Journalistic ideas, practices, and artifacts are manifested in content, and they reflect specific news cultures of production. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts (n = 1,004,167) produced by 478 news outlets in three Scandinavian countrys (i.e. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 57 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. likes, comments, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin, and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.

Ferrer-Conill, R., Karlsson, M., Haim, M., Kammer, A., Elgesem, D., & Sjøvaag, H. (5/2020). Finding cultures of engagement? Comparing Scandinavian patterns of engagement with news posts on Facebook. Presented at the 70th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Gold Coast. (content_copy)