Comment Counts, News Factors, and Interest in Politics as Factors of Users’ News Selection on News Websites

• In Event: The News Audience

Abstract

In this paper, we compare how the news selection of the audience on news websites is influ-enced by comment counts, news factors, and the interest in politics of the individual. Web metrics in the context of news items might complement, or even substitute, the journalistic indication of relevance online. Therefore, we conducted a factorial survey, combined with an experimental setting (N = 320 participants), and computed multi-level regressions in order to assess the impact of the aforementioned audience- and journalism–related relevance characteristics. Our results show that comment counts have at least a similar influence on the selection of news items as news factors do. However, the individual interest in politics of the users is an important moderating factor.

Authors

• Ines Engelmann, FSU - University of Jena

• Manuel Wendelin, LMU Munich