Online discussions about politics and current events play a growing role in public life, they can foster positive outcomes (e.g., civic engagement political participation) negative hostility polarization). The present research examines how the use of doubtful (vs. confident) language influences behavior online events. We examine effects on comment popularity (i.e., recommendations from other us...

News reports of assisted dying can trigger individuals to end their own lives. Social media is unaccountable to guidelines on reporting suicides. Radian6 social media analysis software was used to explore whether Twitter messages breached guidelines on reporting assisted dying more often than formal online news. Tweets and online news were compared by how frequently “assisted dying” was colloca...

Online newspapers, having existed on the Internet for a couple of years, are now having similar form and content, starting to shape what could be called a genre. We have analyzed the news sites of nine Swedish local newspapers using a repertoire of genre elements consisting of navigation elements, landmarks, news streams, headlines, search/archives and advertisements. We have also interviewed 1...

Searching health information on web has become an integral part of today's world, and many people turn to the Web for healthcare information and healthcare assessment. Our pilot study investigates users' preferences for the type of search results (image, news, video, etc.), and investigates users' ability to accurately interpret online health information for the purpose of self­diagnosis. The p...

This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-rep...

Online news has gradually become an inherent part of many people’s every day life, with the media enabling a social and interactive consumption of news as well. Readers openly express their perspectives and emotions for a current event by commenting news articles. They also form online communities and interact with each other by replying to other users’ comments. Due to their active and signifi...

The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called ‘grassroots’ or ‘citizen’ journalism, which uses the World Wide Web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is drive...

Recent studies have shown that micro-blogging services such as Twitter can outperform online news aggregators in reaction time to breaking events. On the other hand, disadvantages of Twitter, such as low signal-to-noise ratio, inaccuracy of geographical data, and lack of in-depth analysis prevent it from becoming a reliable news source. In this paper, we investigate how the different informatio...

The online content market for news and music is changing rapidly with the spread of technology and innovative business models (e.g. the online delivery of music, specialised subscription news services). It is correspondingly hard for suppliers of online content to anticipate developments and the effects of their businesses. The paper describes a prototype multiagent simulation to model possible...