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Spreadability and Journalism
Several researchers have been thinking through how ideas from Spreadable Media might change the way people are thinking about journalism in a digital age. See some of their work below:
- Mabel Oliveira Teixeira’s 2014 Brazilian Journalism Research piece, entitled “User X Newspaper Interaction on a Social Network Site: Evidence of Change,” draws on Spreadable Media to discuss an environment where readers “become (co) responsible for the spread of information…both within the source system, and beyond, in other environments.”
- Drury University Assistant Professor of Communication Jonathan Groves asks, “What is the best way to measure meaningful content?” in journalism. He draws on Spreadable Media and a range of other arguments to ultimately propose the idea of basing success on the longevity a piece of content has.
- Rasa Jusionyte takes themes from Spreadable Media and builds on it to look at longform journalism in a digital age and show how professionally written pieces may still have an audience…but an audience where the model for attracting readers won’t be “to go viral.”
- In their 2014 piece (in Portuguese) for the journal Contemporanea: Comunicação e Cultura, entitled “Remediation of the News Consumption Experience in Social Network Sites,” Universidade Federal de Pelotas professor Gabriela da Silva Zago and Universidade Federal do Pampa professor Vivian de Carvalho Belochio draw on Spreadable Media to set up the environmental context for journalistic content produced for social network sites, in particular the conceptualization of audiences as active participants with media texts.
- Portuguese scholar Ivan Satuf’s 2014 piece for Liinc em Revista in Brazil, entitled “A Rua Manda Notícias: Dispositivos Móveis e Manifestações Sociais na Atualização dos Critérios de Noticiabilidade,” looks to update the criteria to establish newsworthiness in light of 2013 Brazilian social demonstrations—drawing on Spreadable Media in referring to a shift from a broadcasting communication model to one more in tune with “a scenario of ubiquity and mobile media.” In the process, Satuf references Spreadable Media’s distinction of how content circulated by communities within themselves become deeply rooted in the popular memory through repetition and variation.
- On her SciLogs’s blog From the Lab Bench, Paige Brown writes about lessons from reading Spreadable Media for science journalism in this piece: “Spreading Science Far & Wide Takes Time, Design and Reader Empowerment.”
- University of Texas-Austin doctoral student Angela Lee, University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication’s Dr. Seth C. Lewis, and New York University Media, Culture, & Communication’s Dr. Matthew Powers reference Spreadable Media and other texts as a check on seeing audiences “in an ‘algorithmic’ fashion, reduced to statistical flatness” and instead focusing on “the relative empowerment” of media audiences, as part of their 2014 piece for Communication Research, entitled “Audience Clicks and News Placement: A Study of Time-Lagged Influence in Online Journalism.” This piece is based, in part, on work Lee and Lewis presented at the April 2012 International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas.