Charting the liquidity of online news

Abstract

Terms such as liquid, dynamic and fluid news have been used to illustrate and emphasize the ever-changing, user-influenced and border-crossing nature of contemporary online news. However, although often used, what such terms actually denote often remains unspecified, and no existing studies have tried to propose a way to measure and analyse the impact of liquidity’s potential on authentic online news. The three-fold purpose of this exploratory study is therefore to move towards a clearer understanding of liquid news and to propose and explore a method of empirically measuring online news’s liquidity.