In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites, emphasizing traditional media and social-media logics, professional, technological, economic, and participatory logics. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with almost half of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all Scandinavian news outlets’ Facebook posts including their respective websites’ article teasers over the course of 11 months. We investigate the use of news text grammar and social-media features alongside structural influences from individual countries, outlet reach, and ownership. Findings show social-media logic to include less punctuation while employing more calls to action through the use of question and exclamation marks. Implications for news on social media are discussed.

Haim, M., Karlsson, M., Ferrer-Conill, R., Kammer, A., Elgesem, D., & Sjøvaag, H. (5/2020). You should read this study! It compares media logics on Facebook. Presented at the 70th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Gold Coast. (content_copy)