Stories and Comments Taken From Unique Site NewsTrust
By Tony Herman
New research from students at the University of Maryland shows that lengthy, negative comments following online news stories may not just be limited to stories concerning the political arena - they can be found after business stories as well.
NewsTrust views itself as "a guide to good journalism."
Senior journalism students Ethan Rothstein, Christine Jubert, and Kaitlyn Crawford analyzed political and business stories featured on a unique web site titled NewsTrust.net.
The nonprofit California-based site was founded in 2005. Its intent is to bring both journalists and non-journalists together to critically evaluate the credibility of online news.
NewsTrust describes itself as “a guide to good journalism,” and posts news stories from various media outlets and blogs from around the country. Those signed up to the NewsTrust service reviewed stories, leaving comments and openly labeling the story as either “balanced” or “unbalanced,” “fair” or “unfair,” and other such descriptions.
Political stories draw more comments, but business stories draw longer ones.
The trio’s research – completed for a class assignment – attempted to “show the comparison between business stories and politics stories,” and, in particular, see whether “one type of story will generate more comments in the reviews than the other.” (See the end of this story for links to the actual research.)
After analyzing comments on 22 NewsTrust stories, the research team found that the difference between the length and the number of comments following the two types of stories was slight, at the very most.
“We thought the political stories would have many more comments, so I didn’t think the numbers would be as close as they ended up being,” admitted Jubert.
The data showed that while political stories generated almost a full comment more than business stories did, business story comments on average were over seven words longer.
In addition, the study indicated that negative comments were about six words longer than positive ones.
Some believe NewsTrust to be unrepresentative of most online media sources.
Some in the research team, however, are not willing to generalize the results of their study to the entire world of journalism. They feel the average NewsTrust reviewer has a different agenda than the average online news reader.
Crawford said she believes the results probably would have been different if content from sites other than NewsTrust was analyzed, citing how many people on NewsTrust review based on the journalistic aspects of a story.
“I think that if we had used sites such as CNN or Business Week, the comments would be about the content of the stories instead of about the quality of the journalism,” Crawford said. “It would be a lot different.”
Other NewsTrust reviewers agree. University of Maryland senior Robert Heald was recruited to participate in an experiment on NewsTrust because of how frequently he views and comments on online news stories. After reading and reviewing a few stories on NewsTrust, Heald said that the NewsTrust population is not typical of Internet bloggers as a whole.
“If people are going to comment on news stories, in the real world, they’re not going to comment on how well or not a story was written,” Heald said. “People like for their own opinions about the subject to be seen.”
In fact, he saw a difference when he started to write his own comment – a comment he never ended up posting.
“You’re definitely more conscious of what you’re writing on there because you know other people are actually looking to see if you care about the journalism or not.”
The research team believes their study can be the beginning of an enveloping theory about reader comments
Despite these concerns about the scope of their study, the research team considers their findings to be valid for reviews on NewsTrust, and to be worthy of further research.
The team writes that the difference in results “[was] enough to establish a sort of base for future research in this area.” It continued further in the paper by stating that the research “begs expanding.”
Jubert expressed interest in opening up the scope beyond the dual-pronged approach of political and business stories. Rothstein went bigger, saying that the research could be the tip of the iceberg of what prompts user participation in news.
“The research begs expanding because it’s worthwhile to explore what makes readers want to comment on news and why,” Rothstein said.
“If there were an established theory on the subject, online publications would be able to engage readers much more effectively.”
Click here for the actual research report.
Click here for Appendix A.
Click here for Appendix B.
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