Presenting News on Social Media

With the rising popularity of social media as news sources, a new common format element for presenting news has emerged: in addition to the classic headline, lead and picture, news organizations add a status message when they share their news articles on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Based on media logic theory, we argue that the communication style of these messages is likely to be more interpersonal and subjective. To investigate this we used computational text analysis to compare status messages to headlines and leads, covering nine newspapers from the Netherlands and Flanders over a period of 2.5 years. We conclude that newspapers use status messages to add a subjective expression to news on social media, and call for research into how this takes shape and affects the audience.