Facebook discussions of journalistic news: Investigating article objectivity, topic, and media brand as influencing factors

Abstract

User discussions of journalistic online news are a sensitive issue. First, most users do not seem to be motivated to comment on articles. Second, as far as discussions emerge, they seldom aim to create mutual understanding. Since this threatens the idea of online deliberation and might negatively affect the perceived brand images of news sites, factors influencing the quantity and quality of user comments should be investigated in more detail. In this paper, we analyze 120 articles from four German news outlets (taz.de, SZ.de, FOCUS Online, FAZ.net) and the related Facebook posts. Additionally, we analyze Facebook discussions emerging below the article posts. We comparatively assess the impact of the article’s objectivity, topic, and the media brand on the number of user comments and deliberative discussion quality. The media brand had a significant impact on the number of user comments and most criteria of comment and discussion quality. Article objectivity had a small but significant impact on the level of incivility. We propose to investigate the factor in other communication contexts in future studies.