News 2.0 E-Book

Ahmed Al-Rawi

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Offers fresh insights and empirical evidence on the producers, consumers, and content of News 2.0 The second generation of news--News 2.0--made, distributed, and consumed on the internet, particularly social media, has forever changed the news business. News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences and News on Social Media examines the ways in which news production is sometimes biased and how social networking sites (SNS) have become highly personalized news platforms that reflect users' preferences and worldviews. Drawing from empirical evidence, this book provides a critical and analytical assessment of recent developments, major debates, and contemporary research on news, social media, and news organizations worldwide. Author Ahmed Al-Rawi highlights how, despite the proliferation of news on social media, consumers are often confined within filter "bubbles." Emphasizing non-Western media outlets, the text explores the content, audiences, and producers of News 2.0, and addresses direct impacts on democracy, politics, and institutions. Topics include viral news on SNS, celebrity journalists and branding, "fake news" discourse, and the emergence of mobile news apps as ethnic mediascapes. Integrating computational journalism methods and cross-national comparative research, this unique volume: * Examines different aspects of news bias such as news content and production, emphasizing news values theory * Assesses how international media organizations including CNN, BBC, and RT address non-Western news audiences * Discusses concepts such as audience fragmentation on social media, viral news, networked flak, clickbait, and internet bots * Employs novel techniques in text mining such as topic modeling to provide a holistic overview of news selection News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences and News on Social Media is an innovative and illuminating resource for undergraduate and graduate students of media, communication, and journalism studies as well as media and communication scholars, media practitioners, journalists, and general readers with interest in the subject.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Preface

1 News 2.0 and New Technologies

References

Part I: Content

2 Social Networking Sites and News

Introduction

News Values and Social Media News

Researching News on Facebook and Twitter

Facebook News Analysis

Twitter News Analysis

Conclusion

References

3 Fake News Discourses on SNS vs. MSM

Introduction

Fake News on Social Media

Networked Gatekeeping

References

Part II: Audiences

4 Social Media News Audiences

Introduction

Selective Exposure on Social Media

Radio News Analysis

TV News Analysis

References

5 Viral News on Social Media

Introduction

What Is Viral Content?

Emotions and Virality

Viral News and Newsworthiness

YouTube and Twitter News Analysis

Facebook News Analysis

References

Part III: Producers

6 Celebrity Journalists 2.0 and Branding

Introduction

Celebrity Journalists

Journalists and Social Media Use

References

7 Who Is Breaking News on Social Media?

Introduction

What Is Breaking News?

Metajournalistic Discourses and Breaking News

References

Part IV: Mobile News

8 Mobile News Apps as Ethnic Mediascapes

Introduction

Theoretical Framework

Mobile News Apps as Cultural Sites

Non‐English Mobile News Apps

Conclusion

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.1 Facebook news pages and frequency of total reactions.

Chapter 2

Table 2.1 Frequency of references (and average percentages) to countries by t...

Table 2.2 Frequency of references (and average percentages) to political acto...

Table 2.3 Number of news stories and retweets by the 12 news organizations.

Table 2.4 Frequency of references (and average percentages) to countries on d...

Table 2.5 Frequency of references (and average percentages) to political acto...

Table 2.6 Total frequency and percentage of the top 10 most referenced figure...

Table 2.7 Total frequency and percentage of the top 10 most referenced countr...

Chapter 3

Table 3.1 US and British MSM coverage of fake news.

Table 3.2 Topic clustering in MSM.

Table 3.3 Top 50 most recurrent words in MSM.

Table 3.4 Top 50 phrases (two to three words) in MSM.

Table 3.5 Topic clustering on Twitter.

Table 3.6 Top 50 most recurrent phrases (two to five words) on Twitter.

Table 3.7 Top 50 most recurrent words on Twitter.

Chapter 4

Table 4.1 Number of page likes and news story comments on the two TV channels...

Table 4.2 Most recurrent words used by the audience of Radio Monte Carlo's Fa...

Table 4.3 Most recurrent phrases used by the audience of Radio Monte Carlo's ...

Table 4.4 Most recurrent words used by the audience of RNW's Facebook page.

Table 4.5 Most recurrent phrases used by the audience of RNW's Facebook page.

Table 4.6 Top 20 most liked posts on RNW's Facebook page.

Table 4.7 Top 20 most liked posts on Radio Monte Carlo's Facebook page.

Table 4.8 Top 20 most frequent words in the comments on Al Jazeera's Facebook...

Table 4.9 Most frequent comment phrases on Al Jazeera's Facebook page.

Table 4.10 Top 20 most frequent words in the comments on Al Arabiya's Faceboo...

Table 4.11 Most frequent comment phrases on Al Arabiya's Facebook page.

Table 4.12 News topic distribution for the top 100 most commented‐on news sto...

Table 4.13 Most commented‐on countries in news topics.

Chapter 5

Table 5.1 News stories on YouTube and Twitter.

Table 5.2 Number of page and news story likes and comments along the 10 news ...

Table 5.3 News topic distribution along the 10 news organizations.

Table 5.4 Viral news on the four newspapers' Twitter accounts.

Table 5.5 Viral news on the four newspapers' YouTube channels.

Table 5.6 Ranking of news stories on YouTube and Twitter.

Table 5.7 Average results on YouTube and Twitter in sequence.

Table 5.8 Most liked news topic distribution along the 10 news organizations.

Table 5.9 Most commented‐on news topic distribution along the 10 news organiz...

Table 5.10 Ranking of news stories.

Table 5.11 References to specific countries in local order, politics, and spo...

Table 5.12 References to specific countries in local order, politics, and spo...

Table 5.13 Total number of Facebook users by country for the 10 news organiza...

Chapter 6

Table 6.1 Statistics on the journalists' Twitter accounts.

Table 6.2 Statistics on the journalists' Facebook pages.

Table 6.3 Categories of journalists' posts on Twitter.

Table 6.4 Categories of journalists' posts on Facebook.

Table 6.5 Geographical locations of journalists' social media followers.

Chapter 7

Table 7.1 Top 10 retweets in the data set on February 14, 2018.

Table 7.2 Most retweeted posts in the data set.

Table 7.3 Most dominant topics in the top retweets in the data set.

Table 7.4 Top 20 most recurrent words in the Twitter data set.

Table 7.5 Top 10 most recurrent phrases in the Twitter data set.

Table 7.6 Top 20 most recurrent hashtags in the Twitter data set.

Table 7.7 Top 20 most mentioned Twitter users in the data set.

Table 7.8 Top 20 most active Twitter users in the data set.

Chapter 8

Table 8.1 Selection of the top 100 news apps used in five majority English‐sp...

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Frequency of references to countries by the four channels on thei...

Figure 2.2 Frequency of references to political actors by the four channels ...

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Timeline distribution of news items referencing fake news in US a...

Figure 3.2 Top 100 words in MSM and their associations.

Figure 3.3 Top 100 most recurrent words in the text corpus on Twitter and th...

Figure 3.4 Frequency of tweets referencing fake news before the 2016 US elec...

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1 Frequency of tweets referencing #breakingnews and “breaking news....

Figure 7.2 Top 100 Twitter users based on the frequency of their tweets.

Figure 7.3 Bot likelihood of the top 2000 Twitter users.

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1 Mobile phone penetration per 100 persons. Numbers arranged as fol...

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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News 2.0

Journalists, Audiences, and News on Social Media

Ahmed Al‐Rawi

This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Al‐Rawi, Ahmed K., author.Title: News 2.0 : journalists, audiences, and news on social media / Ahmed Al‐Rawi.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020001719 (print) | LCCN 2020001720 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119569664 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119569640 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119569626 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Social media and journalism. | Mass media–Audiences. | Journalism–Technological innovations. | Journalists–Effect of technological innovations on.Classification: LCC PN4766 .A4 2020 (print) | LCC PN4766 (ebook) | DDC 302.23–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001719LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001720

Cover Design: WileyCover Images: Social Network © Ani_Ka/Getty Images, Media concept © Vertigo3d/Getty Images

To Nawal Namuq with my love and gratitude

About the Author

Ahmed Al‐Rawi is Assistant Professor in News, Social Media, and Public Communication at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the Director of the Disinformation Project, which empirically examines fake news discourses in Canada on social media and in mainstream media. His research expertise is related to global communication, news, social media, and the Middle East, with emphasis on critical theory. He has authored three books and over 50 peer‐reviewed book chapters and articles, published in journals like Information, Communication & Society, Online Information Review, Social Science Computer Review, Social Media + Society, Journalism, Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Communication, International Communication Gazette, and Public Relations Review.

Preface

This book provides an analytical assessment of recent developments, debates, and research on news, social media, and 2.0 news organizations. The main argument, which is drawn from empirical evidence, is that news production is largely biased, while news consumers are now mostly confined to their filter bubbles despite the widespread proliferation of news on social media. From the news‐consumers side, this often leads to the dissemination of disinformation as well as misinformation, phenomena related to the term “fake news”: a phrase deployed with divergent meanings and intentions. This is an important field of research due to its direct impact on democracy and politics, especially with the increasing popularity of clickbait and the influence of bots on Social Networking Sites (SNS).

The book focuses on three main areas, with emphasis on non‐Western media outlets: content (news), audiences or “prosumers” (networked audiences), and producers (news organizations and journalists). Prosumers are not only consumers of news but also producers of data (posts and comments) and metadata (clicks) who exhibit their engagement with news organizations and their news productions in different ways. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the meaning of News 2.0 and the advent of new technologies that are shaping the way news is produced and packaged, while Chapter 8 discusses mobile news: the future of news consumption.

I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Simon Fraser University's Rapid Response Fund, which provided the financial means to cover the costs of the copy editor. I would also like to thank Derrick O'Keefe, a graduate student at SFU, for his editorial assistance. Finally, versions of most of this book's materials have been previously published as journal articles, as indicated in each relevant chapter. What motivated me to produce this book is the thematic nature of the previous studies that I conducted using, primarily, computational journalism methods and cross‐national comparative research with emphasis on news values theory. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, with a focus on media produced and consumed outside of Europe and North America, remains all too rare. It is my hope that this humble contribution will encourage other researchers, especially from the global south, to pursue similar projects in the study of international news flows and journalism. Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother as a way to express my gratitude for her love, generosity, and tremendous sacrifices.

1News 2.0 and New Technologies

“News 2.0” is no longer a new term. It has been in common usage for over a decade (Meikle 2008), but it is more relevant than ever in today's world. I define it as news made, disseminated, and consumed on Web 2.0 outlets, for social media platforms have become so popular for news organizations that they are now indispensable in the news business (Newman et al. 2012; Phillips 2012). Some scholars consider social networking sites (SNS) like Twitter as news media themselves, because of the opportunities they provide for sharing news (André et al. 2012; Hermida 2013; Al‐Rawi 2016a,b) and understanding the nature of “quantified audience” (Anderson 2011). In addition, many Internet users find SNS to be far more practical than visiting each news organization's individual website, because it allows them to find their news in one place, largely filtered based on their personalized and unique preferences.

Due to fierce competition and the changing news consumption behavior of people around the world, news organizations realized the need to change their traditional one‐way communication strategy by allowing viewers to interact with the news on their websites, which included creating comments sections, allowing users to customize the online platforms according to their own preferences (Chung 2008; Chung and Yoo 2008), and sometimes even publishing readers' online comments in their print versions (McElroy 2013). These were some of the first steps taken by media outlets to broaden their readership, before the meteoric rise of SNS. Later, they created multimedia platforms, in which the news experience is characterized by three main features: portability, personalization, and participation (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2010). Interactive features provided by news organizations include discussion groups, blogs, and forums (Boczkowski 1999; Schultz 2000), which have been described as “demassified forms of feedback” (Lievrouw 2001, p. 21). All of these tools have, on the one hand, enabled journalists to interact with their readers and, on the other, allowed readers to exchange their opinions among themselves (Constantinescu and Tedesco 2007, p. 449). Many newspapers and TV stations also provide hyperlinks to other topics and stories, enabling journalists to change the news frame in a way that “emphasizes broader social and political themes,” since the “[e]xpanded framing may prove central to re‐engaging an increasingly distrusting and alienated citizenry in a 21st Century democracy” (Pavlik 2001, p. 320).

What is important here is that news is read and shared much more than before; it has become a social experience (Redden and Witschge 2010, p. 181). Hermida calls this phenomenon “ambient journalism,” which refers to “social information networks that provide an asynchronous, lightweight and always‐on communication system … enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them” (2010, p. 301). Goode notes that, in the world of ambient journalism, news stories are being “amplified, sustained and potentially morphed as they are re‐circulated, reworked, and reframed by online networks” (2009, p. 1293). Most commonly, news organizations share hyperlinks to stories posted online in order to direct traffic from SNS to their own websites, where users can comment using their Facebook and Google+ accounts (Goodman 2013, p. 48; Ju et al. 2013, p. 1). In this way, news content can be disseminated “virally” (Stelter 2007, para. 11). Further, SNS offer solutions to news organizations that are less problematic and costly than comments sections, which have become notorious for containing a great deal of incivility (Howell 2007). Braun and Gillespie (2011) call SNS “digital intermediaries,” because of their practical functions.

The interactive nature of social media has revolutionized the dissemination of news. The New York Times, as early as 2010, recorded people tweeting its articles 17 times per minute, equivalent to one tweet every four seconds (Harris 2010). Around that same time, the Associated Press was believed to attract more audiences to its YouTube channel than its website (May 2010). As for Facebook, in February 2012 it was found to attract higher traffic to the Guardian's website than arrived via online search engines such as Google (Phillips 2012, p. 669). Data on the frequency of readers' visits, the time they spend on a site, their gender and age distribution, as well as the most shared, liked, and commented‐on news stories are always important to news organizations (MacGregor 2007). Phillips believes this data “is now increasingly considered necessary to ensure that news is produced in a form that is capable of spreading virally” (2012, p. 669). As a result, many news organizations implement social media guidelines for their employees and hire social media specialists in order to maintain their image and identity and enhance their public relations efforts (Morton 2010; Steyn et al. 2010; Muralidharan et al. 2011, p. 228). Among the first TV stations to use Facebook to enhance its news dissemination was ABC News, which officially partnered with the site in 2007 to allow its users to “electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new ‘U.S. Politics’ category” (Stelter 2007). By 2018, CNN, for example, employed around 150 people to tweet the news (Garrison‐Sprenger 2008) and used its “Facebook Connect” service to increase its online audiences and make them more connected (Emmett 2009). A study by Messner, Linke, and Eford found that by 2009, 81% of US TV stations had Facebook pages; by 2010, it was 100% (2011, pp. 14–15).

Social media sites themselves have been fiercely competing to attract as many readers as possible in order to guarantee the flow of money from advertisers. Indeed, this advertising revenue has been drained from the news organizations themselves, especially local and small news outlets, which have been greatly impacted by the emergence of social media outlets, forcing many to shut down or downsize. According to a report by the Pew Research Center (2018), newspaper advertising revenues reached their climax in 2005 at over $49.4 billion, but declined precipitously coinciding with the advent of social media to an estimated $11.2 billion in 2017. In other words, social media platforms have indirectly played a major role in downsizing the news industry. Facebook realized early on the importance of news consumption on its platform. In 2015, the company signed a deal with nine famous news organizations, including the New York Times, the BBC, and the Guardian, in return for a share of the advertising revenues. This deal allows Facebook to host instant news stories on its platform, so users won't need to browse to other websites in order to discover them (Evans 2015). One survey shows that online users consume news on Facebook‐recommended pages more than they do pages recommended on Twitter, especially following the introduction of the Facebook Social Reader (Mitchell and Rosenstiel 2012), though this was shut down shortly after launching. While this survey deals with the US audience, it is important to mention the results of a Pew study here, which can provide a general insight into audiences' media habits in other regions. According to this study, about 30% of Facebook users get news onsite; this is higher than for any other SNS, including YouTube (10%) and Twitter (8%) (Pew Research – Journalism Project 2013).

Despite the financial and practical advantages of knowing the demographics and reading habits of online audiences, some communication scholars warn that the increasing obsession with what readers want to read or view can force news outlets into tailoring their stories and reports to fit their audiences' informational needs. In this regard, Shoemaker and Vos assert that “hard data about what readers want to read butts up against the social responsibility canon to give readers what they need to read” (2009, p. 7). Bright and Nicholls agree, and emphasize that while statistics on stories' popularity can be useful, they have also “created worries about the potential for populism online: that editorial judgment [will] be overridden by traffic statistics” (2014, p. 178). This view is bolstered by previous studies on how audience news clicks and online preferences can affect the placement of news stories and other vital editorial decisions in relation to news production and dissemination (Thurman 2011; Lee et al. 2014).

SNS news readers are not always engaged with or interested in everything posted by a news organization, even if they follow its Twitter or Facebook page, and there's no guarantee they will engage with a particular story beyond skimming the headline on SNS. For example, when NPR posted a story titled “Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?” to its Facebook page on April Fool's Day 2014, many online readers commented on it after reading just the headline, not the full story – which of course was the joke (Dickson 2014; NPR 2014). This example sheds light on the kind of weak involvement some online readers have with news, mostly due to time constraints. Yet, this phenomenon is not confined to news stories posted on SNS outlets. Earlier studies showed similar tendencies when it came to print and online media (Garcia et al. 1991; Holmqvist et al. 2003).

The other problematic issue with News 2.0 is that some indicators of popularity may be deceiving because of the use of bots, troll armies, and paid users. In addition, relying on one indicator may not always be a good option when studying News 2.0. For example, the public Facebook pages of news organizations show their number of likes or followers. This can be an important indicator of the popularity of some pages or outlets, but it does not necessarily reflect real engagement with news. To provide a clearer picture, I used Netvizz, a social media mining tool, in mid‐2017 to extract data from 26 Facebook pages belonging to different Arabic and English news media outlets. In total, I retrieved the metadata of 157 844 Facebook posts made between January 20, 2010 and April 13, 2017, which generated 326 257 464 reactions. The digital tool has a 10 000‐news‐stories limitation, and it is not clear whether all or most of the stories were retrieved, so there is a clear research limitation here. Regarding the more than 300 million Facebook reactions, they refer to the total number of likes and emotional reactions (wow, anger, haha, awe, and sad) but do not include the number of comments and shares. A whopping 91 out of 100 of the top posts belonged to Fox News (Table 1.1), despite the fact that its Facebook page has far fewer likes than CNN and the BBC. These top 100 posts got 31 893 875 reactions, which is a useful reminder that researchers have to analyze several indictors before judging the popularity of, and audience engagement with, news organizations and their content.

In this book, I examine News 2.0 on different platforms, approaching the phenomenon from different angles using a variety of digital methods and computational journalism approaches. From the side of content and its producers, I mostly use news values theory to examine differences and similarities in news coverage, providing important insight into the nature of global and regional news flow. There are several studies that examine the comments sections of news sites using, for example, content analysis (Abdul‐Mageed 2008; McCluskey and Hmielowski 2012), but there are few empirical studies that have investigated the content of news stories posted on news organizations' SNS channels, especially from a cross‐national comparative perspective. Sonia Livingstone outlines the challenges of this type of research, but also highlights its many benefits, including “improving understanding of one's own country; improving understanding of other countries; testing a theory across diverse settings; examining transnational processes across different contexts … etc.” (2003, p. 479). This book purposefully uses many non‐English and non‐Western case studies. For decades, many scholars have been calling for a de‐Westernization of journalism, media, and communication research (Park and Curran 2000). Waisbord and Mellado define de‐Westernization as follows: “It is grounded in the belief that the study of communication has been long dominated by ideas imported from the West …. Underlying this position is the argument that ‘Western’ theories and arguments are inadequate to understand local and regional communication processes and phenomena” (2014, p. 362). The main premise behind the de‐Westernization trend is not a wholesale rejection of Western theories or media studies, but rather the “enrichment” of the available theories and methods (Wang 2010, p. 3). According to Shelton Gunaratne, de‐Westernization should refer to “the addition of multiple approaches to investigate problems in their proper context, so that factors such as culture, environment, ideology and power are not omitted from the theoretical framework or held to be constant (ceteris paribus)” (2010, p. 474). This is an issue on which Wasserman and de Beer principally agree, calling for in‐depth theoretical research rather than the mere provision of “descriptive comparative studies of journalism” (2009, pp. 428–429). One of the main problems of mainstream, Western media studies is its limited, Eurocentric and Anglo‐American coverage. For example, in their review of previous research done on news sharing, Kümpel, Karnowski, and Keyling surveyed a total of 461 research papers published between 2004 and 2014, and found that there was an obvious focus on studies that dealt with the United States (about 79%), with “only a few that addressed other countries and almost none that discussed possible cultural differences or actually made cross‐country comparisons” (2015, p. 10). Kümpel et al. recommend expanding news sharing studies “to multiple countries and cultural settings” (2015, p. 10). This suggestion was echoed by Wilkinson and Thelwall, who recommended examining “international differences in news interests through large‐scale investigations of Twitter” (2012, p. 1634). Hanitzsch, among others, has noticed obvious Western bias in the selection of academic research topics, which “giv[es] scholars from the Global North a considerable advantage” (2019, p. 214). Instead of relying on social media data in the English language alone, this book attempts to fill a major gap in the literature by examining data in the Arabic language as posted by a variety of news organizations, allowing a closer examination of international news.

Table 1.1 Facebook news pages and frequency of total reactions.

No.

Page

No. of posts

Total reactions

1)

CNN Arabic

9993

739 369

2)

The

Guardian

3241

1 963 470

3)

The

Independent

6663

5 737 015

4)

Youm 7 ()

9995

3 547 479

5)

Al Arabi

7081

1 328 947

6)

Hufftington Post‐Arabi

8366

2 022 548

7)

RT Arabic

9888

9 198 863

8)

DW Arabic

9965

8 263 656

9)

Fox News

7070

164 201 316

10)

Al Jazeera Arabic

9740

36 529 076

11)

The

Daily Mail

4195

5 128 176

12)

SkyNews

2166

1 299 939

13)

SkyNews Arabia

9936

10 936 313

14)

France24

1657

107 467

15)

BBC News

3846

7 914 869

16)

DW

7956

827 397

17)

France24 Arabic

856

942 889

18)

RT

537

633 818

19)

XinhuaNewsAgency

9983

1 805 994

20)

The

New York Times

3128

10 005 958

21)

CNN

5675

20 063 233

22)

CBC News

9981

3 519 474

23)

The

Washington Post

2283

953 095

24)

Al Jazeera English

3363

2 743 514

25)

BBC Arabic

6755

6 152 507

26)

The

Hufftington Post

3525

19 691 082

‐

Total

157 844

326 257 464

From the perspective of news consumers, I examine a variety of metrics, such as YouTube video views, number of Facebook comments, likes, and retweets. Here, the fact that some stories get viewed, commented on, liked, or retweeted more than others signifies that they are important, since online audiences not only select news articles to read but also disseminate them by liking or commenting on them. This activity can be linked to the concept of produsage (Bruns 2007; Horan 2013) because of its dual nature. According to Facebook, clicking like is an indication that someone is interested in a post or a story, which will also “be posted on [his or her] Timeline” (Facebook 2019), so liking a news story shows engagement and reflects a certain degree of interactivity with the online material. Indeed, human beings may have a variety of motives for viewing, liking, and commenting on social media posts, such as indexing materials in order to consume them at a later stage or showing engagement with certain types of materials in order to express certain political ideas or stances. Facebook likes and comments are similar to retweeting a story or sharing a YouTube video, since a user's preferences can be seen and read by their friends or followers on the site. In this way, the shared, liked, or commented‐on news story is more likely to appear on the user's social media timeline, allowing their friends and followers to further engage with the story.

In view of the rapid developments in the news industry and new technologies, I argue here that we have in fact entered the era of “News 3.0,” part of “Web 3.0,” a term coined by Manuel Castells to refer to “the cluster of technologies, devices, and applications that support the proliferation of social spaces on the Internet thanks to increased broadband capacity, open source software, and enhanced computer graphics and interface, including avatar interaction in three‐dimensional virtual spaces” (2011, p. xxvii). Many news organizations have recently employed new technologies in producing and disseminating news, taking advantage of advances in algorithmic, automated, and robo‐journalism that often involve the “use of computer software (Natural Language Generation [NLG]) to transform data and other material into a story that resembles a piece of human journalism, by following a pre‐programmed structure and formula” (Harcup 2014). The Los Angeles Times, for instance, was the first newspaper to publish an automated story about an earthquake in 2014 with the help of a robot “journalist.” China's Xinhua news agency introduced artificial intelligence (AI) anchors in 2018 that report news non‐stop to interested audiences (Kuo 2018). ProPublica became the first mainstream media (MSM) organization to create a website on the Dark Web in an effort to diversify its audiences. The New York Times later followed its example. Accessing the Dark Web requires installing a browser like Tor, so it is not as straightforward as accessing the Open Web. The author examined ProPublica's website on the Dark Web and found that it looks exactly the same as the one available on the Open Web, but it seems to be for those users who want to maintain their online privacy. Other new methods have been employed, like using 3D technologies in making and disseminating news (e.g. Sky 3D in the United Kingdom), 360‐degrees news, and Snapchat (Lichterman 2015). Outlets such as RT Arabic and CNN have developed virtual reality (VR) news to micro‐target specific audiences. These and other news organizations have embraced the potential of Web 3.0: innovation fueled by a variety of new technologies, including mobile apps.

Despite all this, news organizations' new practices, as well as the algorithms used by many SNS, do not seem to assist news consumers in being more informed. Instead, consumers and users are increasingly becoming insulated by focusing on personalized content and sensational entertainment. Another drawback is that some of these new technologies can be used against the interests of the public, such as the phenomenon of “deep fakes,” which utilize AI techniques to make fake images and videos look real (Shwartz 2018). The use of online bots or automated accounts can also enhance the problems that exist in spreading fake news on social media (Al‐Rawi et al. 2019). The disinformation problem is exacerbated by the reluctance of social media platforms to act effectively and promptly. For example, Facebook promised after the 2016 US election to act fast to end the spread of conspiracy theories by working closely with fact checkers; however, the results were not satisfactory, prompting many fact checkers to quit when the platform did not implement real changes (Levin 2018). Also, these platforms have themselves become a favorite venue from which to launch attacks against the news media by trolls, political parties, and public figures. For instance, the database of Google's Transparency Report, which includes details on political advertising on Google and YouTube, shows hundreds of content items attacking MSM. As of July 2019, almost all such ads in the United States are paid for by US President Donald Trump and his official political campaign. Facebook Ads Archive, which provides details on paid political ads in several countries around the world, turns up the same issue when searching for ads referencing “fake news” in the United States: the highest number of paid ads associating MSM with fake news are posted by Trump and his official campaign, bringing in millions of dollars for Facebook. Unfortunately, this is another way in which social media outlets are assisting in undermining the credibility of MSM, by providing a venue for attacking journalists and news outlets.

In terms of future news research, there are promising opportunities. Mobile news apps are still highly under‐researched, especially the means by which audiences interact among themselves in a high‐tech version of the comments section. Also, there are many digital tools and online platforms that can be better utilized by researchers for the future study of news. For instance, Facebook Ads Manager is an interesting platform that can be employed to understand the demographics of Facebook news production and dissemination. It can provide detail on international audiences' consumption of news along different variables, including gender, age, geographical location, educational level, ethnicity, interests, and so forth. This tool has recently been employed in many different studies to identify audiences' interests regarding a variety of issues, such as news bias, disease surveillance, migrant monitoring, gender gaps, and schizophrenia awareness, among other things (Araujo et al. 2017; Saha et al. 2017; Zagheni et al. 2017; Fatehkia et al. 2018; Ribeiro et al. 2018). For example, there are 6.7 million users on Facebook, aged from 18 to over 65, who show interest or engagement with the following media outlets: the Globe and Mail, ABC News, CNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC News, CTV Television Network, CBS News, the Washington Times, CNN, Fox Broadcasting Company, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal. To give another example, there are over 13 million people worldwide interested in the Fox News channel, including 6.8 million males and 6.8 million females aged between 18 and over 65. Geographically, there are 110 000 users in the United Kingdom, 67 000 in Australia, and 140 000 in Canada interested in this news channel.

There are many other avenues opening up for future research. The GDELT Project, a global media‐monitoring database associated with Google Jigsaw, offers some interesting areas of news research, though there are limitations in terms of its thematic and visual classification of news stories. It can be used to examine and test several theories and concepts related to news values, biases, agenda setting, and intermedia agenda setting.

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