News Quality in the Digital Age

PART I: FOUNDATIONS

1. Introduction

Regina G. Lawrence and Philip M. Napoli

2. Communication Technology and Threats to Democracy: We the People are (also) the Problem

Johanna Dunaway and Nicholas Ray

PART II: MEASUREMENT APPROACHES TO NEWS QUALITY

3. Social Media Metrics and News Quality

Jieun Shin

4. Is that News for Me? Defining News-ness by Platform and Topic

Emily K. Vraga and Stephanie Edgerly

5. User Comments as News Quality: Examining Incivility in Comments on Perceptions of News Quality

Shuning Lu, Hai Liang and Gina M. Masullo

6. Beyond the "Trust" Survey: Measuring Media Attitudes through Observation

Zacc Ritter and Jesse Holcomb

PART III: ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS AND NEWS QUALITY

7. All the News that’s Fit to Tweet: Sociotechnical Local News Distribution from the New York Times to Twitter

Jack Bandy and Nicholas Diakopoulos

8. Out of Control? Using Interactive Testing to Understand User Agency in News Recommendation Systems

Judith Moeller, Felicia Loecherbach, Johanna Möller and Natali Helberger

9. Gaming AI: Algorithmic Journalism in Nigeria

Emeka Umejei

10. Editorial Values for News Recommenders: Translating Principles to Engineering

Jonathan Stray

PART IV: NEWS QUALITY, GOVERNMENT, AND MEDIA POLICY

11. How Australia’s Competition Regulator is Supporting News, but not Quality

Chrisanthi Giotis, Sacha Molitorisz and Derek Wilding

12. Government Interventions into News Quality

Philip M. Napoli and Asa Royal

13. Conclusion

Biography

Regina G. Lawrence is Research Director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, and editor of the journal Political Communication. Dr. Lawrence’s books include When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press, 2007, with W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston), Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009, with Melody Rose); and The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality (University of California Press, 2000).

Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is the author/editor of seven books, including, most recently, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Praise for News Quality in the Digital Age

The book offers a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of news quality being delivered through various communication channels. With chapters ranging from computation science to a more political theory-oriented perspective, this project offers a lot of ways to introduce students to the vital issue of assessing the quality of news that is being produced these days for public consumption.

Steven Farnsworth, University of Mary Washington

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of journalism. While many are exploring how to limit disinformation online, this group of scholars is one of the first to consider fully the crucial question of how to define quality news and increase its dissemination. The text also explores the relationship between news quality and algorithms, how artificial intelligence is affecting news production and emerging public policy efforts with the potential to shore up a struggling journalism ecosystem. Lawrence and Napoli have pulled together a stellar team of researchers pushing discussions of journalism in a digital age in a new direction.

Deborah Rae Wenger, University of Mississippi