We share the sport news: News values as audience selection criteria for Czech sports media Facebook profiles
Abstract
As summarized in the newest compendium on news values (Temmerman & Mast, 2021), modern news values research has expanded its focus to include not only the media and their routines but also on the audience. This change to the subject of interest also reflects the newsroom's new social-mediaoriented routines supported by the availability of the data from digital media.
The estimated shareworthiness, defined as the news value by Harcup and O'Neill (2017) can be measured and tested against the real data of shares and likes. However, if the concept of news values is understood as a useful tool to describe and categorize the criteria applied during the news selection process in the newsroom environment, beginning with Eilders (2006), it has also been proposed to use it as the tool to assess the processes of selective attention and selective retention.
A quantitative news values analysis (Maier et al., 2018) can be performed on the data from social networks in the same way as was the original media coverage. For sports fans, media usage patterns are based on various factors including those specific to the sports sphere, including fandom identity and/or identification (Koronios et al., 2020).
The parallels between these factors and news values as the description of criteria for audience's selective attention can expand the interpretation of the findings. Analysis from the 2021 Facebook coverage of major Czech sports media shows that ethnocentric success, celebrity, competition status and human interest are among the most prominent news values factors in the top shared posts.
The strong role of self-identification in the process of selective attention can be identified in the data. Further research, including the comparison of the prioritized news values in the original media service and in the most shared stories, will bring a thorough understanding of audience selection processes in sports media, a topic that has a potential to open new perspectives on the field.