Consumption and supply of news on social media. Case study of the #Maldonado network

Abstract

Besieged by the current crisis in their business model, the media seek to increase the number of readers. These, in turn, increase driven by the news preferences of their virtual peers on social networks. In this media-digital scenario, the underlying question is: to what extent will the decisions of social network users affect the news relevance criteria taken by journalists and editors? In the current digital environment (Boczkowsky y Mitchelstein, 2022), the reader has ceased to be one more among other extra-media factors to permeate the editorial work in a significant way (Vu, 2014). Hence, the growing importance of news exchanges on social networks and the ways in which it impacts the routine practices of journalists and editors incorporates new questions into the process of information production and circulation. The main hypothesis is that there is a close and causal connection between online (news sharing) and the newsworthiness editorial decisions of digital media (gatekeeping).
This study takes as input Twitter conversation around the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado in Argentina, between August and October 2017, in order to integrate two theoretical perspectives —news sharing and gatekeeping— and thus answer key questions of the current relationship between media and public. Do the media create news tailored to users located at the ideological extremes of a virtual conversation or do they maintain a moderate editorial profile? If readers matter to the media, to what extent will more ideologically intense and politically engaged users promote greater polarization among media organizations? The results of this study show that a positive correlation between ideology (cognitive congruence) and the importance given to an issue (attention) will result, in the first place, in an overrepresentation of the preferences and narratives proposed by the most «partisan» users (which are, therefore, more dependent on cognitive congruence in information consumption). As a consequence, this will lead to heightened perceptions of polarization in the virtual conversation on the Twitter network.