The Language and News Values of ‘Most Highly Shared’ News

Abstract

Studying the uses of language in social media news sharing is central tounderstanding how its industrial ecology operates, and how its actors and processesmight influence the production of news journalism. Google and Facebook have builtempires on the acquisition of user-generated text, and the identification, patterning,and commodification of keywords in our searches, conversations and annotations. Inthose cases, the words we most often search for or discuss have intrinsic value toadvertisers, based on their capacity to capture our browsing attention. News, too,has historically been shaped by particular rhetorical strategies, packaged withcompelling headlines, summary leads and concise, active language that demandsthe reader’s attention.Yet, little public research has been done on the language of most sharednews. For our Share Wars partners, it was critical to explore what linguistic factorspeople value in the communication of news – and whether these conform to, ordiverge from, the contemporary language of news and the traditional ‘news values’that guide journalists in filtering and selecting information that will be newsworthy –that is, timely, relevant and interesting in other ways to their audience. From anindustry perspective, if the words we share online most often emphasise particularcriteria, like the unusual aspects of an event or positive emotional reactions, thenthese may be indicators as to how journalists could shape their stories for greatershareability.Here linguist Monika Bednarek, a co-investigator on the Sharing News Onlineteam, uses computational techniques to examine how the language of a set of mosthighly shared stories constructs newsworthiness, providing insights into how newsmight be packaged for an era of social sharing