Offers fresh insights and empirical evidence on the producers, consumers, and content of News 2.0   

The second generation of news—News 2.0—made, distributed, and consumed on the internet, particularly social media, has forever changed the news business. News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences and News on Social Media examines the ways in which news production is sometimes biased and how social networking sites (SNS) have become highly personalized news platforms that reflect users’ preferences and worldviews. Drawing from empirical evidence, this book provides a critical and analytical assessment of recent developments, major debates, and contemporary research on news, social media, and news organizations worldwide.

Author Ahmed Al-Rawi highlights how, despite the proliferation of news on social media, consumers are often confined within filter “bubbles.” Emphasizing non-Western media outlets, the text explores the content, audiences, and producers of News 2.0, and addresses direct impacts on democracy, politics, and institutions. Topics include viral news on SNS, celebrity journalists and branding, “fake news” discourse, and the emergence of mobile news apps as ethnic mediascapes. Integrating computational journalism methods and cross-national comparative research, this unique volume:

• Examines different aspects of news bias such as news content and production, emphasizing news values theory
• Assesses how international media organizations including CNN, BBC, and RT address non-Western news audiences
• Discusses concepts such as audience fragmentation on social media, viral news, networked flak, clickbait, and internet bots
• Employs novel techniques in text mining such as topic modeling to provide a holistic overview of news selection

News 2.0: Journalists, Audiences and News on Social Media is an innovative and illuminating resource for undergraduate and graduate students of media, communication, and journalism studies as well as media and communication scholars, media practitioners, journalists, and general readers with interest in the subject.

AHMED AL-RAWI is an Assistant Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and Director of the Disinformation Project, empirically examining fake news discourses in Canada on social media and mainstream media. He is the author of several books and over fifty peer reviewed book chapters and articles published in journals including Information, Communication & Society, Online Information Review, Social Science Computer Review, and International Journal of Communication.

About the Author ix

Preface xi

1 News 2.0 and New Technologies 1

Part I Content 15

2 Social Networking Sites and News 17

3 Fake News Discourses on SNS vs. MSM 47

Part II Audiences 75

4 Social Media News Audiences 77

5 Viral News on Social Media 107

Part III Producers 137

6 Celebrity Journalists 2.0 and Branding 139

7 Who Is Breaking News on Social Media? 159

Part IV Mobile News 181

8 Mobile News Apps as Ethnic Mediascapes 183

Index 203