Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, this study investigated how the quality and reputation of news outlets were related to their social media capital. Social media capital is conceptualized as the resources that news organizations can generate via social media efforts, and measured by examining each outlet’s audience size and engagement metrics on Twitter. To triangulate findings, we used social media metrics extracted from (1) the entire population of Twitter users, as well as (2) a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users whose demographics were identified through a survey. Our results suggest that journalistic reputation is a reliable predictor of a news outlet’s social media capital. News site quality, however, was not significantly associated with social media metrics. In fact, the quality of news sites was at times related negatively to social media capital, such that, controlling for other factors, news from low-quality sites received more retweets than news from high-quality sites. This pattern was especially pronounced among politically conservative users.

摘要

借鉴布迪厄的场论，本研究调查了新闻媒体的质量和声誉与其社交媒体资本的关系。社交媒体资本被概念化为新闻机构可以通过社交媒体努力产生的资源，并通过检查每个媒体在 Twitter 上的受众规模和参与度指标来衡量。为了对调查结果进行三角测量，我们使用了从 (1) 整个 Twitter 用户群以及 (2) 美国 Twitter 用户的代表性样本中提取的社交媒体指标，这些用户的人口统计数据是通过调查确定的。我们的研究结果表明，新闻声誉是新闻媒体社交媒体资本的可靠预测指标。然而，新闻网站质量与社交媒体指标没有显着相关性。实际上，新闻网站的质量有时与社交媒体资本负相关，因此，在控制其他因素的情况下，来自低质量网站的新闻比来自高质量网站的新闻获得的转发更多。这种模式在政治保守的用户中尤为明显。