Jieun Shin, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Media Production, Management, and Technology assistant professor, is the co-author of “Social Media Metrics in the Digital Marketplace of Attention: Does Journalistic Capital Matter for Social Media Capital?” published in Digital Journalism on March 2.

Shin and Katherine Ognyanova investigated how the quality and reputation of news outlets were related to their social media capital. Social media capital is the resources that news organizations can generate via social media efforts. They focused on examining each news outlet’s audience size and engagement on Twitter.

According to the authors, “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.”

Posted: March 3, 2022
Category: College News
Tagged as: Jieun Shin