Abstract
This paper delves audiences’ responses to Chinese online news. Standing from a journalistic view, it mainly deals with how online news’ read rate is influenced by the news type and headline length. A multi-dimensional conceptualization of news type is proposed. There are various perspectives in terms of defining news type. Base on its relationship with audience, news type in this paper is understood from the typology of soft news versus hard news. Not only the news type takes a prominent role, it is found that the headline length also has conjured up inevitable effect on read rate as well. Using three coders’ rigid scheme training machine, this analysis exploring over 260,000 pieces of news from 12th February to 29th April, 2015 from one of the most popular news aggregator, Toutiao (Headline) News in China, the finding suggests that there is evidence of a moderated quadratic relationship that news types moderated the quadratic relationship between title length and read rate. As title length increased, the relationship between title length and read rate progressively became more positive for hard news than soft news, and progressively became more negative for hard news than soft news after the peak. Moreover, analysis of nuanced relationships between different news type dimensions (topic, focus, and timeliness) and read rate or title length are demonstrated as well. Existing literature mostly define the news type from a binary perspective (treating hard news and soft news as categorical variables). To challenge the validity and accuracy issues the binary definition arises, this paper offers a new aspect in conceptualization. In comparison with both western and Chinese literature on news type definitions, we operationalize the concept from three dimensions (topic, focus, and timeliness) in ordinal scales. Implications of this paper are both theoretical and methodological. Although mutually influencing in the real world, existing journalism studies majorly discuss journalistic practices and audiences’ response individually. The nature of Toutiao News enables the study to explore audiences’ reactions on a particular type of news simultaneously. It not only offers future predictions on journalistic practice but also audiences’ tastes in China. Big data covers read ship accounting a quarter of the Chinese population, which solidities the representativeness of results from this study. Our trial on turning the dichotomized variable into ordinal one solves the traditional critique on the accuracy and validity of the conceptualization of soft news and hard news.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 28 Jul 2016 |
| Event | International Association for Media and Communication Research Conference, IAMCR 2016: Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward - Leicester, United Kingdom Duration: 27 Jul 2016 → 31 Jul 2016 https://leicester2016.iamcr.org/leicester2016.html (Link to conference website) |
Conference
| Conference | International Association for Media and Communication Research Conference, IAMCR 2016 |
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| Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
| City | Leicester |
| Period | 27/07/16 → 31/07/16 |
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