How News Reading and News Sharing diverge by Jonathan Bright

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The social news gap: How News Reading and News Sharing diverge by Jonathan Bright
Journal of communication ISSN 0021-9916
Introduction
Through social media sites, individuals and news rooms share information to a large audience. However, unlike traditional outlets of information, social media platforms only consider what people like and not what they really need to read. As a result, information on social media is frequently modified to meet these factors rather than preserving the original content of the message. As a result, it leads to “social news gap” between readers on social media and traditional outlets. Through his research article, Dr. Bright gives a comprehensive insight into this phenomenon.
The researcher and author of the article is Dr. Jonathan Bright who is a senior research fellow at the oxford internet school. Dr. Bright claims to have two major research interests; investigating how new forms of communication can assist national and local governments make better decisions and how new technologies are changing the political landscape. Therefore, Dr. Bright specializes in computational approaches to the political and social sciences.
The article’s scope mainly involves the sharing patterns of information on social media sites. Generally, social media platforms are important in the dissemination of communication messages due to their popularity. On the other hand, news editors have the power to shape social media conversation through the use of social importance cues. However, there are areas of information for which this power does not apply i.e disasters and crimes. Consequently, this explains the existence of social news gap. This involves filtering of some information due to different agendas such as political agendas.
There are two specific artifacts of the research article. The first artifact relates to why some news are shared more than others? It was identified that the “importance cues” were significant in driving sharing motives. This is because people share what they deem important so that they enhance their social status. As a result, news rooms frequently manipulate information so that it may please their followers on social media sites. The second artifact relates to the existence of the social news gap. Therefore, does the type of news that gains prominence on social media differ from what is actually intended? Dr. Bright confirmed that those who receive their news from social media sites end up ha...