Fewer but More Elaborate: How Information Accessibility Filters Participation and Shapes Online News Comments

Abstract

Information accessibility in journalism operates along two dimensions that may work against each other: increasing information availability raises what news stories offer audiences, while simultaneously elevating the cognitive demands that determine whether audiences can use it. To test whether this gap functions as a participation filtering mechanism, we examine how four informational features, namely statistical information, external sources, data visualizations, and analytic style, are associated with participation volume and the linguistic structure of comments, using data journalism as the empirical context where this tension is most pronounced. Analyzing 6,400 New York Times stories and 934,992 comments from 2014 to 2022 through computational text analysis and structural equation modeling, we find that stories with higher information availability, particularly those with greater statistical information and analytic style, are associated with fewer but more analytically structured comments. Reduced participation mediates this relationship, suggesting that the availability and usability gap functions as an indirect pathway linking informational features to more elaborated audience responses. Stories published in the data journalism section show independently higher cognitive elaboration, pointing to a complementary self-selection pathway. The findings suggest that information accessibility is a structural condition of journalism that shapes not only audience engagement but who participates and how.