WhAQ0AAAAJ&hl=es