Herbstkolloquium des Forschungsverbundes „Mediatisierte Moderne“

The Social Making of News: Readership in Legacy and Social Media
In this talk we contrast the readership in legacy and social media by comparing the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. We explore the shifting paradigm of newsworthiness by showcasing a recent study that retrieved two weeks of articles published by the NY Times and Guardian and tracked the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon. We discuss the different topics emphasized by social media users, who favor opinion pieces, national, local and world news, and by newspapers editors, who emphasize sports, economy, entertainment, and celebrity news. Common to the social networking sites is the prevalence of items about arts, technology, and opinion pieces, with niche social networks like StumbleUpon and Delicious presenting a greater volume of articles about science and technology. We also discuss the role of social networking sites not usually associated with news (i.e. Pinterest and StumbleUpon) in distributing journalistic content, the potential fragmentation of audiences prescribed by social networking sites, and the arguable balkanization of readership according to interests of like-minded groups. In short, this talk examines the role of social media audiences in the networked architecture of journalism that instigates a new shakeup of newsmaking as usual.

Biography
Marco T. Bastos is the NSF EAGER Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University where he studies the social networking site HASTAC. He received a PhD and a M.Sc. in Communication Sciences from the University of São Paulo and is a Doktorand in Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt. Before coming to Duke, Marco was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Communications of the University of São Paulo and a visiting research fellow at the Department of Media and Communications of the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research explores the interplay between onsite and online networks and the cross-pollination between legacy and social media.