Rosanne M. Scholl

News Recommendations from Social Media Opinion Leaders: Effects on Media Trust and Information Seeking

Polls show a strong decline in public trust of traditional news outlets; however, social media offers new avenues for receiving news content. This experiment used the Facebook API to manipulate whether a news story appeared to have been posted on Facebook by one of the respondents real-life Facebook friends. Results show that social media recommendations improve levels of media trust, and also make people want to follow more news from that particular media outlet in the future. Moreover, these effects are amplified when the real-life friend sharing the story on social media is perceived as an opinion leader. Implications for democracy and the news business are discussed.

Youth Antecedents to News Media Consumption Parent and Youth Newspaper Use, News Discussion, and Long-Term News Behavior

Intergenerational panel data are used to test a model of youth news socialization. We hypothesize that observing parent news reading and participating in family news discussions have concurrent effects on youth news use, ultimately resulting in a propensity for news consumption that persists into adulthood. Results from a recursive path model demonstrate parent communication variables have direct and indirect effects on frequency of youth news use. Frequency of youth news use, in turn, predicts news use among the same respondents 7 years later. We also find a latent, lagged effect of parent news reading on their kids’ long-term news use.

Here’s What You’ll Learn From This News Story Prior Framing and Learning Reasons From News

In the online news environment, audience information processing may be influenced by the framing not only of a news story itself but also of other messages that introduce, link to, or accompany the news content. We test these mixed media framing effects on audience reason acquisition from news content with an experiment, in which we manipulate the frame—value or strategy—of a text introduction about the issue of stem cell research, followed by exposure, or no exposure, to a video news report about stem cell research. Value framing (as opposed to strategy framing) prior to a news story increased the number of reasons for one’s own side of the issue acquired from the news report, but no effects were found on learning reasons for the other side.