The Logics of Social News: How Buzzfeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.Tv Are Making News More Engaging, Sociable, and Personal

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The Logics of Social News: How BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv are Making News More Engaging, Sociable, and Personal

Edward Hurcombe

BA(Hons). University of Melbourne

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Communication Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology

2019

Keywords

BuzzFeed Junkee Pedestrian.tv News Journalism Digital journalism Audience engagement Sharing Personalisation Sociability Popular culture Social media Platforms Textual analysis Social media analytics

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Abstract

In recent years, disruptive digital technologies, monopolising platforms, fragmented and partisan news publics, and failing revenue streams have led to growing concerns regarding the health of journalism. Yet a number of commercially successful news outlets, that share common stylistics and operate in similar ways, have arisen from these developments. Journalism researchers, however, currently lack categories in which understand and evaluate these outlets.

In response, this thesis proposes, conceptualises, and illustrates the emerging genre of “social news”, comprising specific forms and practices that are recognisably journalistic yet deeply embedded in the everyday cultures of social media platforms and the broader Internet. Specifically, it examines three exemplary Australian born- digital publications – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. These outlets are critically evaluated using a mixed methods approach that combines textual analysis of content and self-representational material from social news outlets, along with close readings of platform affordances, and social media analytics. In addition, a comparative content analysis of news articles is performed, based around a significant news event: the 2017 Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. This mixed methods approach ultimately enables investigation of the origins and operational logics of these social news outlets, and a broader evaluation of this genre’s capability to inform and educate audiences, and scrutinise and challenge power.

Findings are organised into three key, intertwining social news logics, constructed for the purposes of analysis. These logics are termed “engagement”, “sociability”, and “personalisation”. Engagement refers to the commercial prerogative of social news outlets to maximise social media attention metrics, as well as how these

iv outlets also attempt to foster civic action of various kinds. Sociability refers to the creative fashion in which these outlets seek such reader engagement, through organising their content around shareability. Social news outlets embody particular kinds of platform vernaculars and pop-cultural sensibilities: their fluency in these vernaculars and sensibilities supports their suitability for everyday socialising on platforms. Lastly, personalisation refers to how these outlets are co-ordinated around the personal. Social news writers position themselves within the stories they are telling and the issues they are reporting on, and against other political perspectives: social news, therefore, is frequently not “objective” or “balanced”, but neither is it biased, as its political perspective is often explicit rather than concealed. Instead social news features what this thesis terms a “transparent positionality”: an original intervention into the impasse around “objectivity” as a measure of trustworthiness and quality in news reporting. Furthermore, personalisation is a business strategy, as these outlets deploy micro-targeting on

Facebook and Twitter.

The conceptual framework of social news proposed in thesis responds to the need for new theory to understand current transformations in news and journalistic practices in relation to digital disruptions (Deuze & Witschge, 2017). A foremost benefit of this framework is that it highlights that emergent characteristics of social news – its challenge to problematic journalistic norms like “balance”, and its playful engagement strategies – can be considered useful experiments or even necessary antidotes to perceived failings of mainstream journalism. In these ways, social news is an important site of study that provides new knowledge about how journalism is co-evolving with a platform ecology, both reflecting and negotiating its challenges.

Table of Contents

Title page ...... i Keywords ...... iii Abstract ...... iv Table of Contents...... vi List of Tables ...... viii List of Figures ...... ix Statement of Original Authorship ...... x Acknowledgements ...... xi Previously Published Content ...... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Overview ...... 1 1.2 Research design ...... 10 1.2.1 Social news outlet selection ...... 12 1.2.2 Qualitative textual analysis...... 14 1.2.3 Major case study: the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey ...... 18 1.2.4 Limitations ...... 21 1.3 Thesis structure ...... 23 Chapter 2: Positioning social news within the Australian news media ecology ...... 28 2.1 Introduction ...... 28 2.2 Australian media histories and scholarly debates ...... 29 2.3 Innovative journalism in late-night television ...... 39 2.4 Digital disruptions in the Australian news ecology ...... 42 2.5 Social news profiles ...... 46 2.5.1 BuzzFeed Oz News ...... 46 2.5.2 Junkee ...... 51 2.5.3 Pedestrian.tv ...... 58 2. 6 Social news as an emerging genre ...... 61 2. 7 Conclusion ...... 70 Chapter 3: Social media logics ...... 72 3.1 Introduction ...... 72 3.2 (Mass) media logics and their conceptual offshoots ...... 73 3.3 Social media logics ...... 80 3.3.1 Programmability ...... 82 3.3.2 Connectivity ...... 86 3.3.3 Datafication ...... 96 3.3.4 Engagement ...... 101

3.4.5 Self-branding ...... 107 3.3.6 Automation ...... 109 3.4 Governance by algorithms ...... 111 3.5 Algorithms and news ...... 114 3.6 Social news logics ...... 118 3.7 Conclusion ...... 121 Chapter 4: Engagement ...... 123 4.1 Introduction ...... 123 4.2 Audience engagement ...... 125 4.2.1 Trolling for reactions, comments, and shares ...... 133 4.2.2 Social news outlets and civic practices ...... 143 4.2.3 Advocacy and activism in the same-sex marriage postal survey ...... 148 4.3 Conclusion ...... 154 Chapter 5: Sociability ...... 156 5.1 Introduction ...... 156 5.2 Connectivity and sharing on social media ...... 157 5.3 Shareability emerging from platform vernaculars ...... 166 5.4 Creating connections through affect ...... 175 5.5 Constitutive humour instead of “togetherness” ...... 179 5.6 Sociability in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey ...... 182 5.7 Conclusion ...... 188 Chapter 6: Personalisation ...... 191 6.1 Introduction ...... 191 6.2 Personalisation as a business model ...... 192 6.3 The personable and the personal in social news-writing ...... 198 6.4 Positionality and challenging “objectivity” ...... 204 6.5 Positionality in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey ...... 217 6.6 Conclusion ...... 225 Chapter 7: Conclusion ...... 227 7.1 Summary of contribution ...... 227 7.2 Fragmented news publics? ...... 232 7.3 Future of “objectivity” in news ...... 234 7.4 Futures of social news ...... 236 7.5 Emerging research questions ...... 244 References: ...... 249

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List of Tables

Table 1. Number of articles collected during survey ...... 19

Table 2: Articles and article types during survey ...... 221

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Understanding social news through three interrelated contexts ...... 11

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not previously been submitted to meet

requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the

best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously

published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: QUT Verified Signature

Date: 16 July 2019

Acknowledgements

A doctoral thesis tends to be framed as a solitary journey: supervised, but undertaken and completed largely by the sheer diligence and competence of the student. My own PhD experience was quite different. For when I reflect back on the last three years, I think mostly about the people with whom I have completed this thesis, together.

To start, my supervisors, Professor Jean Burgess and Associate Professor Stephen

Harrington, who I owe foremost thanks. Especially Jean, my principal supervisor.

Thank you, Jean, for your persistent and tireless support, for your care, for your humour, and for continually challenging me to think more critically and to argue more rigorously. Thank you, also, for believing in me.

I also have been very fortunate to complete my thesis research with the assistance of an Australian Government Research Training Program Stipend and a

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Top-Up Scholarship, and with the support of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and the broader QUT postgraduate community. During my three years in Brisbane, the DMRC became a home away from home for me. A place where I spent my day-to-day, learning, collaborating, but most importantly connecting (in that meaningful, personally way) with so many, so many in fact that it is difficult to do justice to them below.

But I will try.

Firstly, thank you to the many postgraduate and PhD students that have been an amazing source of peer support, but more importantly, of friendship. Ari, Silvia,

Ehsan, Stef, Emma, Hannah, Fiona, Rosie, Aleesha, Jarrod, Kelly, Smith, Gabbi,

Katherine, Sara, Bondy, Sofya, Matty, along with many others (including

Honourary HDR Brendan). When I started this PhD, I did not expect to meet such

beautiful people to converse, laugh, and – crucially, as the thesis dragged on – vent

with. Thank you for always being there. I realise that the HDR community at the

DMRC is special, and I hope I did my best to continue that supportive tradition

with the next generation of PhDs. Secondly, I would like to thank my DMRC

mentors: not just my supervisory team, but also people like Dr. Aljosha Karim

Schapals and Dr. Tim Highfield, who have given me their time and their

encouragement when they never needed to.

Thank you also to the people outside the DMRC, which this PhD has brought me

to – in particular, my fellow students from the 2018 Oxford Internet Institute

Summer Doctoral Programme. It was amazing meeting such bright, peer-

supportive people from all over the world. I know you will all go far.

Now, my family. I have been very privileged to have a mother, father, and brother

who have not only supported my academic pursuits, but also have understood and

empathised with the unique struggles of a PhD life. Thanks, Mum and Dad, for

reading and proof-reading my drafts, and for the Sunday night calls. It was so hard

to leave home, but you all made sure that home never left me. Part of growing up

has been me realising just how lucky I have been.

And finally, Alice. You have been the best and most unexpected surprise of the

PhD.

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Previously Published Content

Hurcombe, E. (2019). “Cloudy with a chance of sh!tstorm”: Examining the role of social news outlets in the Hack Live: Is Male Privilege Bullsh!t? social media ritual”. In A.K. Schapals & A. Bruns, (Eds.), Digitizing Democracy. London: Routledge. Hurcombe, E., Burgess, J., & Harrington, S. (2019). What’s newsworthy about ‘social news’?: Characteristics and potential of an emerging genre. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918793933

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Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Overview

On 14 August 2015, the Twitter account @RealMarkLatham was observed sending abusive messages to prominent Australian women in the media and the military.

The account appeared to be impersonating Mark Latham, the former, notoriously belligerent, leader of the Australian Labor Party. Yet by digging up the account’s old tweets, analysing the language of tweets both new and old, and by checking connections between Twitter accounts, a reporter deduced that @RealMarkLatham was not some anonymous imitator after all (Di Stefano, 14 August 2015). Instead,

Mark Latham – a man who came close to being Prime Minister – really was using what was made to look like a parody account to fire off insults and provocative one-liners specifically targeting women who had criticised him in the past. Among his targets were transgender military officer Cate McGregor, former Australian of the Year Rosie Batty, current affairs host Leigh Sales, and author and media personality Tara Moss. Soon after being unmasked, Latham had quit his job at the respected legacy outlet Australian Financial Review and before long, he began a new career as a far-right cultural commentator: initially through frequent appearances on Sky News, Australia’s conservative cable news broadcaster, and then in videos posted weekly to his Facebook page.

Yet, this news scoop was not the work of one Australia’s established and prestigious outlets, such as The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald. Instead, it was

BuzzFeed Oz News reporter Mark Di Stefano – just 25 years old when he was appointed the outlet’s first political editor (Christensen, 10 September 2015) – who broke the story. Moreover, the article in which he did so was full of media objects

1 familiar to a regular user of social media – GIFs, infographics, embedded tweets and screengrabs of recently deleted tweets, most of which served as evidence in

Stefano’s investigative reporting – and was written in the personal, informal, and irreverent style typical of social media user cultures. It was, in these ways, a news article reporting on social media, produced by an outlet that seemed born to be from and for a social media ecology. At the same time, this was not frivolous news content – a characteristic of which BuzzFeed had been regularly accused. This was a serious exposé of an influential political figure, which also revealed the prevalence of misogynistic online trolling practices beyond underground spaces and subcultures, in contrast to how Australian news media typically framed and reported on online trolls. The article indicated how Australia’s media and journalistic landscape was shifting, and in particular how this had something to do with the growing centrality of social media platforms – and their logics, users, and cultures – in relation to the production and consumption of news, to the extent that they also needed to become objects of reporting. At the same time, Latham’s subsequent regular appearances on Sky News – alongside frequent columns in another Murdoch-owned outlet, the Sydney-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph

– demonstrated the rising currency of social media notoriety within, particularly conservative, legacy media. In these ways, Di Stefano’s BuzzFeed Oz article showed how both old and new media, conventional journalistic practices and innovative digital techniques, along with the cultural and political practices of the

Internet, were all transforming together.

Journalism researchers, however, currently lack categories in which to understand and evaluate these transformations – nor is there a defined label to describe the kind of news content BuzzFeed Oz and other similar outlets produce. For BuzzFeed

Oz is not the only outlet that creates this kind of news. There are other successful

Australian born-digital outlets – such as Junkee and Pedestrian.tv – whose news content shares characteristics with and who operate in similar ways to BuzzFeed

Oz. Due to these shared qualities and operational practices, I argue that the output of these outlets should be viewed as constituting an emerging genre of news, which

I term “social news”.

At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have raised concerns regarding their effects on the health and sustainability of journalism. Yet, as BuzzFeed Oz’s article on Mark Latham indicates, social media are also at the heart of some of the more innovative developments in socially progressive journalism that are occurring in response to the economic and technological developments of recent years (Deuze & Witschge, 2018). In this thesis, I develop a conceptual framework to better understand the transformations in news and journalism which social news embodies. I do so as new concepts and approaches, as Mark Deuze & Tamara Witschge have argued, are necessary and “productive in this time of flux” (2018: 177). This means going beyond journalism, in terms of how the latter has traditionally been conceived – as a coherent and stable institution

(Hallin, 1992) with its own “occupational ideology” (Deuze, 2005), normative values (such as “objectivity”), professional culture and practices, and conventional news formats (Harrington, 2008). These traditional conceptions are not fully equipped to address questions about “what” social news is, or to evaluate its journalistic potential. Why do these outlets share these characteristics, where are they coming from, how do they operate, and what can their output tell us about how news and journalism are co-evolving in relation to social media? And, lastly, what are the implications of the growth of social news for the future of journalism,

3 and journalism’s traditional societal function of informing audiences and scrutinising power? All these are questions that this thesis asks and investigates.

In order to answer these questions, I unpack logics of social news. Logics are defined as organising principles and valuing regimes (Altheide & Snow, 1979), which govern how news is selected, produced, composed, and communicated.

Studying “logics” not only draws attention to the technological, cultural, and economic forces underpinning and driving social news, but also how these forces shape operational practices, communication styles, and news values – and thus journalistic potential. I study these logics through a close study and detailed exploration of the three exemplary outlets producing social news: BuzzFeed Oz

News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. As a way of examining how these outlets operate in society in comparison to established Australian legacy outlets, I also conduct a case study of a major Australian news event: the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey.

The analytical framework that I constructed for the purposes of this thesis comprises three intertwining social news logics: “engagement”, “sociability”, and

“personalisation”. This framework was reflexively developed from my findings and analysis. These three logics are not necessarily wholly descriptive of social news phenomena; there may be other logics through which outlets like BuzzFeed

Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv could be understood. They were, however, those best suited as an analytical framework for the findings in this thesis. “Engagement” refers to how social news content is organised around seeking “audience engagement”: on the one hand, through maximising social media attention and interaction metrics in order to boost visibility on those platforms, and, on the other, by attempting to grab and sustain audience attention so as to encourage political

4 action on certain social justice issues. “Sociability” is the creative fashion through which such audience engagement is sought, that is, by organising news content around shareability. Social news outlets’ fluency in platform vernaculars – GIFs, acronyms, memes, and the like – and its pop-cultural sensibilities reflect their deep connection to the user cultures of social media platforms, and thus their suitability for the kinds of everyday socialising practices that occur on these platforms. Lastly,

“personalisation” refers to how social news content is co-ordinated around the personal. In one sense, personalisation means writers tend to appeal to and foreground the personal, and position themselves in the issues they are discussing and the stories they are reporting, thus breaking with journalistic “objectivity” and instead featuring a transparent positionality. In another sense, personalisation is a business strategy: a way of appealing to a narrowly-defined demographic – young, politically progressive Australians, in the case of BuzzFeed, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv – and how social media platforms support and encourage such micro- targeting.

In the following chapters, I elaborate on and illustrate these logics. This thesis will show how the outlets that I examine exhibit developments in socially progressive, entertaining, and critical news, occurring precisely in response to – and in tandem with – economic, technological, cultural, and socio-political developments in recent years. In this sense, social news is a site of study that provides new knowledge about how journalism is co-evolving with this environment, both reflecting and negotiating its challenges.

For the emergence of social news comes at a time when social media, to most observers, are seen as a major threat to the news business and to journalism, not a site for new models of it. This is because mainstream news and journalism remain

5 in an ongoing crisis as they attempt to adapt to and co-evolve with a multi-platform digital media ecology. The crisis is economic, professional, and societal in nature.

In terms of the economic foundations of news, the decline in print newspaper readerships and the digital transition has not only disrupted, but fundamentally challenged traditional business models for many longstanding legacy outlets, such as The New York Times and Australia’s The Sydney Morning Herald, which were largely based on a mixture of reader subscriptions, classifieds, and print advertisements. Digital subscriptions and web banner advertisements, while now widely in use, have not been nearly as lucrative as previous revenue models, resulting in cuts to and even the closure of many outlets across the Western world

(Bird, 2009; McChesney, 2012). The centrality of internet distribution, discovery, and search platforms – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to contemporary news reading practices has also presented numerous significant challenges for established outlets. There have been economic concerns, for instance, about how

Facebook’s algorithm – the programmed mechanism through which users’ news feeds are sorted – is affecting the visibility of outlets’ news output, particularly since the workings of Facebook’s algorithm are not transparent (Bucher, 2012;

Caplan & boyd, 2018). Furthermore, Facebook-led initiatives such as “Instant

Articles” – a feature developed by Facebook that hosts content from recognised news outlets, thus reducing load times for users – while seemingly presenting benefits for outlets, have also raised concerns regarding a growing economic dependency on the platform. Many outlets had already been relying on Facebook’s

Audience Network tool for readership metrics, which itself already came with revenue-sharing requirements (Caplan & boyd, 2018: 6).

Alongside and related to these economic challenges have been issues regarding the professional integrity of journalism in a social media-dominated news ecology.

News organisations are grappling with the effect of metrics and real-time audience data on the daily news selection and curation process (Anderson, 2011; Phillips,

2012; Harcup & O’Neil. 2016). These developments have intensified existing concerns about the impacts of audience-centric business models on newspaper and television news (Turner, 1999). At the same time, these metric-driven business models have been held responsible for phenomena such as “clickbait” – content that, through misleading or sensational headlines, is designed to attract attention and clicks but not necessarily sustained reading (Chen et al, 2015). Early born- digital outlets that achieved significant success on social media in early 2010s, such as the US-based EliteDaily and UpWorthy, gained notoriety for being particularly adept at “subsum[ing] their organisational practices to the logic of Facebook’s algorithms” (Caplan & boyd, 2018: 5): producing content that utilised emotional ques and manipulative “curiosity gaps” (Madrigal, 25 March 2014) to entice clicks in crowded social media feeds. BuzzFeed’s pop-cultural content – before it went into news – also achieved early success through similar devices. Established outlets have also attempted to adapt to this new “attention economy”, the latter characterised by informational noise (Goldhaber, 1997): Angela Phillips noted in the early 2010s how news outlets were chiefly promoting speed and “virality” – that is, content that is capable of spreading quickly across networks – in news production and dissemination (2012). There are ongoing concerns, then, about whether journalists in a platform-dominated news ecology are able to balance commercial imperatives with their traditional responsibilities to inform the public and hold power to account.

These concerns regarding the ways that social media are apparently deteriorating journalism’s professional ethics relate to, and compound, other broader societal anxieties. The centrality of social media in contemporary news production and circulation has provoked apprehensions about the role of personalised, algorithmic news curation in fragmenting audiences. Notable in this regard have been claims about the existence of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” in partisan social media spaces, in which algorithms work to “filter” out arguments and perspectives outside users’ existing experiences and beliefs (Pariser, 2011; Jacobsen et al, 2016).

Scholars such as Axel Bruns have questioned these claims, arguing instead that social media publics are often highly connected and aware of each other (2017).

Still, these anxieties have deepened due to a number of recent events. Most prominently, the 2016 US Presidential election, during which fabricated, hyper- partisan stories spread relatively freely on Facebook and Twitter, and appeared to influence both the broader media agenda and the election outcome (Benkler et al,

2017). The growing prominence of outlets like the US-based, far-right publication

Brietbart during this time also appeared to confirm such anxieties. The purported role of Russian operatives in aiding the spread of hyper-partisan material, apparently in an attempt to influence the election outcome, has also drawn acute attention to Facebook’s role in the news business, and the responsibilities that come with it. Similarly, the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal – which revealed that a private firm had exploited a security flaw to gather large quantities of Facebook user data, and sold it to political campaigners during the 2016 US election – further implicated Facebook’s advertising model, which has allowed “fake news” outlets and malicious actors to directly target highly specified audiences with political

8 propaganda and misinformation (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Marwick & Lewis,

2017).

Exacerbated by these developments has been the rise of what some observers have claimed to be a “post-truth” era, in which “appeals to emotion are dominant and factual rebuttals or fact checks are ignored” (Suiter, 2016: 25). Processes through which journalists have traditionally claimed legitimacy – “objective” reporting and the dispassionate delivery of news – are undermined in these concerns, on the one hand, by populist politicians who elude rigorous questioning from journalists and undermine the authority of the media in the public eye, and on the other, by the spread of fabricated “fake news” and conspiracy theories on platforms (Rose,

2017). These “post-truth” phenomena have also tapped into ongoing distrust with the “mainstream” media in the Western world, particular in the US, in recent decades (Ladd, 2010): populist politicians and malicious actors have been exploiting this distrust by framing established news outlets and journalists as out of touch “elites” (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2018). This critique of the news media, albeit in a more sophisticated form, has come from scholars as well – with

Catherine Lumby earlier noting how established news media tended to privilege, through their unique access to politicians and their narrow conceptions of politics, the back-and-forth nature of the formal political process over the concerns and

“lived experiences” of “ordinary” citizens (1999). In Australia, this critique is particularly pertinent: where a close, intimate relationship between journalists and politicians is institutionalised in the form of the Canberra Press Galley (Chubb et al, 2018), and where “insider” knowledge is both celebrated and somewhat indulged on television news programmes such as Insiders. This latter example is produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

It is in the broad context detailed above that my thesis research on social news is situated. For outlets like BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv appear to embody many of the anxieties expressed by observers; such as a break from “objectivity” and a turn towards overt political positioning, an embrace of shareability in the form of playful and pop-cultural content, and an explicit narrow-targeting audience strategy. However, while the concerns outlined above do present serious challenges for news and journalism – and thus, for the effective functioning of liberal democracies – social news, as the Mark Latham BuzzFeed Oz article indicated, also show how challenges brought about by recent economic, technological, cultural, and socio-political developments can be negotiated for the benefit of a critical, informative, accessible and even entertaining journalism. I now explain how I conducted this research.

1.2 Research design

Social news logics are informed by media, technological, industrial, and cultural contexts, and manifest in the operational practices and news values of BuzzFeed

Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. By media and technology, I mean the influence of platforms as major sites for distributing and reading news (Gottfried & Shearer,

2016; Caplan & boyd, 2018; Burgess & Hurcombe, 2019), as well other new digital tools in journalistic practice (Gray et al, 2012; Nelson & Webster, 2016); in terms of industry, I refer to the contemporary business environment in which Australian news operates; and by cultural context, I mean everyday social behaviours and meaning-making practices (Williams, 1989; McKee, 2003), particularly those pertaining to the Internet (John, 2018), through which news is received and circulated (Phillips, 2012; Harcup & O’Neill, 2016). In developing the social news logics analytical framework, I employ a mixed methods approach, which includes

10 textual analysis, quantitative content analysis, as well as the use of digital methods to collect and analyse social media data.

Figure 1. Understanding social news through three interrelated contexts

Firstly, I surveyed the media and technological context, as provided by extant scholarship, and complemented by my own analysis of Facebook and Twitter’s marketing and their platform features. Secondly, I studied the industrial context, as provided by industry press articles, and through close readings of interviews with social news staff and journalists and other self-representational material, such as

“About” web pages. Thirdly, I examined the cultural context, the nuances of which are revealed through textual analysis of social news content. Fourthly, I studied the journalistic practices of social news outlets, which are made visible through close readings of their articles.

In addition, I investigated the role and significance of BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv within significant news events in a major case study of the 2017

Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. In this case study, alongside textual

11 analysis of social news content, I undertook a content analysis by examining the broad differences between social news and legacy outlets – such as the strategic uses of positionality and “objectivity” – in the coverage of the survey. I also performed an analysis of a large Twitter data set, investigating the visibility of the outlets and their advocacy during the major Australian news event of 2017.

From this mixed methods approach, the industrial, technological, and cultural forces driving social news are detailed, and a nuanced analysis is provided of how

BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv respond to and negotiate with these forces in order to create a genre that, in many ways, embodies positive potential for an entertaining yet critical journalism. Social news logics are conceived through this inductive approach, emerging from and developed through my own analysis of the three contexts and how the social news outlets respond to them. My use of existing concepts – such as “media logics” (Altheide & Snow, 1979) and “social media logics” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013) – came about as part of this sense-making process, as I realised that they were useful ways of understanding empirical material. These concepts were not chosen from the outset of my research process, as theoretical frameworks to be proven or disproven. Furthermore, concepts that I developed were initially provisional, and thus were repeatedly tested against additional material that I gathered, in order to continually gauge the validity of these concepts. Concepts were then revised, if necessary.

1.2.1 Social news outlet selection

The research design of this thesis is guided by the close analysis of three exemplary,

Australian-based, born-digital outlets: BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv. These three outlets were selected due to their possession of similar

12 characteristics, such as those found in the BuzzFeed Oz article on Mark Latham, which first suggested to me the presence of an emerging and distinct genre. They are also outlets that have achieved considerable commercial success – and thus visibility – in Australia, further indicating to me that they deserved investigation.

At the same time, the outlets are also different – in so far as BuzzFeed Oz News, for example, embodies fewer departures from established conventions, such as dispassionate reporting, than the other two outlets. Pedestrian.tv, on the other hand, tends to be the most unconventional in terms of article format, storytelling techniques, and story choices. In these ways, BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv are framed as emblematic of social news and its varying manifestations. Some outlets are more guided by certain logics in preference to others (an example is Pedestrian.tv and the logic of sociability), while outlets also display certain logics more visibly at different times: such as how the three outlets were organised strongly around personalisation during the 2017 Australian same- sex marriage postal survey. The survey forms part of an ongoing case study in this thesis, explained further below.

BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv all share a politically progressive perspective. This is the case largely because I am not aware of examples of prominent and commercially successful right-leaning, conservative, and far-right

“social news” in Australia. The possibility of outlets from the Right bearing social news characteristics and forming part of the emerging social news genre is addressed in detail in Chapter 2. Suggestions for future research on right-leaning – and even neo-Nazi – social news outlets are also provided in the Conclusion

Chapter.

1.2.2 Qualitative textual analysis

I conducted this research by collecting large quantities of material, selected to give a varied but comprehensive picture of the social news genre, the cultural and political phenomena of which it forms part, and the Australian media context in which social news is situated. Specifically, I collected in total 1,462 news articles;

6 “About” webpages and numerous quotes and interviews that social news staff have had with researchers and the press; 656,699 tweets and 80 Facebook posts.

From these, I selected choice examples for closer textual analysis.

This means that that this material will be treated throughout the subsequent chapters as “texts”: things “which we make meaning from” (McKee, 2003: 12).

Furthermore, by treating these articles, “About” pages, Facebook posts, tweets, and interview quotes as texts, I ground them within cultural contexts and “understand them as complex artefacts produced and consumed in a complex web” (Fürsich,

2009: 247). Through this method, I work to reveal how certain cultures – in this case, politically progressive user cultures on social media platforms – “make sense of the world” (McKee, 2003: 12) through close textual analysis of content from news outlets that emerge from and cater to these cultures. I do this not so much to judge these sense-making practices against an “objective” perspective, but to try to

“map out” (McKee, 2003: 12) and understand these practices alongside other dominant practices – and, in some cases, to demonstrate not only where these practices are taking journalism, but also how they can present alternatives to dominant journalistic sense-making practices.

Thus this thesis’ methods are predominately qualitative. This is because only through close analysis can I attune to the frequently more subtle nuances in social

14 news texts that distinguish them from other news texts, such as articles from established legacy outlets. What I am looking for is the nuance of language, tone, and imagery – the peculiarities of a particular sense-making practice – which a purely quantitative study would have to neglect (McKee, 2003: 11). This is because if I relied solely on a comparative context analysis, and if I found in such a study that BuzzFeed Oz News used on average such-and-such number of GIFs per article compared to The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, this would still neglect the qualities of the GIFs in question and how they related to certain political cultures, and vernacular cultures, of social media platforms. For GIFs, like other images and gestures, possess certain histories and resonate in relation to different cultural reference points (Miltner & Highfield, 2017) – and these would be overlooked if they were simply quantified and then categorised into columns in a table. This kind of study would also omit how GIFs, and other visual artefacts like memes, are embedded within a text as part of an ongoing sense-making practice, and grounded within certain technological, economic, and cultural contexts.

By referring to such contexts, I mean that I do not study social news texts in

“isolation” – the latter a frequent critique of textual analysis as a method (Philo,

2007: 194). On the contrary: this thesis emphasises the relationship between media, culture, and industry in order to conceptualise social news as an emerging genre.

Extensive research into the industrial contexts of social news – from existing interviews between social news staff and journalists and other researchers, from

“About” webpages and press releases, and from extant scholarship – was conducted alongside the close readings of social news content. Close readings of platform features were performed in conjunction, to contextualise the operational practices of outlets. In these ways, how social news is both a symptom and response to the

15 logics, cultures, and economics of social media platforms – as well earlier and more recent developments in the broader Western media environment – is demonstrated.

There is a rationale of selection for the numerous texts that I analyse in the coming chapters. This rationale intends to map out as best as possible the characteristics and logics of the emerging social news genre, and also to continually test the possibilities and limits of social news as a conceptual framework. In this regard, from the websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of BuzzFeed Oz News,

Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, I selected articles and videos covering a range of news events, particularly those of great significance in Australia in recent years. By significance, I mean those events that received considerable news coverage in

Australia: such as the 2016 federal election, the citizenship scandals that engulfed federal Parliament in 2017 and 2018, and climate change activism in 2018. This allowed me to determine whether the chosen social news outlets cover news events in particular ways and to examine the nuances of coverage for different news events or topics. I also paid close attention to BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv news articles reporting on other media outlets, so as to get a sense of how these social news outlets position themselves within Australia’s media ecology. Over

2016-2018 there were a number of controversies in Australia’s news media which provided an opportunity for this kind of analysis, such as commercial television’s handling of public racist attacks on a sitting senator in 2017, the cable channel Sky

News’ platforming of a neo-Nazi in 2018, a Melbourne newspaper’s racist cartoon of tennis player Serena Williams in 2018, and the ABC’s handling of “balance” on its popular television panel programme, Q&A, throughout 2016-2018.

Lastly, as is evident above, early into this research project I decided to rely on existing interviews that social news staff and founders have had with researchers

16 and journalists, rather than conduct my own. This was partly due to issues of scope, and the tight schedules around completing a doctoral thesis. Largely, though, I found that quotes from and transcripts of interviews with BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv writers, editors, founders, and CEOs were already available in abundance, both in Australia’s media industry press and in previous research by journalism researchers. These suited the purposes of this thesis, and it was thus not necessary for me to seek out and undertake my own interviews. Still, limitations arose from this decision to use only second-hand interview material. Firstly, because I have to rely on the selected quotations from – and interpretations of – interviews that journalists and other researchers have made, an extra layer of decoding is necessary: to judge why certain things were said to certain interviewees and publications, for example. This is especially so when it comes to interviews with industry outlets – such as Australia’s Mumbrella – where public relations from

BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv is a significant element in their self- representation. For similar reasons, I also must be mindful of how different outlets and researchers frame these quotations, particularly when they are used in support of particular narratives about “digital media” and “start-ups”. Yet these same limitations also provided benefits: mainly, by allowing me to document the manners in which these outlets discursively position their operations, output, and business models against those of established news outlets, and analyse how these outlets are represented in the industry press. Secondly, by relying on second-hand material, I am unable to record non-verbal communication. The interpretation of such could have possibly enriched my analysis of social news self-representation.

To make up for this, I pay extra attention to the language use of interviewees.

1.2.3 Major case study: the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey

As part of and in addition to the textual analysis conducted across a range of news events and issues, I also conducted detailed a case study of the 2017 Australian same-sex marriage postal survey. I selected this case study for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the survey was a particularly significant event that received extensive coverage by Australian news media. The survey was commissioned by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National federal government to gauge nationwide support for same-sex marriage. A vote on same-sex marriage rights legislation followed the postal survey, although – controversially – members of the government were not bound by the results of the survey. Secondly, BuzzFeed Oz

News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv covered the survey comprehensively and, significantly, tended to break with journalistic norms around “objectivity” and

“balance” in their coverage – in the case of Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, the two outlets even openly advocated for the “Yes” side. Thirdly, the survey was a notable case at the intersections of transforming media and demographics: since the survey was conducted via post, and since the social news outlets were not only born-digital but also aimed largely at a youth audience assumed to be unfamiliar with this older communication system, the outlets had to educate young readers about mail in order to boost postal enrolment and the “Yes” vote. This case study runs throughout the Chapters 4, 5, and 6, in which I analyse BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv’s activity during the survey in relation to the specific logic under discussion.

Alongside the kinds of textual analysis described above, I also used other methods to conduct research on this case study.

1.2.3.1 Comparative content analysis

Firstly, I collected all the articles produced by the three social news outlets on the postal survey from 11 August – 15 November 2017, covering the period shortly after the survey was announced until two days after the results were announced. I also collected all the articles on the survey from three major Australian legacy outlets – public service media outlet the ABC, the Melbourne-based and Fairfax

Media-owned The Age, and the Sydney-based and Murdoch-owned The Daily

Telegraph (table below). I did so to perform a comparative analysis of coverage of the survey, to see whether – and if so, in what ways – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv differed in their reporting on the survey. Due to the scale of this case, and my interests in the broad differences between outlets, a content analysis was appropriate. I collected the articles from the websites and social media accounts of these outlets during the survey. After the survey I used the ProQuest and the Factiva Australian media databases to collect any news content that I missed. I stored all these articles in the digital notebook software, Evernote. Table

1 below details the number of articles collected from each outlet.

News outlet Number of articles collected

BuzzFeed Oz News 182

Junkee 142

Pedestrian.tv 183

ABC News 231

The Age 198

The Daily Telegraph 176

Total 1,112

Table 1. Number of articles collected during survey

For this larger comparative study, a content analysis was performed across the social news outlets and the selected legacy outlets. I coded for themes, news framing, and topics, as well as the presence – or absence – of “objectivity” in news coverage, to give a wider picture of differences in coverage between legacy and social news outlets, which close textual analysis of individual articles would be unable to provide. This wider picture, obtained through comparative content analysis, also helps to substantiate social news as a distinct genre.

1.2.3.2 Social media analytics

Secondly, I collected Twitter data within the same period (11 August – 17

November 2017), with an aim to examine the prominence and role of social news outlets and actors – by actors I refer to writers, reporters, editors and others associated with social news outlets – within the progressive Twitter-based publics that formed around the survey. Here, I used the automated DMI-TCAT Twitter data capture tool (Borra & Rieder, 2014) to capture tweets within keywords and hashtags specific to postal survey. Keywords included “postal survey” and “postal plebiscite”, and hashtags included “#EnrolAndUpdate”, “#EnrolForEquality”, and

“#MarriageEquality”. “#EnrolAndUpdate” and “#EnrolForEquality” were the two hashtags used by Junkee and Pedestrian.tv in their attempt to boost enrolments amongst young people, and “#MarriageEquality” was the most popular and widely used hashtag by politically progressives and “Yes” supporters on Twitter during the survey period. As the hashtags suggest, my sample was biased towards the progressive side of the vote. This is because I was not interested in the whole

“debate” around same-sex marriage but more so the role and visibility of the social news outlets in the “Yes” campaign as it played out on Twitter.

In total, 656,699 tweets were collected. I then analysed this tweet data using the social media analytics software Tableau, with the aim of revealing the most active users and the most visible users (which includes the accounts of news outlets), tweets, and hashtags within the data set. Twitter was chosen because, as will be found throughout the coming chapters, social news outlets and actors are particularly active on the platform and display a close connection to the specific cultures and publics on that platform. Furthermore, during the survey, Twitter was also the platform on which Junkee and Pedestrian.tv performed significant advocacy work: both outlets mobilised hashtags in support of the “Yes” vote. Since

I lack access to detailed electoral data, analysing visibility of hashtags and actors associated with Junkee and Pedestrian.tv in this Twitter data set helped me gauge the success of their advocacy work, which oriented largely around boosting young people’s enrolment in order to increase the “Yes” vote turnout. There was also a practical reason for this Twitter research – for unlike Facebook, Twitter’s application programming interface (API) remains relatively open for researchers to access (Rogers, 2018; Hepworth, 26 April 2018). In order to examine the coverage and advocacy work performed on Facebook by social news outlets I turned to more manual methods, such as taking screenshots for close analysis, and the manual counting of likes, reactions, shares, and comments on posts in order to gauge audience reception and engagement.

I now discuss some of the limitations of my research design.

1.2.4 Limitations

While this mixed methods approach provides a comprehensive yet nuanced account of social news logics, there are still some limitations to the research design

21 in this thesis. Firstly, although quantitative textual analysis is adept at attending to the cultural and political subtleties of articles, videos, and “About” webpages, there is a limit to the amount of texts that can be analysed in this way. I tried to cover as many significant news events as possible to alleviate this issue: nonetheless, this qualitative approach makes it difficult to state with accuracy the frequency with which BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv operated in certain ways across a wide range of news events, topics, and issues. Secondly, the lack of comparative content analyses between social news and legacy news outlets outside the major case study limits the picture that I provide regarding the differences and similarities in styles, perspectives, and strategies between the two news genres. Thirdly, in the social media analytics component of the major case study, I focused my attention on the progressive “Yes” campaign in the same-sex marriage postal survey. This meant that I lack data on BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv’s role and place within the broader “debate” on Facebook and Twitter. However, as I note in

Chapter 6 on the social news logic of personalisation, this approach was indicative of the social news outlets’ operational practices and advocacy strategies.

Specifically, as the outlets themselves were largely focused on boosting enrolments among young, progressive-minded and “Yes”-voting people, with much less emphasis on changing the minds of, particularly older, people on the conservative side.

Fourthly, and related to the previous limitation, the outlets that this thesis selected as exemplary of “social news” were all politically progressive. This means that I have not examined closely outlets from the right of the political spectrum that may share the logics detailed and unpacked in this thesis. As I stated above, this was because I could not find prominent and successful examples of right-leaning,

22 conservative, or far-right outlets bearing social news characteristics in Australia.

Still, the question of whether such outlets exist, and in what ways they should be considered “social news”, is addressed in more detail in Chapter 2, as well as in the

Conclusion Chapter, where possible research opportunities for examining social news from the Right are discussed.

I will now outline the structure of this thesis.

1.3 Thesis structure The structure of this thesis is designed to set up, and then detail, the different components of my social news conceptual framework – that is, the three social news logics of “engagement”, “sociability”, and “personalisation”. Social news, I argue, provides a pertinent and timely framework in which to work through and analyse how news and journalistic practice are transforming in relation to the logics and user cultures of platforms.

The following chapter, Chapter 2, I provide some background to the Australian news ecology, as well as earlier scholarly debates in journalism studies, media studies, and cultural studies which inform my own conceptual work. I then give profiles of BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, detailing their histories, employment demographics, and business models, as well as their relationships with each other. I then elaborate on what I mean by social news. Most significantly, I distinguish my conception of “social news” from earlier uses of the term in relation to social news sharing platforms (Wasike, 2011; Tang et al, 2011).

Chapter 3 reviews the literature on media logics and social media logics in order to develop my own concept of “social news logics”, which is then operationalised in

Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Drawing from the work of David Altheide & Robert P. Snow

(1979), I first introduce the term “media logics” as a way of studying the co- constitutive relationships between mediating technologies and the news organisations that make use of those technologies. I then examine ongoing debates around the usefulness of the term, arguing that, while there has been considerable conceptual inflation, there remains a tension in these debates between those that use the term “media logic” in reference to a dominating institution (as in, the logic of mass news media), and a “media logic” that places emphasis on the organising principles of mediating technologies, and their resulting influence on news work. I then relate these debates to contemporary research on social media platforms and news, in turn examining what José van Dijck & Thomas Poell have called “social media logics” (2013). I then attend to how algorithms – the programmed solutions to particular technical problems (Knuth, 1968: 27) – govern social media logics, and in turn influence how news operates on platforms. I argue that these technological and algorithmic social media logics provide useful groundwork for the three following chapters on social news logics. Social news logics, I argue, are organisational principles of the institutional kind that reflect and respond to the user cultures and the logics – in the “media format” sense of Altheide & Snow and van

Dijck & Poell – of social media platforms.

As previously noted, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 elaborate and illustrate the three social news logics in detail, working through a rich series of examples from BuzzFeed Oz

News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv and the case study news event, the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Chapter 4 concerns the logic of engagement. I begin by relaying how “audience engagement” has become a prominent theme in contemporary newsrooms, but note that there has been considerable disagreement about what “engagement” entails, and the ways in which it can be maximised. I

24 first perform a literature review on “audience engagement”, arguing that there have been two interpretations of the term: one which places emphasis on a “reciprocal” or civic journalism that uses platforms’ interactive affordances to “engage” readers in dialogue; and another usage, which interprets “audience engagement” as the maximisation of audience attention and interaction metrics for commercial purposes. Like other news outlets, BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv are organised around “engagement”, yet, I argue, they present a third way outside this commercial/civic binary. I examine how accumulating shares, comments, retweets, likes, reactions, clicks, and so on are a constant concern for social news outlets. At the same time, I go on to argue, this concern does not preclude attempts at operationalising a more “civic” engagement, in the sense of producing novel news content, written in informal and conversational styles, which tries to help readers navigate, relate and thus better understand the news. In the last section of the chapter, I argue that social news outlets also perform engagement in an activist sense, as I examine how the outlets encouraged readers to enact social change through participating in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey.

Chapter 5 concerns the social news logic of sociability. “Sociability”, I argue, refers to the creative fashion in which these outlets seek such reader engagement, through organising their content around shareability. I understand “sociability” in the sense described by Georg Simmel: the “impulse” to connect and the “satisfaction in the very fact that one is associated with others” (1971: 128). In this chapter, I examine how BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv respond to a perceived need to be

“shareable” by becoming sociable, through embodying specific kinds of platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al, 2014) and pop-cultural sensibilities. These vernaculars and sensibilities – which include acronyms, irony and humour, along with the use

25 of pop-cultural visual media like GIFs and memes – reflect a deep connection to the cultures of social media platforms. The fluency of social news in these vernaculars indicates the genre’s suitability for the kinds of everyday socialising prevalent on platforms. Thus, I argue, a shareability – a quality that encourages the passing along of news content to others – emerges from these sensibilities and vernacular characteristics, which taps back into the connective affordances of social media platforms. I then qualify the sociable potential of these social news outlets by examining their “constitutive humour” (Phillips & Milner, 2017), noting how the vernaculars, snark, and politics of these outlets articulate an implicit “us” that excludes an equally implicit – even, at times, explicit – “them”. I then go on to examine the ways in which social news’ affective sociability, and their constitutive humour, operated in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey: in this context, I argue, these qualities were notably used to help the enrolment drive prior to the survey.

Chapter 6 elaborates on my proposed social news logic of personalisation. In this

Chapter, I examine how social news tends to be organised around the personal.

Firstly, “personalisation”, I argue, is an explicit social media business strategy, as the economic viability of micro-targeting on Facebook and Twitter allows outlets to promote themselves to highly specific audiences. Secondly, I argue that personalisation is also a style of news-writing, as BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv tend to appeal to and foreground the personal: both through the frequent use of personal voice and through the explicit positioning of news writers and their identities within the stories being reported on or discussed. “Positionality”

– which distinguishes social news from “objective” journalism on the one hand, and accusations of “bias” on the other – is discussed in these contexts: as an explicit

26 positioning towards a particular political and generational demographic, as a positioning within news stories and issues, and as a positioning against other political perspectives as well as other news outlets. Lastly, I substantiate this chapter’s claims by examining how these different aspects of personalisation came into play during the 2017 postal survey. These included a rejection of the “balance” that appeared in the major established outlets (the latter manifesting in, for example, numerous and often provocative “No” opinion articles), and a frequent and explicit insertion of social news writers’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans,

Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ) identities into their coverage of the survey.

Chapter 7, the Conclusion, summarises the conceptual work performed throughout the previous chapters. I then offer some concluding remarks regarding the futures of social news, in terms of how the genre and its related business models are becoming attractive to big media corporations, as well as recent issues to do with

BuzzFeed’s venture-capitalist-led funding model. I end the thesis by discussing opportunities for further scholarly research, such as the need for research on developments in innovative news in relation to digital transformations outside of the Western, Anglo context, as well as the applicability of the social news framework to right-leaning, conservative, and far-right born-digital outlets. It is my hope that this thesis will help scholars better understand ongoing transformations in news and journalistic practice, in relation to social media platforms and their user cultures. I also hope that this thesis highlights the journalistic potential – and dangers – of the social news genre, and in doing so better equips scholars to evaluate emerging outlets, based in and designed for social media.

Chapter 2: Positioning social news within the Australian news media ecology

2.1 Introduction

Historically, a small number of large organisations have dominated the Australian media ecology. BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv both embody growing challenges to what has been a mostly oligarchic industry and reflect the ways in which such an industry is transforming as digital media platforms become more ubiquitous in use and thus more powerful. At the same time, these social news outlets also have antecedents in earlier, pre-digital newsforms, both in television and in print.

In this chapter, I will do some background work: examining the development of

Australia’s peculiar media context, as well as attending to previous scholarly debates surrounding the merits of particular modes and models of earlier forms of news – debates which inform the theory-building in this thesis. Many qualities of

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, I argue, have precursors in 80s and

90s niche print media as well as political late night television programmes of the

2000s. I then survey current digital transformations in the contemporary Australian news media ecology, providing a more recent context in which to situate social news and the three Australian-based outlets that are emblematic of the emerging genre – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. I then profile these three outlets, detailing their histories, business practices, employment demographics, and their relationships with both each other and legacy outlets. These outlets have largely relied on native advertising – a form of brand-sponsored content – for their revenue which, as I discuss further in Chapter 4, tends to work in tandem with their desire to create “engaging” content. I also note that these outlets have tended to

28 employ a distinctively “millennial” newsroom, in the sense of the age of their journalists and writers and the kind of generational outlook perceivable in the news content they produce. This latter point will be discussed in more detail in the later chapters, especially in Chapter 6 on “personalisation”.

This chapter then elaborates on a definition of social news, outlining the key characteristics of the genre, which include sociability and positionality. My usage of “social news” represents, I argue, a necessary and timely update of earlier conceptions of the term. This is because previous scholarly uses of “social news” mostly referred to participatory “sharing” practices, and the digital sites where these practices occurred – rather than a broader genre of news produced with such social practices in mind. There are three major reasons for my use of the term.

Firstly, “social news” is already used by BuzzFeed and other similar outlets as a self-descriptor, as a way of distinguishing themselves from established news media. Second, I use the term to refer to how BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv – and other outlets – are embedded in social media platforms, and the user cultures of these platforms. Thirdly, the outlets I term “social news” also all have an emphasis on sharing – that is, they attempt facilitate socialising through the passing along of news content. This introduction to the intertwining of social news and social media sets up, and will be explored further in, the following chapter on social media logics.

2.2 Australian media histories and scholarly debates

Scholarship on the Australian newspaper industry has emphasised that, more so than in other similar Western contexts like the US, Australia has historically been dominated by a relatively small number of major actors (Tiffen & Gittins, 2004).

For the past few decades, two companies – Fairfax Media and News Corp – have accounted for the vast majority of daily metropolitan newspaper circulation

(Tiffen, 2010), and in some cases, such as in Brisbane with News Corp’s The

Courier Mail, a single proprietor dominates the daily metropolitan newspaper market. The local newspaper market – outlets serving suburban neighbourhoods – has also tended to be dominated by a single actor, such as the News Corp-owned

Leader titles. Outside the capital cities, newspaper and broadcasting ownership has been similarly concentrated (Tiffen, 2010). The historic reasons for the concentration of media ownership have been complex, though Australia’s peculiar demographics – a small number of medium-sized coastal urban centres – have been conducive to markets that, on the one hand, do not accommodate a large array of titles, but, on the other, make ownership across cities fairly economically feasible

(Tiffen, 2010: 87-89; Cunningham, 2010).

The Murdoch family has dominated the history of Australia’s highly concentrated newspaper industry. It was current News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s father,

Keith Murdoch, who largely drove the monopolisation of the Australian newspaper market when his company the Herald and Weekly Times aggressively acquired failing competitors following the Great Depression. By the mid-1970s, Herald and

Weekly Times newspapers controlled over half of daily metropolitan circulation

(Tiffen, 2010: 86). Rupert Murdoch, who began his career in news after inheriting his father’s stake in the Adelaide newspaper The News, bought Sydney’s The Daily

Telegraph in 1972: by 1987, Rupert had ownership of his father’s old Herald and

Weekly Times company, and with it, a majority control of daily metropolitan newspaper circulation. Even in 2016, Murdoch metropolitan newspapers still accounted for nearly 70% of daily circulation (Dwyer, 12 December 2016), and in

2018 retained a 57.5% market share in terms of newspaper ownership. This is in contrast to, for example, the company with the largest newspaper market share in the US, the Gannett company, which only has a 9.6% share (Gaber & Tiffen, 2018).

Murdoch’s dominance of the media market in Australia also includes News Corp’s ownership of the country’s only daily national newspaper, The Australian.

Due to the heavy presence of News Corp in Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s personal politics have exercised significant influence in both the country’s media and in its

Parliament. The political power of Murdoch’s papers at both the state and federal level has been emphasised by scholars and former government staff members.

David McKnight has argued that through the control of major metropolitan dailies,

Murdoch’s News Corp has “significant agenda-setting power” (2012: 10). This is not just due to the overwhelming visibility of News’ editorial line that comes with such a large readership, but also the political favours that emerge from such a dominating presence: most recently, for example, former staffers for state governments have opened up about the demands they faced from News Corp for

“drops” – exclusive access to government announcements, and the framing power that came with such access. If such “drops” were not forthcoming, News Corp papers would threaten negative coverage (Davies, 21 September 2018). In addition to this, News Corp’s agenda-setting power also comes from the heavy presence of

News Corp journalists in the Canberra Press Gallery – a central institution of

Australian journalism housed in the Federal Parliament building, membership of which enables daily access to politicians (Chubb et al, 2018). Murdoch’s influence has also worked on a more personal level: it is a “tradition”, McKnight states, for new opposition leaders (that is, leaders of the major party not currently in

31 government) to meet Murdoch personally, as a way of attempting to begin an amicable relationship (2012: 10-11).

News Corp’s editorial line in Australia – like in similar Anglophone contexts, such as the US and the UK, where Murdoch media holds considerable power – is conservative. Or, more specifically, it follows the distinctive kind of conservatism which McKnight has called a “market populism”: combining beliefs in the virtues of free markets (and thus consistently supporting deregulation and privatisation) alongside an anti-elitist discourse which rails against the supposed dominance of

“cultural” and “liberal elites” (2010). In this populist perspective, “politically correct” liberal elites have captured Australia’s political and cultural institutions – government, the mass media, and the nation’s universities – with ideas that are usually framed as out of touch with much of the rest of society. Such a perspective results in, for example, regular negative coverage of progressive movements or policies – recently Australia’s government-funded LGBTIQ anti-bullying “Safe

Schools” initiative (Law, 2017) – fuelling an ongoing “culture war” (McKnight,

2005). However, unlike the explicit positionality that characterises the politics of the social news at the focus of this thesis, News Corp’s conservative market populism functions in a more traditional editorial sense, implicitly framing its coverage while reserving explicit political positions for editorials and opinion columns.

Broadcasting in Australia has developed differently from the newspaper industry, in large part due to the historically higher regulations within this sector, along with the existence of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and its mandate for an independent, public news service. The broadcasting system in Australia was regulated from the start, with the original Broadcasting Act of 1942 establishing

32 service areas and the appropriate number of licences for those service areas, as well as the conduct for licensees, although these regulations were loosened by a new

Act in 1992 (Cunningham, 2010: 36). Stuart Cunningham has argued that the reasons for such stronger regulation lie in the early perception of broadcasting’s peculiar qualities: that television and radio held particular pervasive powers, which were also consumed “en bloc” in a way not possible with print media or film (2010:

36). By contrast, the emergence of the Internet and social media platforms embodied an inverse rhetoric in that they were perceived and marketed as technologies for free expression (Gillespie, 2010), ideas which have hampered – and are still deployed by social media companies to elude – attempts at government oversight and regulation (Gillespie, 2018).

It is within this regulatory context that the ABC was established. The ABC was modelled largely on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Gaber & Tiffen,

2018; Inglis, 1983: 19). That is, the ABC was to be distinguished from the commercial broadcasters insofar as programming was governed solely by public service principles. Such principles include, according to the most recent Act, a commitment to “comprehensive” broadcasting that informs, entertains, and contributes to a sense of “national identity” (1983). In regards to news content, the

ABC has historically maintained a commitment to editorial independence and fair coverage free from political and commercial interests. As the most recent statement of principles puts it, the ABC has a “statutory duty to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism [emphasis added]” (ABC, 2011).

In this way, ABC News draws heavily on values that comprise traditional journalistic “occupational ideology” (Deuze, 2005) – such as objectivity and

33 autonomy – in order to claim legitimacy as a quality, independent and thus public news service. Yet, as Graeme Turner has argued, such editorial independence has been consistently undermined, largely due to the ABC’s distinctive funding model

(2005). Unlike the BBC, since 1973 the ABC has not received funding from license fees paid by directly by taxpayers, or other independent sources of revenue: instead, funding is annually allocated by the federal government. This has resulted in funding being used as a means of “political leverage” (2005: 99), particularly in recent years. The ABC’s commitment to impartiality and the associated journalistic principle of “balance”, which refers to the practice of giving both sides of any significant issue equal attention (Entman, 1989: 30), has historically been a point of contention. The ABC’s impartiality has been contested by conservative parties and news media (most notably, News Corp), frequently for political reasons

(Turner, 2005: 100-102). As Gay Hawkins has noted, this has made the ABC cautiously concerned not to upset balance, with news stories and panel programmes tending to give strictly equal weight, in terms of air time, to competing parties as well as the opposing sides of topical issues (2013: 89). At the same time, fairness as enacted through balance is also a key mechanism through which the ABC performs its value as an independent, impartial and thereby necessary public institution (Hawkins, 2013). Still, the ABC’s impartiality and balance has been criticised by progressive digital outlets, such as social news outlets, for what they claim is its harmful effect on civil discourse. The critique that balance can potentially misrepresent certain issues, like the validity of climate science, has a history in scholarship (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004). Social news outlets’ critique of balance will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

Public broadcasting in Australia has not been limited to the ABC. The Special

Broadcasting Service (SBS) was established in 1977, with a unique mandate to

“reflect Australia’s multicultural society”. SBS programming has historically comprised shows, films, and news in languages other than English, and SBS emphasises storytelling that both displays and caters for the diverse range of identities within Australia (Ang et al, 2008: 2-3). In this sense, as Ien Ang,

Hawkins, & Lamia Dabboussy argue, SBS has not been a niche, “ethnic” broadcasting serving distinct communities (2008: 3). Rather, there has always been a quite different kind of public value enacted in SBS, and indeed a different kind of “public” conceptualised: instead of the unified national identity implicit in the

ABC’s charter, “ingrained in the philosophy of SBS is the fact that the public is characterised by plurality, not unity” and attending to and broadcasting this plurality of “histories and perspectives” is the public good of SBS (Ang et al, 2008:

3). In addition, as the 1991 Act makes clear, SBS has still very much been a nation- building project: with a mission to “increase awareness of the contribution of a diversity of cultures to the continuing development of Australian society” a key part of its charter (1991, section 6). Due to this distinct kind of nation-building project, which has had diversity and plurality at its core, SBS has often been attacked by various Murdoch outlets and by conservative governments (Ang et al,

2008: 1-2). How SBS has responded to both economic and political pressures, and how it has attempted to innovate in the digital era, will be discussed further below.

Yet, despite the presence of both independent public broadcasters and their distinct civic mandates, some scholars in the late twentieth century lamented the supposed decline in the quality of Australian news and current affairs broadcasting. Perhaps most prominently, there were concerns about a growing “tabloidisation” of both

35 newspapers and news television in Australia (Turner, 1999), related to similar concerns in the US and the UK (Gitlin, 1997; Lumby, 1997). Tabloidisation generally referred to a growing tendency in programming and content away from

“information-based treatments on social issues” and towards “entertaining stories on lifestyles and celebrities”, in addition to an increased emphasis on visual elements in news presentation (Turner, 1999: 59). This argument was perhaps most famously and polemically put in the US by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to

Death which, as its title denotes, described a descent away from “information” and towards entertainment, to the detriment of public discourse (1985). Postman, in particular, ascribed this decline to the dominance of television: a medium which he argued – drawing on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (1964) – privileged entertaining forms. Similar arguments about the decline of public discourse on television continued into the 2000s, although they did not necessarily share

Postman’s scepticism of the medium. Graeme Turner wrote of the decline of current affairs television in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s, arguing that programmes like Today Tonight and A Current Affair (both on commercial broadcasters) were foregoing the format’s potential to lead public debate with rigorous investigative journalism, instead suffering from a similar tabloidisation as described above – although ABC programmes like The 7:30 Report and Four

Corners, Turner argued, continued to perform high standards of journalism (2005).

Still, such narratives of decline were critiqued by numerous scholars, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds. Catherine Lumby noted that implicit in such concerns around tabloidisation was a desire to protect traditional – gendered – boundaries between “public” and “private” (especially domestic) issues, and thereby what was worthy of public discussion (1997: 117-118). Much of what was

36 considered “tabloid”, Lumby noted, was traditionally “feminine” – emotive forms of storytelling, personal and romantic relationships, parenting, and other “lifestyle” content. Tabloidisation, in this regard, could have progressive potential, by blurring

“the boundaries between women’s stuff and traditional public policy matters”

(1997: 117-118). Conventions of “hard” and “soft” stories, dominant in news organisation during this time, were also critiqued as similarly gendered: Lana F.

Rakow and Kimberlie Kranich noted that the former tended to mean “serious, important” news that men did, and the latter softer “human interest, lifestyle” stories that was the “purview of women reporters and readers” (1991: 11). This critique of normative values echoes and builds on the foundational work by Nancy

Fraser, who argued that Habermasian conceptions of the “public sphere” (1962) – such as that deployed by the ABC – tended to exclude that which “masculinist ideology labels ‘private’” (1990: 77). Furthermore, Frances Bonner argued that these “lifestyle” programmes – such as gardening shows, home renovation programmes, and daytime talk shows – actually demonstrated the ability and the positive potential of television to draw upon and open up “ordinary, everyday concerns” (2003: 32).

This critique of traditional conceptions of news and “the public”, along with the increasing sympathy towards popular cultural forms, also occurred when scholars in and outside Australia were turning their attention to emerging forms of niche and subcultural media. In a similar vein to earlier research on underground,

“alternative media” – usually conceptualised as a political counter to a

“mainstream” media (Glessing, 1970; Lewis, 1972) – scholars in the 1990s studied media produced for (and typically by) marginalised or under-represented groups.

Zines – amateur, subcultural comics, pamphlets, and magazines, comprising a

37 broad range of styles and formats, hand-drawn or photocopied – were celebrated for their “radically democratic and participatory ideal”, as Stephen Duncombe put it, and their ability to provide a voice for those outside of the mainstream (1997:

7). “Zinesters”, for Duncombe, privileged “authenticity”, the “ethic of DIY, do-it- yourself”, and of “maki[ing] your own culture” in an era “marked by the rapid centralisation of corporate media” (1997: 7). Echoes of this DIY ethic, framed in opposition to commercialised and centralised media, would also be found in early

Internet news genres. Zines were typically circulated through alternative networks: sold at small bookshops, mailed through the post, given out at music gigs, or passed around in social groups (Harris, 1999). The political potential of zines were also examined in the Australian context. Anita Harris researched zines for young women, noting how these zines were used as “grassroots, collectivist means to promote women’s rights and agitate and campaign around feminist issues” (1999).

In relation to this, more recently Shirleene Robinson studied the “queer press” in

1980s Australia, examining how underground LGBTIQ newspapers and magazines were used to both fight homophobia during the HIV/AIDs crisis, and provide a space for community and identity formation (2008, 2010). In such ways, these niche genres formed what Michael Warner would call “counter-publics” (2002).

As will be discussed further below, some of the social news outlets under examination in this thesis have roots in these alternative and niche media.

Before I move on to examine digital disruptions and transformations in Australia’s news ecology, it is also important to briefly examine fairly recent developments in late night television. Innovations in this genre sparked scholarly debates, in both the US and Australia, specifically around the potential of entertaining news formats. These debates inform some of my own conclusions regarding social news.

2.3 Innovative journalism in late-night television

During the 2000s, a number of late-night satirical television programmes became prominent in the mediated discussion of public affairs in the US (Baym, 2005).

Programmes such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart provided daily comedic commentary on news, which included both current events and the reporting of these events in media outlets. They did so through a blurring of generic boundaries. The Daily Show would be structured like a nightly news programme, with Stewart serving as the anchor, presenting individual stories or talking points – but delivered with the comedic sensibilities of a late-night talk show host, complete with audible laughter from a live audience. The show would even regularly defer to its “correspondents” for satirical news updates, using this gimmick to comment on, for example, the absurdities of round-the-clock news coverage of celebrity scandals. The Colbert Report adopted a similarly satirical approach, styling itself as a deliberate parody of conservative punditry programmes like The O’Reily Factor from the Murdoch-owned cable channel Fox News. In these ways, both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report utilised a news and punditry veneer to parody and critique traditional news and current affairs genres.

Simultaneously, these programmes also exploited the familiarity of these formats to inform viewers of salient current affairs.

It was through this innovative and successful adaption of the generic structures of traditional television news that these programmes helped instigate across the

Western world a “cultural shift in what is acceptable as news” (Mourao et al, 2016:

215). These shows not only provided further examples of how “serious” news could be entertaining – to return to the 1990s debates – but also demonstrated that these entertaining elements could be integral to a critical journalistic project. Indeed, The

Daily Show and The Colbert Report were hailed by journalism scholars such as

Geoffrey Baym for the “neo-modernist” ethos that underpinned their approach to politics – despite the rejection of the “journalist” label by the programme hosts themselves (Baym, 2010). Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert instead viewed themselves as “comedians”, and tended to frame their programmes as continuing a

US tradition of late-night entertainment television. But by virtue of their discursive position, these programmes could actively mock dominant mainstream media (in particular, the conservative Fox News) for the latter’s apparent abdication of their public responsibilities as journalists (Harrington, 2013: 17-21). Moreover, they could also better engage the audience by reflecting everyday – that is, sometimes crude and emotive – political discussions, rather than using the much more formal and distanced language that dominates traditional news forms (Jones, 2010: 44).

For Baym, this kind of “fake news” – as Stewart and Colbert facetiously labelled their programmes – was a “news that entertains”: an emerging genre that amused but also stimulated critical thought (Baym, 2005: 273). In such ways, news- watching was reformulated from being a civic “duty” or “responsibility” – as it was conceived in the traditional “good” or “informed citizen” model of journalism

(Schudson, 1998; Zuckerman, 2014: 155-156) – to something that was both overtly pleasurable and democratically useful. Programmes like The Daily Show provided yet more evidence that civic-minded news could be combined with entertaining rhetorical styles, which served to enrich – rather than detract from – the quality of this news.

Further testifying to the importance of the connective and sociable phenomena to which social news outlets have responded, these programmes have recently found success online. Some of the still existing original “fake news” programmes, along

40 with their successors such as Last Week Tonight and The Late Show with Stephen

Colbert, owe much of their current popularity to users viewing and sharing clips from these programmes on social media. The latter practice partly originated as a way for users outside the US, including Australia, to bypass geoblocking restrictions enforced by television networks, but now more recently is something encouraged by the networks and programmes themselves, via their Facebook pages or YouTube channels. Indeed, social news outlets assist these programmes in attaining virality – with articles about clips from these “fake news” programmes, or how Twitter “reacted” to clips from these programmes, being fairly common in

Junkee or Pedestrian.tv. This is especially so in regards to Australian versions of the “fake news” genre: Tonightly with Tom Ballard, which aired on the ABC in

2018, was repeatedly written about and promoted by the three social news outlets

– in spite of the eventual axing of the programme after only a year on air (even though individual Tonightly clips achieved relative success on Facebook, drawing tens of thousands, and occasionally millions, of views). A former writer for

Pedestrian.tv, comedian Rebecca Shaw, also wrote for Tonightly – which may partly explain the regular promotion of the programme, by social news outlets, as well as indicate the general shared social and professional circles in which these kinds of programmes and outlets appear to operate. But more so, this close relationship between the “fake news” genre and social news outlets demonstrates the importance of sociability – that is, entertaining and “shareable” news content – within the social media-dominated contemporary news ecology.

The histories of late-night television, “tabloid” formats and zines – along with the policy concerns and scholarly debates around them – provide a backdrop to social news. At this point, it is pertinent to more specifically focus on digital disruption

41 in news: examining how digital media and the Internet have resulted in attempts to rectify the “tabloid” turn of the 1990s, but also have helped further collapse traditional boundaries between hard and soft news, and “public” and “private” concerns.

2.4 Digital disruptions in the Australian news ecology

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, most major Australian news outlets – both broadcasters and newspapers – had their own websites, although these early forms of digital, Internet-based news largely consisted of repurposed material from their primary medium (Turner, 2005: 139-140). Still, outside of major news outlets, and outside of Australia, there were innovations which embodied a DIY or alternative ethos, grounded in the networking technologies and liberating ideals of the Internet.

Axel Bruns studied early “collaborative” news networks: examining websites like the US-based Indymedia which allowed for users to upload and comment on news published elsewhere (2004). Blogs were another genre that achieved notoriety – though not necessarily popularisation – during the early 2000s: blogs tended to foreground the personal and seemed to have the potential to provide accounts which countered institutional, mainstream news reporting, particularly in times of war (Redden, 2003). These user-centred and user-generated forms of news, and their relation to social news, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. Born- digital outlets have also emerged in Australia that share a history with the

“alternative media” discussed above, in so far as they are produced by and provide a platform for marginalised groups. A notable example in this regard is

IndigenousX, which was created in response to a “national dialogue… characterised by a consistent lack of awareness, understanding and respect for

Indigenous people” (IndigenousX, 2019). Founded in 2012, the outlet – and its

42 rotating Twitter account – has provided a space for a range of Indigenous voices, experiences, and perspectives in an Australian media environment traditionally dominated by white people.

Aside from these more radical developments, in Australia there were also some notable attempts at creating alternative online news that still functioned in a rather conventional manner – albeit with an oppositional ethos. Perhaps most prominent in this regard is Crikey, launched in 2000 as a subscription-based news site. For much of its history, Crikey has articulated itself as an “independent and critical voice” within Australia’s highly concentrated media environment, and has been highly critical in this regard of the Murdoch media’s influence (Morieson, 2012).

In its early years, Crikey especially appealed to “journalistic attitude”, and a frustration with commercialised and “wimpy” big news media (as quoted in Turner,

2005: 143) – the gendered language being striking here, particularly in light of the discussion above. Other significant outlets in this similar vein are New Matilda, launched in 2004 and Independent Australia, launched in 2010. Unlike Crikey, both outlets are free to access and subsist largely on donations and volunteer writers.

The audience for all three outlets continues to be quite small, however, especially in the case of Independent Australia.

Major established Australian news actors have recently undergone more substantial transformations as, concurrent with international developments (McChesney,

2012), audiences have shifted online – and onto social media platforms – and older revenue sources are no longer viable. In light of this, newspaper circulation has suffered a sharp decline in recent years (Samios, 11 December 2017), along with television ratings. This has led to major cuts in newsrooms: Fairfax suffered a series of job losses during the late 2000s as it transitioned to a focus on web news

(Slattery, 5 April 2017), and now faces an uncertain future following a merger with the operating company of the commercial broadcaster Channel Nine (Zhou, 26 July

2018). Other mainstream news outlets have had more success online. The

Murdoch-owned News Corp, for example, has achieved significant success online with its digital outlet News.com.au – a free aggregate of content from its metropolitan dailies – being the most accessed news website in Australia, according to market researcher Roy Morgan (24 May 2018). The ABC News website has also been successful at attracting audiences, being the third most visited website according to the same Roy Morgan report. The popularity of both websites has been largely achieved on social media platforms, with much of their traffic coming from Facebook, and Google searches (Park et al, 2018).

These established outlets have also attempted to adapt to the now-dominant digital ecology in more innovative ways. The ABC, especially, has been a leader in this regard. In line with its commitment to be “innovative” (Act, 1983), the ABC has been behind a number of digital initiatives in recent years, such as the Interactive

Storytelling Team (IST), which uses interactive digital tools to create new forms of engaging, informative and “entertaining” digital news content (ABC Backstory,

2014). The IST has produced some novel and award-winning journalism, such as its report on the Australian same-sex marriage postal survey, which used voting data to map the survey results visually and allowed readers to break down the vote by different levels (Story Lab, 11 January 2018). It is important to note here the break with 1990s concerns around “entertainment”: instead, the latter is conceived as beneficial for news engagement. In addition, in 2017 the ABC adapted to the popularisation of Facebook’s personal communication platform, Messenger, by launching the Messenger Newsbot (ABC Backstory, 7 October 2017). The

Newsbot is a new service that, once subscribed to, sends news summaries and headlines through the Messenger platform. The Newsbot also utilises the vernacular characteristics of that platform: the tone of the summaries is typically informal, complete with the use of visual artefacts like emoji (small images depicting moods, gestures, or objects), common to everyday socialising practices on the platform. Developers of the Newsbot have specifically said that they wished to “emulate” the kinds of discussions users have with “friends” on Messenger

(Marsh, 7 October 2017). The traditionally “private”, here, merges with a traditionally “public” news service. The Newsbot can also be personalised, in the sense that users can control the kinds of news that they receive. In addition, the launch of ABC Life, a new “lifestyle” and youth-oriented outlet, in August 2018 also further demonstrates the corporation’s willingness to branch out into and experiment with news formats and genres.

SBS has similarly experimented with innovative digital formats, in relation to the popularisation of social media. This can be seen in new digital outlets like SBS Life

(which is quite similar, as the name suggests, to ABC Life, but with a greater emphasis on multicultural content and cooking) but also in some of its television programming, such as the youth-oriented nightly news show, The Feed. Many of

The Feed’s segments – particularly its sketches, which usually satirise topical issues or personalities – appear to be partially produced with social media in mind, their short clips being conducive, it seems, to the viewing habits and sociable sharing practices that occur on Facebook and Twitter. This is in line with similar programming strategies seen in US programmes like Last Week Tonight with John

Oliver. In these ways, established media organisations are transforming in relation to the kinds of social news logics I discuss in later chapters: I return to discuss this

45 point further in the Conclusion Chapter. At the same time, it can be seen how SBS and ABC are transitioning away from public service broadcasting and into what

Terry Flew, Cunningham, Bruns & Jason Wilson earlier called “public service media [emphasis added]” (2008). This reconceptualisation not just indicates a diversity of media formats, but also new ways of conceiving public service: not simply “informing the public” through news broadcasts, but also providing new interactive forms to help facilitate such public engagement (Flew et al, 2008: 20).

This is both the troubled economic backdrop, and the innovative context, in which the social news outlets I will be examining have found success. I will now turn specifically to social news, introducing the outlets under analysis in this thesis –

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv – before providing a fuller conceptualisation of this emerging genre.

2.5 Social news profiles

The following section will briefly detail the histories, business models, and employment demographics of BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. The three outlets will also be situated within the media histories and scholarly debates, and the contemporary news ecology, described in the previous sections. I do so to both acknowledge the antecedents of social news, and to elucidate the peculiarity and distinctiveness of this emerging genre.

2.5.1 BuzzFeed Oz News

BuzzFeed began in the US in 2006 as a small lab tracking viral online content, a side project for co-founder and current CEO Jonah Peretti, who was working on the digital news outlet The Huffington Post at the time. The small lab originally employed no writers or editors, and – indicating the affinity for technological

46 solutions that BuzzFeed possessed from the beginning – instead relied solely on a single algorithm to aggregate content from the web that was demonstrating signs of virality (Rice, 7 April 2013). Hence, the lab’s name: BuzzFeed gave its designers a feed of “buzz”. In these early years, due to lab’s ability to indicate viral content,

BuzzFeed was able to strike data-sharing deals with partner sites – including the permission to install trackers on these sites, thereby increasing BuzzFeed’s capacity to monitor traffic. The company continued to benefit well into the early 2010s from this trove of data about what people were clicking on, and how people were reading and sharing information (Rice, 7 April 2013). After attracting further investment,

BuzzFeed grew into a pop-culture website known for quizzes, web memes and pop- culture listicles, the latter an article format the outlet popularised. It was also during this period that The Huffington Post was sold to AOL in 2011, and Peretti began working on BuzzFeed full-time (Carr, 5 February 2012).

BuzzFeed found significant success on social media in the early 2010s. Drawing from its previous incarnation as a viral lab, BuzzFeed demonstrated considerable expertise in understanding and exploiting the connective logics and sociable platform cultures of Facebook and Twitter, and it was from these platforms that users predominately accessed BuzzFeed’s content (Salmon, 11 June 2014, Caplan

& boyd, 2018). BuzzFeed also experienced success on the video sharing platform

YouTube – BuzzFeedVideo currently has over 15 million subscribers – producing pop-cultural and humorous content for the platform, along with popular series such as The Try Guys. The latter – a comedy show in which four men attempt unusual tasks – typifies much of BuzzFeed’s combination of silly and politically progressive-leaning content: for example, a popular Try Guys episode featured the

47 men simulating labour pain as a way to bring attention to the varied experiences of motherhood (BuzzFeedVideo, 9 May 2015).

By 2015, the company was valued at US$1.5 billion (Kosoff, 31 July 2015), with much of its revenue coming from native advertising. BuzzFeed’s considerable reach as a recognisable brand and its expertise in sharing has brought the company into lucrative partnerships with corporate clients, and quizzes, lists and videos are often customised to suit a client’s needs. By the mid-2010s, the company had expanded overseas: establishing operations in India, Germany, the UK, and

Australia. Stylistically, content remains similar throughout these regions – although, as I will discuss in the subsequent chapters, vernaculars (especially slang) within articles can be region-specific.

During this expansion period, BuzzFeed began investing in news. In late 2011, political blogger Ben Smith of the US outlet Politico was hired as BuzzFeed News’ first Editor-in-Chief. Soon afterwards, BuzzFeed began a wave of hirings – picking up Matt Buchanan from Gawker Media, and Doree Shafrir from Rollingstone.com.

These hirings seemed to favour journalists and commentators who established their careers on the Web (Carr, 5 February 2012). At the time, the late New York Times columnist David Carr described these “young writers” as “bathed in both the ethos and the practice of social media” (5 February 2012): indicating that this new and

“serious” BuzzFeed was still to be one rooted in the cultures of platforms. This combination of platform literacy and professional experience seemed to work: in the years that followed BuzzFeed News underwent a rather rapid process of journalistic legitimisation – and when BuzzFeed expanded outside the US, its news division was brought with it.

BuzzFeed Oz News was established in 2014, as part of a broader BuzzFeed

Australia bureau (Champness, 3 February 2014). Like in the US, BuzzFeed Oz

News rapidly acquired both established and younger, up-and-coming reporters for its team. Simon Crerar, a journalist who since the late 1990s had worked for both

Fairfax and News Corp, was hired in 2014 as BuzzFeed Oz News’ Editor-in-Chief.

Mark Di Stefano, a 25-year old who formerly worked as a TV and radio reporter for the ABC, was hired in 2014 as a beat reporter (Christensen, 4 June 2014). Di

Stefano later became the outlet’s political editor, before departing in 2017 to take a position in BuzzFeed’s London office. Other reporters – Alice Workman, Gina

Rushton, Lane Sainty, and Brad Esposito – were all in their early career when they were hired by BuzzFeed Oz News. This distinctly young newsroom has been reflected in the kinds of stories that BuzzFeed Oz News has pursued, with the team demonstrating literacy in both social justice issues and Internet cultures. Sainty, for example, has reported extensively on LGBTIQ issues, while Esposito has been one of the few journalists in Australia to regularly report on Australia’s active far-right

Facebook groups (Esposito, 27 February 2018, 26 March 2018).

BuzzFeed Oz News, like the US bureau, was initially met with some scepticism from Australian media organisations. The audience measurement company Nielsen originally excluded BuzzFeed Oz from its news category – thereby preventing

BuzzFeed Oz from being included in its annual news rankings – and instead placed the outlet within a “search engines, portals, and communities” category. This prompted the Interactive Advertising Bureau to create a new definition of “news” which better reflected the kinds of emerging outlets that BuzzFeed Oz represented

(Christensen, 19 May 2014). Other outlets have also continued to question

BuzzFeed Oz’s journalistic credibility – Christopher Dore, the editor of News

Corp’s The Daily Telegraph, recently criticised BuzzFeed Oz’ inclusion into the advisory panel for the Walkley journalism awards (Christopher Dore, 6 July 2017).

However, this criticism likely emerged as much from The Daily Telegraph’s political disagreements with the progressive-leaning BuzzFeed Oz as it would have from concerns over the latter’s journalistic standards.

Nonetheless, despite all this, BuzzFeed Oz News has undergone a similar process of journalistic legitimisation as that experienced by its US outlet. This has come in the form of a number of significant scoops: such as the Mark Latham story told in the previous chapter, as well as BuzzFeed Oz’s 2017 investigation into the citizenship status of far-right federal senator Malcolm Roberts, which eventually resulted in Roberts’ resignation after his position was deemed illegitimate by

Australia’s High Court (Workman & Taylor, 22 September 2017). In the same year,

Workman prompted parliamentary investigations into conduct inside the office of

Employment Minister Michaela Cash, after Workman revealed that Cash had tipped off media outlets about an Australian Federal Police raid on trade union offices. Notably, Workman’s scoop also provoked criticism from other journalists that BuzzFeed Oz was breaking unwritten codes between reporters and politicians regarding anonymous sources (Meade, 27 October 2017). The Cash scoop demonstrated, to an extent, BuzzFeed Oz’s willingness to occasionally break with

Australia’s journalistic norms, particularly, as in the Cash case, when the story in question satisfies notions of the public interest. Lane Sainty was also notable for her tireless in-depth reporting during Australia’s 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. The survey was not just a confusing process, but also a distressing one for

LGBTIQ people in Australia. And finally, Workman and Sainty, alongside their

BuzzFeed Oz colleagues Josh Taylor and Nick Wray, are now all members of

50 federal Parliament’s Press Gallery (Press Gallery, 2018) – a major signifier of journalistic legitimacy in Australia.

In terms of online audience reach, BuzzFeed Oz News has been relatively successful. In 2017, the digital news analytics company Nielsen reported that

BuzzFeed had an audience of over 1.6 million (Samios, 25 September 2017).

According to the Digital News Report 2018 from University of Canberra’s News

& Media Research Centre, BuzzFeed Oz News was the 8th most accessed online news outlet in Australia in 2018, behind some established major outlets

(News.com.au, Nine.com.au, The Sydney Morning Herald) but ahead of other older outlets like The Age, The Guardian, and The Australian (Park et al, 2018). This ranking is based on a survey that sampled respondents’ familiarity with a list of 27 online news outlets.

BuzzFeed Oz News, in these ways, is the most conventional, in terms of journalistic practice and organisational structure, of the three outlets under analysis. Still, as will be profiled below, both Junkee and Pedestrian.tv embody similar principles and stylistics – from their enthusiasm for technology-driven entrepreneurialism, to their meme-literate staff and their progressive politics – indicating their placement within the emerging genre which BuzzFeed represents most visibly.

2.5.2 Junkee

Junkee Media is a commercial digital media company that operates a number of outlets, including news and pop-culture outlet Junkee, the teen pop-culture outlet

Punkee, the Westpac Bank-sponsored youth advice outlet The Cusp, and the

QANTAS Airlines-sponsored travel publisher AWOL.com (Robin, 27 June 2016).

Junkee, in contrast to BuzzFeed, has its origins in digital versions of the kinds of niche and queer media discussed above. Previously known as Sound Alliance, the company was founded in 2000 with the launch of the dance music website inthemix. By 2009, the company operated four music and lifestyle websites: inthemix, rock music site FasterLouder, LGBTIQ site SameSame, and alternative music site Mess+Noise. The company generated revenue through banner adverts on these websites, through digital marketing services, and by selling tickets to music events. In March 2013, Sound Alliance launched Junkee, a pop-culture, and news and commentary outlet aimed at a youth audience (Christensen, 2 July 2015).

After Junkee experienced significant growth, driven largely by native advertising,

Sound Alliance rebranded as Junkee Media in 2015 and began launching its other more recent publishing brands. Growth had been so substantial, that in mid-2016 outdoor advertising company oOh Media paid $11.05 million for 85% of Junkee

Media – giving the latter a $13 million valuation (Robin, 27 June 2016). That an advertising company, rather than an existing media company, bought Junkee is greatly indicative of how lucrative the native advertising model is within contemporary Australian media, especially considering how younger audiences may be avoiding traditional advertising channels (such as television). Junkee senior staff have previously emphasised the importance of this model: co-founder Tim

Duggan in 2014, for instance, attributed the outlet’s growth to native advertising: without it, “we probably wouldn’t be here” (Robin, 27 June 2016). Concerns regarding the possible negative effects of the profitability of this model on journalistic ethics and independence are addressed in the Conclusion Chapter.

Junkee Media has also since begun its own annual “un-conference” called

“Junket”, which, as the self-description suggests, is a mostly informal event

52 consisting of various young speakers, be they activists, entrepreneurs or other kinds of “influencers” (Taylor, 5 November 2015) – the latter term indicating how closely the event is associated with social media cultures.

Early self-representation emphasised Junkee’s desire to cater to digital youth cultures. At its launch, a press release for Junkee stated that the outlet was designed on “four principles” (Junkee, 11 March 2013). One, an emphasis on mobile browsing. Two, producing content suitable for social media – because they believed that young people liked to “share content… that makes them look knowledgeable or funny” (Junkee, 11 March 2013). Three, to offer news content that was designed to keep young people informed – as, according to the press release, young people’s “biggest fears are missing out and not knowing what is happening around them.” And four, that Junkee believed that there was “way too much advertising noise on the net” – in response to this, Junkee was adopting a native advertising model that would pioneer “a new way of merging brands and content” so that “everyone wins”: as “the consumer gets genuinely engaging content, and the advertiser gets shareable stories that people actually want to read”

(Junkee, 11 March 2013). Native advertising has apparently been so successful for

Junkee Media that in 2016, the company pledged to ditch banner adverts altogether

(Ward, 10 March 2016), although it seems Junkee Media’s co-founder Neil

Ackland has since backtracked on that pledge (Bennett, 3 October 2017). One of major reasons native advertising is so lucrative for Junkee – as it is for BuzzFeed and Pedestrian.tv – is because of the outlet’s ability to reach a youth audience, something legacy news and traditional advertising find difficult to do (Carson &

Muller, 2017: 36-37). In sum, Junkee’s opening press release promised to “go beyond the headline, to inform, intrigue, provoke and occasionally make you laugh.

[Junkee would] keep you up to date with all the major issues, but curated through the eyes of your smartest, funniest friend” (Junkee, 11 March 2013).

Like BuzzFeed, Junkee in this promotional press release positions shareability as one of its distinctive qualities – as well as a major business aim for the outlet. This emphasis on “shareable” content – designed to be spread amongst friends via the connective affordances of social media platforms – is discussed in depth in Chapter

5. Furthermore, the personal language deployed in the press release – keeping

“you” up to date “through the eyes of your smartest, funniest friend” [emphases added] – indicates another distinctive quality of social news, and which is elaborated on further in Chapter 6, where it is framed in relation to the social news logic of personalisation.

Again as with BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee’s editing and writing team is comprised almost entirely of people in their 20s and early 30s. These include managing editor

Rob Stott, a former news editor at BuzzFeed Oz, Katie Cunningham, features editor, Tom Clift, mornings and weekends editor, and staff writers Patrick Lenton and Sam Longford, amongst others. Unlike BuzzFeed, though, Junkee is less willing to embrace journalistic identities: or at least, its founders have sought to position Junkee in contrast to legacy outlets. Co-founder Tim Duggan has stated that although Junkee “kind of work[s] like a traditional news organisation” he is reluctant to label his staff “journalists”: “Sometimes we call [them] writers, sometimes we call them journalists, but they’re not really proper editorial journalists” (Carson & Muller, 2017). Duggan does not mean this in a “negative way”, but “more as a nod to the difference between [Fairfax Media’s legacy outlet]

The Sydney Morning Herald and Junkee” – and, for Duggan, “there is a big difference” (Carson & Muller, 2017). Junkee co-founder and current CEO Neil

Ackland has also sought to differentiate the outlet from established, legacy news:

“We are not the Wall Street Journal”, Ackland has stated previously, “[we] don’t see ourselves as a hard, breaking news site” (Neale, 3 July 2015). Yet these self- representations of difference from Duggan and Ackland has not prevented some of

Junkee’s former staff continuing their careers into outlets that align more closely with traditional journalistic identities – for example, former editor Meg Watson now works as an associate editor at Crikey. Another senior member of Junkee staff, former politics editor Osman Faruqi (who also happens to be a former Greens party staffer) now works at the ABC. Recently he was employed by the public broadcaster to lead its new youth and lifestyle news outlet, ABC Life – the ABC, here, seemingly sought to draw upon Faruqi’s experience at Junkee (McCauley, 2

May 2018).

In regards to Junkee’s relationship with other outlets, considering Junkee’s status as a youth-oriented publication that frequently uses GIFs and emotive headlines, unsurprisingly there is the occasional condescension from older media actors and figures. News Corp’s The Australian, when it reported Faruqi’s departure from

Junkee, framed his new role as part of an “attempt to ‘BuzzFeed-ise’ the ABC”

(McCauley, 2 May 2018) – the not so subtle suggestion here being that Faruqi did not have experience in “real” and “serious” journalism. In the same article, Faruqi’s status as an ex-Greens party candidate – and son of a federal Greens senator – was emphasised, working to brush both the ABC and Junkee with insinuations of left- wing bias. The online-only Daily Mail Australia also ran a similar article to The

Australian, in a piece that was even more explicit in its condemnation of the ABC’s supposed left-wing “bias”, made evident by Faruqi’s hiring (Tolj & Johnson, 2 May

2018). The Daily Mail was as equally dismissive of Junkee, describing the latter as

55 a “pop website”. Furthermore, and despite Meg Watson’s recent hiring, Crikey writers have similarly criticised Junkee in the past. Columnist Guy Rundle once dubbed Faruqi (and J. R. Hennessy from Pedestrian.tv) as “ageing professional youf”, in a piece that criticised Junkee’s and Pedestrian.tv’s “culture warrior” politics (18 October 2017). Josh Taylor – who now reports for BuzzFeed Oz – wrote in Crikey about Junkee’s tensions between its social justice politics and its embrace of corporate sponsorships (5 November 2015). This kind of criticism is valid but also not surprising, considering Crikey’s historic commitment to independent journalism free from commercial pressures.

For its part, Junkee regularly calls out and criticises established news outlets, whether for the problematic application of journalistic “balance” on the ABC, or for the conservative news agendas of the various News Corps outlets. This kind of call out-culture-influenced media criticism – “call-out culture” refers to the practice of publicly naming (usually through Twitter’s quote function) instances of problematic behavior or language use by others (Ahmad, 2015) – will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

Junkee, according to the Digital News Report 2018, is less successful than

BuzzFeed Oz News in terms of market share: Junkee is only the 26th most accessed online brand in Australia. As stated above, this ranking is based on news outlet familiarity amongst a random sample of all ages, which may misleadingly underrepresent Junkee considering that the outlet is targeted at a specific audience

– young people. More precise metrics suggest that Junkee is popular with this young demographic: in August 2017 Junkee Media scored 1.8 million domestic monthly unique browser visits across its various outlets, according to Google

Analytics. On Facebook during the same period, Junkee Media’s outlets boasted a

56 combined reach of 38 million people (Bennett, 3 October 2017). These audience numbers coincided with the early stages of the same-sex marriage postal survey.

According to advertising industry outlet AdNews, the survey, along with teen outlet Punkee’s recap videos of popular reality television show The Bachelor, drove Junkee Media’s audience growth (Bennett, 3 October 2017). It is important to note here the centrality of social media (namely, Facebook) in Junkee Media’s audience measurements – particularly since much of its video content, for both the survey and shows like The Bachelor, tended to be directly embedded into the platform via Facebook posts. In addition, Junkee, according to a mid-2017 report from the analytics company Nielsen, has the largest audience share of under 34 year-olds in Australia, reaching over 54% of those within that category (Bennett, 3

October 2017).

Junkee’s reach with youth audience also means that the outlet is a popular choice for progressive politicians, especially those from the Greens party, to present their platform or to raise certain issues. Former federal Greens senator Scott Ludlam has written in Junkee on data security (Ludlam, 2 October 2014) and on the woeful human rights record of the current Liberal Party Prime Minister Scott Morrison

(Ludlam, 27 August 2018). Federal Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi – and mother of former Junkee political editor, Osman Faruqi – has also used Junkee to promote issues concerning New South Wales’ archaic abortion laws (8 March 2018) as well as her commitment to combat far-right racist politics in the federal Parliament (15

August 2018). She has also appeared in a Junkee video promoting the “Yes” vote in the same-sex marriage postal survey (Junkee, 22 September 2017). In addition, federal senator and Greens party leader Richard Di Natale regularly shares Junkee articles on his official Facebook page. Although other outlets, like Fairfax’s The

Sydney Morning Herald, occasionally feature commentary pieces from ministers or members of Parliament (e.g., O’Dwyer, 23 October 2018), such contributions are typically contained within the “Opinion” sections of the newspaper or website

– thus maintaining the appearance of impartiality on the outlet’s behalf. Junkee does not perform these kinds of distancing mechanisms. This break with impartiality will be discussed in more detail throughout the coming chapters.

2.5.3 Pedestrian.tv

Pedestrian.tv is a youth news and pop-culture outlet, operated by Pedestrian Group and owned by the Nine Entertainment media corporation. Describing itself as the

“House of Pop Culture”, Pedestrian.tv regularly reports on a mixture of film, TV, music and celebrity culture, as well as sport, travel and politics, although these categories tend to be blurred. The company launched in 2005, originally publishing a “plastizine” (a bi-monthly DVD magazine) that focused on subcultural youth and pop-culture news. Pedestrian.tv moved to the Internet in 2008, launching the current domain www.pedestrian.tv. In addition to its main outlet, Pedestrian runs a jobs listing site (Pedestrian JOBS), and has also recently launched a teen-focused version of Pedestrian.tv, called Pez. Pedestrian.tv has experienced significant success, and currently boasts an average of 7 million page views a month

(Pedestrian.tv, 2018) – even if Junkee still possess a larger reach of under 34 year- olds (Pedestrian was registering 35% of this market share in mid-2017). Due to this success, major Australian media actors have taken an interest to the outlet:

Nine Entertainment bought a major stake 60% in Pedestrian.tv in 2015

(Christensen, 31 March 2015). Later in 2018, Nine purchased the remaining 40% share in Pedestrian.tv for $39 million, in one of Australia’s biggest-ever digital media deals (Redrup, 2 September 2018). This corporate takeover has attracted

58 criticism from other Australian outlets: Crikey’s Guy Rundle, in this respect, has dismissed Pedestrian.tv as a “Channel Nine shopfront” (18 October 2017).

As with Junkee, Pedestrian.tv aims for a young market – its target audience is “16-

35, affluent, influential and hungry for new information and experiences”

(Pedestrian.tv, 2016). This desire to create a different news “experience” for young people is emphasised on Pedestrian.tv’s “About” webpage, which states that its founders Chris Wirasinha and Oscar Martin “wanted to change the publishing game” by “creating a platform that would resonate with young Aussies in an entirely new way” (Pedestrian.tv, 2018). The explicit connotations of this language

– being young, bold, exciting, tech-literate, and championing change – echo a

Silicon Valley ideology of an entrepreneurialism determined to shake up established industries. In this way, Pedestrian.tv shares with Junkee and BuzzFeed an expressed enthusiasm for start-up culture – Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan has declared that his outlet will always “maintain… the start-up essence” (Dickinson,

8 December 2018) – which in particular distinguishes the outlets from the niche media discussed in the first part of this chapter. This enthusiasm is so central to

Pedestrian.tv‘s self-representation that Wirasinha even hosts a podcast called

Founders University that interviews and celebrates successful entrepreneurs

(Samios, 22 December 2017).

Pedestrian.tv, like the other social news outlets, relies heavily on native advertising. Pedestrian.tv has been outspokenly optimistic about the potential of this model, previously declaring that, through native advertising, the outlet can help partners “create innovative, engaging and effective campaigns” – and again, like

Junkee, Pedestrian.tv distinguishes its native advertising content from traditional adverts, stating that at Pedestrian.tv, “we don’t make ads, we create entertainment”

(Pedestrian.tv, 2016). This kind of discursive positioning – that Pedestrian.tv’s native advertising model is more benevolent than the banner adverts of legacy news, because native advertising is tailored to the reader’s interest – will be discussed further in Chapter 4.

As with the other social news outlets, Pedestrian.tv’s newsroom is predominantly young. Again, as a way of distinguishing Pedestrian.tv from established outlets, co-founder Wirasinha has emphasised the importance of hiring young writers in order to properly reach and connect with a young audience, stating that “the youth market is hard if it is a business not run by young people” (Daggar-Nickson &

Manning, 26 October 2018). Of all the social news outlets under analysis in this thesis, Pedestrian.tv departs the furthest from conventional news and journalistic practice. Not just in its content – Pedestrian.tv is the most informal in tone – but also in how its staff identify with the journalistic profession. While some of its staff bear titles that evoke traditional news organisational structures (such as news editor), other staff have actively distanced themselves from the “journalist” label.

Pedestrian.tv writer Ben McLeay has stated on his popular @thomas_violence

Twitter account that he’s “not a journalist” (12 February 2018) and has further suggested on the Boonta Vista podcast, which he co-hosts, that none of Pedestrian staff are actually “journalists” (McLeay, 2018). Instead, and reflecting

Pedestrian.tv’s embeddedness within Australian Twitter subcultures, many of its staff are popular Twitter personalities – like Ben McLeay, but also J. R. Hennessy

(the outlet’s deputy editor), who has over 20,000 followers on the platform, and writer Rebecca Shaw, who possess over 39,000. Pedestrian.tv then, like Junkee but also more so than BuzzFeed Oz News, evades normative understandings of

60 journalistic professional identity while at the same reproduces a rather traditional newsroom structure.

2. 6 Social news as an emerging genre

Now that BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv have been introduced, I elaborate further on what exactly is meant by “social news”. What are the characteristics of this emerging genre, and how can the genre’s significance begin to be understood? Below, I discuss the current scholarly literature on the outlets I conceptualise as “social news”. Following this, I provide a definition of the genre.

Of the three outlets outlined above, because it is a global news company, BuzzFeed has attracted the most attention from scholars and journalists. This has been especially so after BuzzFeed established a formal newsroom in the US in 2011. The outlet, though popularly known for its pop-culture “listicles” (articles composed of lists and quizzes), rather quickly entered the fold of “serious” journalism through news scoops. These scoops included the news that former Presidential candidate

John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican Presidential primaries (BuzzFeed Staff, 4 January 2012). Other BuzzFeed scoops included an award-winning story on the authorisation of the use of military force in the US’

War on Terror (Johnsen, 17 January 2014; Gold, 11 December 2014). BuzzFeed stories have also led to real-world outcomes, such as a BBC and BuzzFeed co- investigation into match-fixing in professional tennis which prompted an independent review by the sport’s major associations (Blake & Templon, 18

January 2016; Mullin, 15 February 2016). Other significant, and more recent,

BuzzFeed stories – such as its investigation into the connections between the far- right US-based news outlet Breitbart and white nationalists (Bernstein, 6 October

2017) – have further increased BuzzFeed’s standing amongst mainstream news outlets.

It is unsurprising, then, that scholarship on what I term social news has concentrated on BuzzFeed and has also mostly focused on this process of journalistic legitimisation. Edson C. Tandoc & Joy Jenkins (2017) studied the US version of BuzzFeed News and its relationship with legacy news outlets through the

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of field theory (1998), finding that although these established outlets were initially wary of BuzzFeed’s entry into their field, they now welcome it and perceive it as “reinforcing existing [journalistic] norms and contributing to the reproduction of the field’s structure” (2017: 14).

Tandoc (2017) also studied the news values, sources, formats, and norms of

BuzzFeed (US) in comparison to The New York Times through a content analysis of news articles. As in the previous study, Tandoc found that although BuzzFeed was “exhibiting some departures from traditional practice”, it was, “in general, playing by the rules” (2017: 1). However, Tandoc notes that it would be beneficial to study BuzzFeed in relation to other emerging outlets, to confirm whether these

“departures” – such as a less negative tone, and a greater inclusion of “citizen” voices through the use of embedded social media – were symbolic of larger shifts in the journalistic field. Lu Wu (2016) had a comparable focus to Tandoc &

Jenkins, looking at the growing similarities of BuzzFeed with established legacy outlets. Wu found that BuzzFeed has gradually been adopting traditional newsroom structures and producing more “hard news stories”, with the latter distinct from the pop-culture content the outlet was originally known for (2016). Tandoc & Cassie

Yuan Wen Foo (2018) also performed an ethnographic study of US-based

BuzzFeed journalists, noting that the journalists they interviewed saw their work at

BuzzFeed as faithful to journalistic “ethics”, but that at the same time they differentiated themselves from legacy outlets by what they saw as BuzzFeed’s close relationship to audiences, its enthusiasm for “experimentation”, and its savvy use of technology.

While there are thus indications of differentiation – and indeed, Tandoc & Jenkins suggest that BuzzFeed’s “discourse and practices” could be transforming the journalistic field in ways that established journalists have overlooked (2017: 14) – these studies mostly sketch a picture of BuzzFeed becoming journalism, which does not quite capture the journalistic transformations evident in the @RealMarkLatham scoop, nor explain their origins. While this process of legitimisation is important – and it is a key part of BuzzFeed News’ success – it is not the only aspect of its story.

There is a possibility of neglecting what BuzzFeed demonstrates about broader transformations in news and journalistic practice, as each become increasingly dependent on and intertwined with social media platforms and Internet cultures.

A major reason for this, as I have outlined in the outlet profiles above, is because while a pioneer of this style, BuzzFeed News is not unique in its combination of

Internet-related vernacular sensibilities, digitally-savvy journalism, and progressive-leaning and frequently explicit politics. Junkee and Pedestrian.tv also combine these stylistic and journalistic elements in their branding and news content, albeit in varying ways. Both Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, like BuzzFeed, are outlets native to the digital platform ecology, and are both highly literate in the vernaculars and politics of these platforms. They share BuzzFeed’s native advertising-focused business model, and are similarly experiencing significant growth in a time of economic crisis in the news industry.

Due to these shared qualities, BuzzFeed and related transformations in news and journalism are forming part of an emerging genre. Here “genre” is understood in its broadest sense as a textual category, with certain formal conventions and expectations, and constructed with particular audiences in mind (Gray, 2006: 53;

Lomborg, 2014). The use of the term genre means that I am not developing a typology: I am not arguing for a set list of social news outlets, nor do these outlets present defined limits for social news as a genre. Rather, they are the Australian outlets whose outputs best exemplify – and appear emblematic of – the transformations I am interested in. Genre denotes “family resemblances”, as Stine

Lomborg, drawing from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967), argues (2014: 15): a collection of commonalities of varying presence, be they stylistic, thematic, or compositional. Genres are thus “dynamic”, despite bearing similarities in form and content (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993). In this respect, legacy news outlets could conceivably be “social news” if they performed in certain ways – and in a sign that doing so could be useful, outlets such as News.com.au are already posting news- related memes to their official Facebook pages (29 August 2018). In addition, new outlets with social news characteristics – such as 10 daily and ABC Life – have already emerged since I began this research, indicating not only the influence of the forces driving social news and the popularity of these kinds of outlets, but also the “elastic” (Lomborg, 2014: 16) fruitfulness of “genre” as a conceptual lens in which to understand them. International examples, such as the viral news and content aggregate Indy 100 from UK-based The Independent, also share social news characteristics, such as an emphasis on informal language and “shareable”

Internet phenomena.

The three outlets I have chosen to focus on represent different manifestations of the social news genre, as it relates to the traditional legacy news genre:

Pedestrian.tv is least like legacy news, being the most informal in tone and its output having the greatest emphasis on pop-culture news. BuzzFeed Oz News, on the other hand, although sharing the pop-culture sensibilities and platform fluency of the other social news outlets, has the greatest emphasis on stories that bear rather traditional news values, has an organisational structure most similar to legacy outlets, and is the most “objective” – in terms of dispassionate coverage – of the three. Junkee sits somewhere in the middle. “Genre” thus allows social news to be flexible as a concept, and at the same time enables an illuminating framework in which to understand news and journalism as it is changing in relation to a dominant platform ecology with peculiar logics and cultures.

Thus, a definition: social news describes an emerging genre of news, that is both symptomatic of and a response to the logics and cultures of social media platforms.

The social news genre has three key characteristics: first, a fluency in the vernaculars and pop-culture sensibilities of social media platform cultures; second, a shareability that emerges from these vernacular characteristics, and which taps back into the connective affordances, sociable cultures, and affective publics of these platforms; and third, a tendency to an overt, transparent positionality that consistently supports and identifies with certain political causes. This transparent positionality challenges traditional journalistic norms around “objectivity” and

“balance” (Deuze, 2005; Zelizer, 2013). This means that the outlets that I discuss here as producers of social news might fail some of the traditional tests for quality journalism, such as a requirement to maintain a clear demarcation between editorial and news content. Their output may also swap a traditional journalistic “objective”

65 detachment for a personal, informal and irreverent tone. Yet these outlets still operate in a fashion that is recognisably journalistic: that is, their output actively investigates, accurately reports, and analytically comments on events, cultural phenomena, and public issues. Furthermore, these outlets demonstrate a strong interest in media criticism – and as will be argued in Chapter 6, this is both symptomatic of and a potential answer to a widespread frustration with the mainstream media. Finally, but not necessarily central to the definition, social news is currently produced and distributed by a range of outlets sharing a business model reliant at least in part on brand-sponsored native advertising that is appealing in content and tone to particular niche audiences and subcultures.

It is worth noting here that it is possible that right-leaning, conservative, and far- right outlets could share social news qualities, such as a fluency in platform vernaculars – a term coined to describe the aesthetic sensibilities, grammars of communication, and social conventions which “emerge from the ongoing interaction between users and platforms” (Gibbs et al, 2014: 257). Considering the meme-literacy of online far-right cultures and communities (such as 4chan), it is conceivable that there could be news outlets from the Right that attempt to emulate the style popularised by shareable news content sites. And there have been such attempts, such as in the early 2010s when a Facebook-focused news site emerged, called the Independent Journal Review, which attempted to mimic the “curiosity gap” style associated with sites like Upworthy. “Curiosity gap” refers to headlines written in such a way to tease user interest by withholding key story details, thereby encouraging click-throughs (Madrigal, 25 March 2014). However, instead of featuring heart-warming social justice stories, the Independent Journal Review predominately ran stories that celebrated conservative victories over progressives,

66 as well as articles that rallied against gun control (Miller, 27 November 2013).

Although a report from BuzzFeed suggested that the Independent Journal Review was experiencing initial success, the outlet has since shut down. In Australia, there has been a similar case of right-leaning mimicry of social news stylistics: in 2017 the conservative Liberal Party attempted to launch a youth outreach news site

(called The Fair Go) which looked very much like Junkee (Street, 27 June 2017).

The content on the site mostly criticised trade unions and the left-leaning Australian

Labor Party. The Fair Go also ran articles that promoted small business and free market economics. It was, unsurprisingly, widely mocked by progressives on

Australian Twitter and has since closed down.

Besides these individual cases of mimicry, the Australian sites that I have seen so far that embody these social news characteristics have all otherwise been progressive-leaning, and that appears partly due to the influence of early politically progressive sites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed. In addition, as I will argue more extensively in Chapter 6, BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv embody and draw from certain pervasive cultures that are deeply embedded in online social justice politics. The kinds of GIFs used in their content, the kinds of acronyms or other forms of text-based vernacular deployed, as well the call out culture- influenced “Twitter reacts” articles are embedded in, reflective of, and responsive to particular progressive online cultures. The latter are distinct from conservative and far-right online cultures, which not only tend to be more abusive in nature – as exemplified by the high-profile social media harassment campaign commonly known as “Gamergate”, in which female videogame developers and journalists were a frequent target of abuse from male “gamers” (Massanari, 2015; Burgess &

Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) – but also tend to carry their own cultural symbols.

A prominent example of such symbols is the notorious “Pepe the Frog” meme, a green cartoon frog popular on far-right online communities like 4chan and made infamous during the 2016 US Presidential election, where it became commonly associated with the online Trump campaign (Marwick & Lewis, 2017: 35-37).

Other symbols associated with conservative and far-right meme cultures include the use of Japanese-style female anime characters, both as political mascots

(Broderick, 21 September 2017) and as social media profile avatars (Charity, 9

August 2016).

Yet general characteristics of social news – such as a fluency in Internet vernacular, the use of a magnetic yet exclusionary “constitutive humour” (Phillips & Milner,

2017: 92), and an explicit positionality – were nonetheless visible in the conservative Independent Journal Review and Fair Go outlets, as well as in others such as the (now-on-hiatus) far-right “men’s rights activist” site Return of Kings.

In this latter example, listicles laughing at and attacking “liberals”, along with articles where a “male” identity is centred, and how the appeal of these articles directly comes from such positioning, all bear resemblance (although, in a flipped fashion) to the “social news” qualities under examination in this thesis. I will discuss this point further in the Conclusion Chapter and provide some suggestions for future research on right-leaning, conservative, and far-right “social news”.

“Social news”, as a term, has previously appeared in scholarly literature. The term was previously used in reference to content aggregator platforms such as

Newsvine, Digg, and Reddit. These platforms enabled users to share and rate articles and videos sourced from elsewhere (Goode, 2009; Wasike, 2011; Sood et al, 2012; Hille & Bakker, 2014). In these studies, researchers were largely interested in “citizen”, or rather what Axel Bruns has previously called

“gatewatching” practices (2003): that is, the kinds of news stories that were shared and ranked highly on the aggregator platforms listed above (Wasike, 2011), and the quality of “debate” or discussion present on the news sites of various legacy media outlets (Goode, 2009; Sood et al, 2012; Hille & Bakker, 2014). In Sanne

Hille & Piet Bakker’s case, the emphasis was placed on a certain kind of “social news users”, meaning those that were particularly engaged in sharing and commenting on news sites (2014). Jonathan Bright’s research on the “social news gap” was in a similar vein, although focused on more mainstream social media platforms like Twitter (2016). Here, “social news” referred to news sharing practices on social media platforms, the “gap” being the divergence between the kinds of news stories shared on Twitter and the ones read on the websites of traditional news outlets (Bright used BBC News as his case study). Bright found that stories about “social welfare and science and technology” were shared more than stories about “politics, accidents, disasters and crime”, during the selected 2- week period (2016: 357). Bright concluded that this “gap” could be contributing to diverging news diets between those that read directly off news websites and those that mostly receive their news from their social media feeds. A critique of this focus on legacy news sharing, and BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv’s attempts to bridge this “gap” by focusing on shareable news content and not just shareable news stories, will be discussed at length in Chapter 5.

These uses of “social news” mostly understood the term in relation to participatory practices and the platform affordances which enabled these. They also neglected how the form and content – not just the stories and topics – of news could promote sociability. This concept is drawn from German sociologist Georg Simmel’s writings on the “feeling for… [and the] satisfaction in, the very fact that one is

69 associated with others” (1971, p. 128). My conceptualisation of social news, in these respects, both builds on and move beyond these earlier uses of the term. The social news genre, in my conception, is not just “social” due to its embeddedness in social media platforms and the user practices on these platforms – although this is a central characteristic. Rather, it is social also in the sense that its news (the form and content of its outputs) is designed to facilitate socialising, or at least to tap into sociable desires – by sharing a laugh or an emotion with others, or passing along an interesting read to a friend – via the affordances of social media platforms.

Lastly, these outlets occasionally even refer to themselves as social news:

BuzzFeed, for example, continues to label itself in various instances as a “social news and entertainment company” (About BuzzFeed, 2018). Indeed, it was this self-labelling by BuzzFeed that partly inspired this thesis project.

2. 7 Conclusion

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv can be situated within a transforming

Australian media ecology, and have antecedents in earlier “tabloid” and niche news media, as well as in late-night “neo-modernist” talk shows. In this chapter, I introduced the concept of “social news” as way of describing certain transformations in news and journalism in relation to social media platforms and internet cultures. In the next chapter, before I elaborate further on the nature of this genre in relation to key examples and to the chosen case study (the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey), I discuss in detail the concept of media logics (Altheide &

Snow, 1979). As indicated in the first chapter, the generic qualities of social news are bound up with, and should be understood as emerging out of and in relation to, the logics of social media (van Djick & Poell, 2013). Instead of a purely descriptive outline of a genre, thinking about logics in relation to social news enables a broader

70 understanding of what is actually going on with contemporary news as it becomes intertwined with platforms – and allows researchers to better predict where current transformations in this media environment are taking journalism. After the next chapter on media and social media logics, three chapters will follow which elaborate on three social news logics: engagement, sociability, and personalisation.

These social news logics are closely related to the social news qualities discussed above, but will be grounded in the conceptual work on social media logics. In this way, by shifting the concern from generic characteristics to logics, researchers can better situate these social news qualities within certain industrial and cultural contexts and within the social media platform ecology. That is, these qualities will be framed as ways in which a genre works in relation to a particular media, economic, and cultural environment. These ways of working, as discussed in the

Conclusion Chapter, can also be influential in and of themselves. Thus, only by attending to logics, both of social media and of social news, can the definition of social news that I have flagged in this chapter – that is, social news being a symptom and response to the logics and cultures of social media platforms – become clear.

Chapter 3: Social media logics

3.1 Introduction

News outlets are increasingly dependent on social media for audiences (Gottfried

& Shearer, 2016). Social media, though, are not neutral platforms. Rather, the term

“platform” itself is the result of deliberative discursive positioning by social media companies (Gillespie, 2010). The “platform” metaphor works to conceive the websites and mobile phone applications that these companies offer as akin to civic infrastructure, dedicated to merely supporting social networking and the dissemination of user-generated content (UGC). In doing so, the term helps these social media companies evade questions of responsibility and regulation, as their services are “only” platforms for social connection rather than algorithmic technologies that structure and regulate connection and connectivity in certain programmed ways. Like older broadcast media (Altheide & Snow, 1979), social media are far from impartial. Instead, they operate with discernable logics –

“strategies, mechanisms, and economies underpinning these platforms’ dynamics”

(van Dijck & Poell, 2013) – which value certain forms of content and social relationships over others, and which structure social life, as lived through these platforms, in deliberate ways.

Much of this chapter will take the form of a scholarly literature review, diving into the extant research on media and social media logics. I will first introduce the concept of media “logics” (Altheide & Snow, 1979) as a way of studying the co- constitutive relationship between mediating technologies and the institutions dependent on those technologies. I will follow this by attending to ongoing debates around the usefulness of the term “media logics”, particularly as a way of studying

72 news and journalistic practices. I will argue that, while there has been considerable conceptual inflation, there is nonetheless a recognisable tension in these debates between a “media logic” that places emphasis on the practices of “the media”

(especially, mass media) as a dominating institution, and a “media logic” that places emphasis on the organising principles of technologies (or, in Altheide &

Snow’s original conceptualisation, ‘media formats’) which in turn influence news work. I will then relate these scholarly debates around media logics to contemporary concerns around social media platforms and news, in the process introducing José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s notions of “social media logics”

(2013). These social media logics include programmability, connectivity, datatification and engagement, as well as self-branding (Duffy & Pooley, 2017) and automation (Duguay, 2018). The chapter will then move on to a discussion of algorithms – algorithms being the programmed solutions to particular technical problems on platforms (Knuth, 1968: 27), such as the problem of organising information – and how algorithms govern social media logics, and in turn news content on platforms. These technological and algorithmic logics will provide useful groundwork for the subsequent chapters on “social news logics”: the latter I conceptualise as being institutional responses to the former.

3.2 (Mass) media logics and their conceptual offshoots

The argument that scholars should locate and study governing “logics” – that is, governing principles and valuing regimes – as a way to understand the operations of news media was most famously advanced by David L. Altheide & Robert P.

Snow’s research on mass media logics (1979). Altheide & Snow defined media logic as the essential process in which information is organised, transmitted, and communicated through media, and how this logic is naturalised – its organising

73 principles and “formats” made to seem value-neutral – as it penetrates and thereby alters the behaviours of the institutions and audiences that are dominated by media

(1979). Altheide & Snow argued that television, the dominant medium at the time, organised public life – as represented in its news and current affairs programming

– as a rapid succession of events happening “out there”, outside the comforting domesticity of the home. This rapid succession of events glued audiences to the screen as they were caught in the sequence, encouraged by news anchors to stay tuned for what’s coming up next (1979: 236-238). Here, Altheide & Snow’s work relates to cultural theorist Raymond Williams’s earlier concept of television’s broadcast “flow” (1974). Williams argued that while previous communication systems consisted of “discrete” events or items – a speech, or a newspaper – broadcast media offered a “planned sequence”, and this sequential flow characterised television’s mediated experience (1974: 86-87).

The logics of television also shape the representation of news in other ways. As discussed in the previous chapter, scholars have argued that television news prioritises visually spectacular conflict over news stories that lack this quality, due to both television’s suitability for such visually arresting representation and the commercial necessity for high audience ratings (Altheide & Snow, 1979: 34-27;

Postman, 1985). Other intrinsic formal characteristics of television have also led to an embedding of certain phenomena in political and news culture. Notable amongst these is the “soundbite”: a linguistic technique public figures developed in order to ensure their messaging fit into the short story formats of news television (Jones,

1996). These kinds of values and organising principles have been made “natural”: not only through the dominance of television as a media form, but also through other qualities of broadcast media such as liveness, which has worked to frame

74 broadcast content – particularly the presentation of events captured by news cameras – as more real, tangible, immediate, and therefore neutral than such content could appear in other media forms (Levine, 2008; White, 1999). In the latter regard, Facebook and Twitter – amongst other social media – have attempted to embed such “live” broadcast features (along with the symbols associated with

“liveness”, such as the red radio tower icon in Facebook’s Live feature) in their platforms. This can be understood as a both an attempt to claim the continued cultural authority associated with broadcast liveness and succeed such authority through the even more “immediate” affordances and environment of social media.

Altheide & Snow’s notion of “media logics” was influential, especially within the fields of media and journalism (Landerer, 2013: 242). However, in the many ways the term has been used and operationalised over the decades, it has also strayed away – in differing degrees – from Altheide & Snow’s original conception. There has been ongoing conflation, at times, between “the media” as a journalistic institution, and “media” as a particular set of dominating technologies. Recent usages are evident of the seeming fluidity of the term within scholarship. In

Stephen Cushion & Richard Thomas’ recent work on election coverage in the UK and the US (2018), the term “media logic” is used not so much to refer to the inherent qualities of certain mediating technologies, but rather the institutional practices of news organisations themselves. For Cushion & Thomas, media logic is thus the “kind of organising principles behind the editorial selection and communication of news about election coverage” (2018: 12). This is quite different from Altheide & Snow’s emphasis on technological principles governing institutional practices. Similarly, this emphasis on the institutional aspects of news media has been articulated by Jesper Strömbäck, who has argued that media logic

75 has primarily been understood as reflecting “the institutional, technological, and sociological characteristics of the news media, including their format characteristics, production and dissemination routines, norms, and needs” (2011:

372). Moreover, these studies have focused on mass media, consonant with the monolithic connotations of “the media”.

This conceptual conflation (or confusion) between technology and institution is particularly clear in the literature on “mediatisation” (or “mediation”) – concepts themselves which share considerable lineage with “media logic” (Landerer, 2013:

240-242). In general, “mediatisation” has been referred to as the process by which

“not necessarily media-related areas of social activity assume media form, media culture, or media logic” (Landerer, 2013: 241). For Stig Hjarvard mediatisation

“represents a new social condition in which the media have emerged as an important institution in society at the same time as they have become integrated into the very fabric of social and cultural life” (2013). Mediatisation, in this sense, is particularly interested in how the operations of “the media” and mass media technologies intrude into other – and all – areas of social (and “private”) life. A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to the question of mediatisation on politics – and especially, formal political processes (Landerer, 2013: 240-242;

Kunelius & Reunanen, 2012; Kepplinger, 2002). For example, Strömbäck has studied mediatisation in terms of how dominant mass media is as a source of political information; the degree of independence between political and mass media institutions; the degrees to which political actors are governed by media logic, and so on (2008). Somewhat more recently, Risto Kunelius & Esa Reunanen studied the mediatisation of Finnish political decision making, finding that in their interviews with political actors, the media were both an essential resource of

76 political power and a crucial element in the environment in which such power operated (2012).

In many of the above studies, mediatisation not only supersedes “media logic” as a grander governing value, but is also framed as a “social condition” (Hjarvard,

2013). In these accounts, mediatisation denotes a “particular phase in the development of modern societies” and an “era during which all social relationships… are embedded in a mediatised context” (Kunelius & Reunanen,

2012). These arguments reflect earlier studies on the dominating role of (mass) media institutions, and their mediating power: Daniel Dayan & Elihu Katz’s influential work on “media events” (1994), these referring to the “high holidays” of media (such as royal weddings, or the Olympics) which monopolise public attention in service of dominant, hegemonic ideologies (1994). In a similar vein,

Nick Couldry’s work on “media rituals” argued that the media do more than simply report concrete occurrences, but instead also work to inscribe, and reinscribe, the

“myth” of the media as “society’s centre”: both as the central access point to social and political life and the “centre” through which social conflict is mediated and resolved (2003). Couldry’s research itself drew upon James Carey’s earlier conception of “communication rituals”, in which television had a central role

(1989). The media’s role in invoking and sustaining public conflicts and solidarities around how society “should or ought to be” has also been argued by Simon Cottle

(2006: 415-416), which itself recalls 19th century French sociologist Emile

Durkheim’s arguments around the cohesive role of social rituals, such as religious festivals (1995). For Durkheim, these rituals provided a momentary transcendence of the everyday, to remind individuals of the social bonds they share, and compel

77 them to imagine themselves as part of a greater social whole – in other words, as a society (1995: 227).

Thus, the ideas and arguments around, and which have stemmed from, Atheide and

Snow’s notion of “media logic” are varied but have tended to favour accounts which emphasised “the media” as a dominating institution. Due to this tendency to support grand – but also rather vague – notions of media power, the media logic concept, in its various forms, has been criticised as inherently reductionist (Hepp,

2009; Lundby, 2009). Andreas Hepp questioned the value of the concept, arguing that it is difficult to think of a single “media logic” (2009). Knut Lundby, as well, has argued that it “does not make sense to subsume… media variety under a more or less coherent ‘media logic’” (2009: 117). Nino Landerer similarly has argued that because of Altheide & Snow’s “rather vague definition”, media logic “lacks conceptual precision from the start” (2013: 242). “Precisely due to its initial vagueness”, Landerer argues, “Altheide & Snow’s definition has been continuously repeated and interpreted in many different accounts of mediatisation… to such an extent that [media logic’s] very usefulness as a singular, coherent logic is indeed questionable” (2013: 242). In response to this apparent inherent “vagueness”, but still wishing to retain the notion of operating “logics” that shape mediating technologies and institutional practices (Strömbäck &

Dimitrova, 2011), scholars have rethought and diversified the “logic” concept in various ways. Landerer has proposed the two concepts of “commercial” or “market logic”, and “normative logic”: the former, a logic driven by the maximisation of audiences, and the latter which places “social or public responsibility… over market considerations” (2013: 244). Strömbäck & Frank Esser, on the other hand, have discussed a “political logic” that exists in an oppositional dynamic with

“media logic” (2014). For Strömbäck & Esser, political logic is shaped by policy and politics rather than the professional, commercial, and technological logics of news media. Cushion & Thomas, too, make use of this “political” and “media” logic opposition in their research on campaign coverage, as well as discussing a third “public logic” (2018). Public logic, for Cushion & Thomas, is used in a similar fashion to Landerer’s “normative logic” and John Downey & Taberez Ahmed

Neyazi’s notion of “professional logic” (2014): that is, public logic refers to how notions of the “public interest” operate in journalistic practice. Studying how

“public logic” operates within news media enables researchers, as Cushion &

Thomas argue, to “make judgements about how well [news] informs voters’ democratic decision making” (2018: 38-39).

However, while these offshoot concepts provide useful frameworks in which to understand how news media operates in relation to formal political processes and election campaigning, they do not fully capture the emphasis on media – not news media – in Altheide & Snow’s original conception. As discussed above, these concepts tend to favour the institutional aspects of the “logics” term, rather than thinking about how particular media structure and organise information: or, in other words, about the inherent values of certain mediating technologies. Thinking in the second respect encourages scholars, I argue, to examine closely different media, in terms of their possibilities and limitations as technologies and cultural forms. This thinking does not exclude considering how media logics develop over time – technological transformations within older media, as well as algorithmic and structural adjustments in social media platforms, instead necessitate a reconsideration of previously proposed logics (Krotz, 2009). By attending to the specific workings of particular media forms, we can also avoid the kind of

79 monolithic, singular and homogenous conceptualisation which media logic has been previously criticised as possessing (Couldry, 2012; Landerer, 2013). At the same time, this kind of thinking around media logics allows the concept to have continued relevance past a previous age dominated by mass media: for some scholars have expressed concern that media logic is a “thinking of the past” from

“the age of mass communication” (Lundby, 2009: 117). Instead, as other scholars have argued (van Dijck & Poell, 2013), the media logic concept enables researchers to attend to the values and affordances of digital media platforms, such as social media – the logics framework encouraging scholars, here, to examine how these digital mediating technologies structure communication, and the consequences this has for the news organisations increasingly dependent on these technologies.

3.3 Social media logics

José van Dijck & Thomas Poell were the first to bring the media logics framework to social media, at the time when the latter were becoming increasingly prominent in the organisation and mediation of social and political life (2013). Just as the term

“platform” was itself an ideological construct (Gillespie, 2010), the term “social media” also carries symbolic baggage which both emphasises and masks particular internal logics. Previously known as “social networking sites” (boyd & Ellison,

2008), and sharing lineages – both technological and ideological – with the earlier

“Web 2.0” (Allen, 2012), “social media” has emerged since the late 2000s as a term used to describe popular Internet-based social networking technologies, while at the same time the term also articulates certain values that are meant to distinguish these social media from earlier mass media. “Social media” has been used, in popular, commercial, and academic contexts, as a descriptor of blogging sites like

WordPress, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, content sharing sites such

80 as YouTube and Instagram, as well as webforums like reddit and 4chan (Highfield,

2016). But as varied in appearance and function as these sites and applications are, their description as “social media” also designates them as sharing positive qualities of user empowerment and social connection: that, unlike previous broadcast media, users are in control rather than, as Altheide & Snow and Williams described, caught in and guided by the sequential flow. Certainly this is how social media companies would like to present themselves – and the term does correctly indicate both the reliance of these sites and applications on user-generated content as well their function as technologies for everyday communication. Yet, as with mass media, van Dijck & Poell’s application of the “logics” frameworks demystifies the ideological and neutralising operations at work in both the rhetoric around, as well as in the lived experiences of, social media “platforms”.

That is to say, just like mass media, social media possess certain discernible logics that are fundamental to both their internal workings and their user experience. In the context of Facebook and Twitter, van Dijck & Poell proposed four distinct social media logics: “programmability”, “connectivity”, “datafication”, and

“popularity” (2013), although the latter, I argue, needs to be reconceptualised as a logic of “engagement”. Other scholars have also more recently argued for additional social media logics, such as a logic of “self-branding” (Duffy & Pooley,

2017), and a logic of “automation” (Duguay, 2018). These logics, I argue below, provide important foundations for thinking about how news outlets operate on social media platforms.

3.3.1 Programmability

As van Dijck & Poell note, in the context of print and broadcasting, the term

“programming” referred to editorial practice of scheduling and arranging content

(2013: 5). Broadcasts, as Williams argued, were a programmed – and thus planned

– flow of content that sought, to differing emphases depending on the broadcaster, to both serve audience interest and command audience attention as one

“programme” flowed to the next. Planning here was (and continues to be) meticulous, even blatantly manipulative: as it is common practice for broadcasters to place new shows they would like to promote after existing popular ones, the hope here being that audiences – out of curiosity, or simply because the television is left on – will flow from the older programme to the new. This practice is termed

“tent-polling” in official scheduling parlance. For print media, such as newspapers, the placement of articles (whether front page or towards the back) served similar public interest or commercial purposes. Front page images, too, are used in a similar fashion to attract potential readers at newsstands. In the mass media logics of these two previously dominant media forms, programming was a way for editorial gatekeepers to attract, control, and manipulate audience interest and attention.

With the advent and popularisation of the Web and personal computing, however,

“the concepts ‘programming and ‘flow’ acquired a different meaning”, their emphasis shifting from “content and audiences to code and users”, and “from programmed flow to programmability” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 5). For van Dijck

& Poell, the shift from programme to programmability signified a transition from the technological and cultural dominance of “one-way” programmed traffic to the

“two-way” traffic between users and programmers (2013: 5) – or rather, a multi- way traffic between users and programmers as well as users and users.

Programmability referred to the mutual shaping by developers and users of the affordances and cultures of platforms. On the one hand, developers code intended uses into platforms, and on the other users create new practices – which are then coded back into the platform in the form of new features. The hashtag is an example of a feature that began as a user practice before it was integrated into Twitter’s official functionality (Bruns & Burgess, 2015). The Twitter thread is another example of such a feature – originating as a number-based user convention which helped “thread” together a series of tweets (e.g., 1/5, 2/5, etc.), Twitter eventually released an automatic “thread” feature in 2017 (Romano, 15 December 2017). And as will be discussed in the next chapter, the prompts “tag friends” in the posts of popular Facebook pages was itself a response to an already common user practice.

More generally, content streams on platforms – unlike the editorial gatekeeping of broadcast television – are to a certain extent determined by users, in so far as content on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on is largely user-generated. The visibility of such content is also partially determined by users through clicks, likes, comments, and shares – although such user engagement practices are nonetheless guided by (but also simultaneously inform) algorithmic content-valuing regimes

(Beer, 2009). Lev Manovich, similarly, previously claimed that being

“programmable” – that is, “subject to algorithmic manipulation” – was a central characteristic of “new media” (2001: 27).

Programmability has also been understood in the sense of how the Application

Programming Interfaces (APIs) of platforms provide third-party developers access to data on which they can build their own applications (Helmond, 2015). As Anne

Helmond argues, the API functionality – which enables the plugging in of

Facebook data into apps like Tinder or embedding Facebook and Twitter “share” buttons into news sites, among other things – transforms the user experiences of both app and platform (2015: 4). On Tinder, users are required to sign up via their

Facebook profiles, and users navigate the app and its display of potential matches with these profiles (minus some identifiable personal information, such as surnames). Facebook profiles are used in this way ostensibly to make the app safer for users (due to Facebook’s real name policy), but at the same time, for those who use Tinder, their Facebook profile becomes tied to their dating profile, resulting in an interdependent app network requiring meticulous user management, including management of the self. In the case of social media plugins on news websites, share buttons mean that rather than static text-based webpages, digital news articles become embedded in the platform-based connective ecology, while at the same time, news content can more easily filter into, and gain greater prominence in, the social feeds of Facebook and Twitter (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). This early determination by Facebook to embed itself in news reading and distribution has now caused trouble for the platform in terms of the apparent proliferation of hyper- partisan and manipulative news-like content on Facebook – and the academic, journalistic, and State-based scrutiny of Facebook that has resulted. Such scrutiny, which has come in the form of demands from governments, journalists, and users for greater accountability, would have likely not occurred if Facebook did not pursue the kind of programmability described above – which was done all the while

Facebook maintained that it was “just” a platform for user-led content distribution

(Castillo, 11 April 2018).

These functionalities are so integral to the technological and cultural foundations of social media platforms, Helmond argues, that they can only be understood as platforms due to this kind of API-based programmability, in terms of their function as accessible sites of user data that also offer embeddable connective affordances.

For Helmond, the “moment social networking sites offer APIs, they turn into social media platforms by enacting their programmability” (2015: 4).

And in a different, broader, sense, “programmability”, for media and cultural theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, extends beyond social media and even beyond computers: for Chun, the logic of software-based and data-driven programmability has become an overarching “logos” through which society views, poses, and solves social, economic, and political questions (2011).

All of this is not to argue that platforms are shaped by developers and users (and third-party developers) on equal terms. As the subtle guiding role that algorithms perform attests, the degree to which user experiences are shaped by developers can be less perceptible – and thus more easily naturalised – on platforms compared to the publicised programming schedules common to broadcast media (van Dijck &

Poell, 2013: 6). Lisa Nakamura had earlier noted how web interfaces tended to enact a kind of “menu-driven identity” which inscribed a limited range of rigidly defined racial and gendered identities, erasing both other identity categories as well as the nuanced experience of identity in general (2002: 102). Rather, thinking about programmability is to acknowledge user agency, and therefore critique a purely deterministic perspective, while also framing user agency as a continual negotiation with platforms. At the same time, it recognises how platforms choose to appropriate and adopt some user practices over others – further indicating the intended logics of platforms.

3.3.2 Connectivity

Social media, as the label denotes, are distinguished by their apparent ability to enable and harness degrees of sociality not possible in earlier “mass” media.

Indeed, this greater possibility for social connection – both in terms ease and scale

– features heavily in the self-imagery of Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook home page announces that the platform “helps you connect and share with the people in your life”, accompanied by an image of a world map, featuring small blank profiles scattered across the world, but connected through jotted lines (2018).

On the Twitter home page, the platform tells us to sign up to “see what’s happening in the world right now”, and to “join the conversation” – marketing the platform as a hub of global connection and action (2018). There is an imperative here to connect, pitched as an implicit good – but this imperative is not just a branding strategy: it also designed into the hardware of these platforms. As van Dijck &

Poell have argued, connectivity – here understood as the “socio-technical affordances” that “connect content to user activities and advertisers” and “a strategic tactic that effectively enables human connectedness while pushing automated connectivity” – is a fundamental logic of social media, shaping the interactions and experiences on platforms (2013: 8).

There is a long history of the importance of social connection in media, not just in terms of their technological prowess, but also with regards to how these technologies are culturally depicted and understood. A late 19th century postcard from the Eastern Telegraph Company, for instance, presented the telegraph in a similar fashion to Facebook’s own marketing: a map of the world, with lines representing telegraph wires connecting major cities and continents, demonstrating the prowess and reach of that modern technological marvel (UC Gallery, 2018).

Media – being technologies of communication – have thus by their very nature always enabled connection, albeit in differing ways, for differing purposes, and to differing degrees. Mass media connected listeners and viewers to a world “out there”– outside the confines of the home, or the car (Altheide & Snow, 1979). Mass media had also afforded a form of connectedness, with television anchors early on developing a mode of direct address that hailed audiences as a “you”: this “you” both recognised the individual viewer while at the same time interpellated this viewer as forming part of a viewing public. The ABC, Australia’s first television channel began its first broadcast in 1956 with an anchor’s address that hailed both viewer and nation simultaneously in its celebratory announcement of a “national television service, which is of course your service” [italics added] (ABC Australia,

17 April 2012).

Mass media’s role in constituting forms of (usually national) connectedness received considerable critical attention from 20th century media scholars. In a 1946 article titled, “Radio as Agency of National Unity”, Lyman Bryson & Dorothy

Rowden depicted radio broadcasting as something which enabled “for the first time in history… people to speak to people, leaders to leaders, and world leaders to a world following” (1946: 137). The “millions of words” broadcast on radio every day, Bryson & Rowden claimed, became the “common property of millions of people” (1946: 137). Bryson & Rowden also warn that radio must be guarded

“against inflaming existing prejudices” (1946: 138) – a concern familiar to contemporary scholars of social media, with regards to the latter’s power in amplifying misinformation and hate speech. Later, after the popularisation of television in the West, Edward Shils noted how the medium created a sense of a

“national family” as individuals and groups watched in unison across Britain

(1975:145). For David Cardiff & Paddy Scannell, television provided a

“fragmented audience with a common culture, an image of the nation as a knowable community” (1987: 168-169). Perhaps most notably in this regard, Dayan & Katz’s work on “media events”, as mentioned above, scrutinised the “high holidays of mass communications”, those festive celebrations – such as state funerals, the

Olympics, or royal weddings – that interrupted “daily routine” to transfix and integrate viewers into a “public” or “nation” through the transcending power of electronic live broadcast media (1992). Couldry’s work on media rituals, too, can be understood as a critical examination of mass broadcast media’s claims of – and purported authority over – social connection (2003).

Electronic media, then, have long boasted the power to connect – and even integrate

– viewers and citizens, facilitating a form of social cohesion which was supposedly not possible before the development of these technologies. In this sense, social media’s claim to “connect” is not new, but rather can be situated within a long history of media imaginaries. But at the same time, social media’s rhetoric here indeed suggests something different: that these platforms break from a mediated

“centre” (as Couldry would put it), and instead create, as the term platform suggests, a more user-centred participatory space, whereby the mediating role of these technologies is less visible in contrast to broadcast media. Users, as the world map on Facebook’s home page indicates, directly connect to each other through technology. This claim itself is an example of the kind of rhetoric that platforms deploy to obscure and mystify their mediating role. Moreover, as the 19th century telegraph company postcard demonstrated, this particular media self-imagery is not even new. Nonetheless, the marketing of social media companies allows a starting

88 point to examine the connective logic central to the lived experience of social media use.

Van Dijck & Poell noted that when (what are now known as) social media platforms emerged in the mid-2000s, they were initially distinguished by their power to connect and their “pursuit” of “connectedness” (2013: 8). As part of a broader “participatory” turn (Jenkins, 2006), these platforms seemingly broke from the recipient model of mass media, and the earlier one-to-many model of a browser- based “Web 1.0” (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008), thus creating new media forms which promoted and made accessible user-generated content and user-led networked communication (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 8). Earlier studies had already revealed the social potential of the Internet: Nancy Baym, for example, in her research on soap fandom in the early Internet Usenet groups coined the term

“online community” to describe how such networks were transformed into

“socially meaningful fields” through ongoing and patterned “community- constituting” interaction (2000: 5). Later developments in the early-to-mid 2000s appeared to signal a highly accessible Internet, where widespread, active participation was the norm and online “groups” became user-centred and user-led

“social networks” (boyd, 2006). During this early period these emerging “social networking sites” (boyd & Ellison, 2007) – as the predecessors of social media platforms were then commonly known – formed part of a nascent “Web 2.0”

(O’Reilly, 2007) that was celebrated for its supposed potential to “nurture connections, build communities, and advance democracy” (van Dijck & Poell,

2013: 4). This was largely because, bound up with the emergence of these platforms were other phenomena which provoked optimistic assessments of Web 2.0’s power to break down traditional media hierarchies and professional boundaries.

On the one hand, Henry Jenkins argued for the existence of a new “participatory culture”, whereby the “relatively low barriers” to artistic expression and civic engagement enabled by Web 2.0, along with the active fan communities that formed through connective media, had led to a breakdown and subsequent transformation in traditional hierarchies of cultural production (2006). Remix cultures on the video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, for instance, where users edited and transformed existing texts, were such examples of a more active and productive fan culture that emerged with these participatory digital technologies.

Photos and text uploaded to early social networks like Myspace and Flickr, and fan and amateur art distributed on sites like DeviantArt, were other examples of an emerging Web 2.0 that, seemingly, was to be constituted and driven by a culture of user-generated content (UGC). Not just in the academy were such celebratory heralds of a new kind of popular culture made, but also in the press: with Time magazine, most notably, declaring “you” as Person of the Year 2006, in tribute to the “many wresting power from the few” on “the new Web” (Grossman, 25

December 2006). Echoing the emancipatory, connective imagery described above,

Time talked of the new Web “bringing together the small contributions of millions of people”, and of “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before”

(Grossman, 25 December 2006).

Various terms and conceptualisations emerged in this period during the 2000s that sought to describe, and also celebrate, this seemingly new user-centred turn in popular media. The “digital prosumer” was a proposed term that sought to capture the accelerated blurring of traditional industrial hierarchies of production and consumption due to the rise of digital UGC (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). It should be noted, however, that the “prosumer” term itself dates back to the 1970s, having

90 been “predicated” by futurists Alvin Toffler & Heidi Toffler as a characteristic of the coming “Information Era” (1970). Just as famously, “produser”, coined by Axel

Bruns, was another concept that, at the time, fittingly described the blurring dynamics of usage and production present on platforms like YouTube and

Wikipedia, where all user accounts were, at least functionally, equal in terms of their productive capabilities (2008). “Produser” was a generally more popular term, due to its emphasis on “usage” rather than “consumption”– the former resonated better with the active and computer-mediated participatory cultures of the time

(Bruns, 2009). There were darker elements within this emerging UGC culture: the notorious image board 4chan, while an anarchic hive of creativity in terms of its prodigious meme production, was also a base for trolling, and has now become home to extreme elements of the online far-right (Phillips, 2015). While this Web

2.0 “moment” has now passed, and scholars have since sobered to realities of the corporate Internet, the mid-2000s participatory turn in popular culture has had enduring significance. Time’s imagery of global community and the “contribution of millions” remains visible in Facebook’s marketing, for instance. This significance will be discussed further in Chapter 5, in terms of the continuities, departures, and ongoing tensions between the cultural legacy of the UGC-led Web

2.0 and the sharing and sociable cultures of contemporary social media platforms.

At the same time, some scholars and journalists celebrated the arrival of so-called

“citizen journalists” or “social journalism”, once again emerging from participatory media, but also from the widespread adoption of mobile technologies (Gillmor,

2006; Goode, 2009). The term “citizen journalism” covered a range of artefacts and practices – such as video content uploaded to YouTube and other platforms, popular blogs, or the live tweeting of events (Wall, 2015: 798) – but in general

91 tended to describe potential UGC-led disruptions to the dominance of corporatized news media, and to the boundary work of professional journalism (Allan, 2007;

Hermida & Thurman, 2008; Bruns & Highfield, 2012; Lewis, 2012; Wall, 2015).

These amateur practices could be purposefully journalistic (e.g., dedicated

YouTube channels or blogs) – in the case of the live Twitter reportage (and self- reportage) of protests, such amateur journalism can be overt attempts to counterbalance perceived bias in mainstream news (Poell & Borra, 2011). More recently, similar attempts to counter or bypass mainstream reportage via social media have also come from more sinister actors – what Thorsten Quandt has called

“dark participants” (2018) – such as conspiracy theorists using YouTube to disseminate misinformation and obfuscate public debate or far-right politicians using their Facebook pages as their preferred platform as a way to evade journalistic scrutiny (Marwick & Lewis, 2017). Comment sections on social media or below articles on news websites are also notorious spaces for forms of problematic and even abusive activity, despite the fact that users are actively

“participating”. Such sinister activity has countered early assumptions, especially during the Web 2.0, about the inherent social positivity of political participation on the Internet (Quandt, 2018).Participatory journalism can also consist of rather

“random acts” (Lasica, 2003) – the live tweeting of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 being a well-known example of unintentional journalism

(Olson, 2 May 2011). That important (i.e., “newsworthy”) events could be reported first by individuals who just happened to be on the scene with an Internet connection was imagined during this period as a potential challenge to journalistic authority over breaking news.

Other practices – such as “gatewatching”, which described online and collaborative news curating practices (Bruns, 2003) – also were included as part of this participatory journalistic phenomenon. Dedicated digital spaces for such curative

“gatewatching” practices included content aggregator websites like Digg, which, in scholarship, were originally called “social news sites” (Wasike, 2011). On these websites, users were able to post and vote on news content found across the Web.

Such practices continue today in a more mundane fashion: the sharing of news stories onto personal Facebook and Twitter accounts are typical of everyday and widespread “participatory” news curation (Bruns, 2018). Even forms of blogging persist on Facebook and Twitter, where status updates and posts provide opportunities for users to share their thoughts on current events. The content aggregator and discussion platform Reddit, too, features the kinds of news curation cultures typical of gatewatching – demonstrating the endurance of these practices.

Aside from UGC and gatewatching, however, even more subtle interactive features of early online journalism, such as embedded hyperlinks within news stories, were beginning to undermine the “‘we write, you read’ dogma of modern journalism”, as Mark Deuze noted (2003). Research from this period indicated that the inclusion of rather mundane interactive functions on early news websites led to readers feeling more involved in the news (Shyam Sundar, 2000). In this sense, the presence of these interactive functions – these affordances – in news content meant that a different form of address was articulated than that present in older print and broadcast news: implicitly, or explicitly, audiences were framed as “users” rather than viewers or readers. Much of the participatory journalism writings and literature from this early period can be broadly understood as attempts to grapple with this shift as it manifested in various (greater or lesser) ways.

Corporate news and professional journalism have since attempted to adapt and co- exist with “citizen journalism” and related UGC cultures (Hermida & Thurman,

2008; Chadwick, 2013; Bruns, 2018), such as by using viral footage in news reports or by embedding Twitter feeds into television news broadcasts (Harrington,

Highfield & Bruns, 2013). Still, as will be made even more evident in Chapter 5, the reverberations of this participatory turn continue to be visible in the ongoing transformations of news and journalism.

Platforms soon matured and consolidated into sizeable commercial entities – in

Facebook’s case, into a highly profitable corporate enterprise. Accompanying this growth, van Dijck & Poell argued, was a shift in their logic from one which promoted UGC-led “connectedness” to one that is now more firmly based on monetised “connectivity” (2013: 8). Connectivity refers to the “socio-technical affordance of networked platforms to connect content to user activities and advertisers” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 8). The term captures how platforms not only enable connections but engineer them: it draws attention to how the “platform apparatus” is always a mediating force in user activities, “defin[ing] how connections are taking shape” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). In this way, the term works to de-mystify the mediating role that these platforms mask in their self- imagery: conceiving the connective affordances of these platforms as enabling and driving particular kinds of connections, for particular purposes. And these purposes are typically grounded in commercial goals: social media platforms like Facebook largely rely on the harvesting of user data, which is then sold to advertisers who use this data to create micro-targeted advertisements (Fuchs, 2011). Encouraging users to connect – to “friends”, to “pages”, to “groups”, etc. – not only helps develop a user profile that would be of interest to advertising partners, but also

94 works to prompt users to keep coming back to the platform, and thereby continue to divulge personal information. Other platform features are also examples of this commercial connective logic. Prompts by Facebook to fill in personal information

– currently, unfilled information slots on a user’s profile page triggers bolded messages requesting these slots to be filled in – could be excused as part of

Facebook’s mission for connection, “openness” and “bringing the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 17 February 2017). But when viewed through the logic of connectivity, these prompts are also clearly requests for the kinds of personal information valuable to advertisers. Furthermore, the algorithmic recommendation features present on these platforms could be understood through the same connective lens: Facebook recommending certain pages and groups to users are not only the result of personal profiling, but also a means through which this profiling is refined.

Van Dijck & Poell make clear that while this logic of connectivity is still grounded in commercial goals, these goals do not fully determine the kinds of uses or connections possible on these platforms, and nor do they preclude users forming connections that users themselves deem valuable. As discussed in the programmability section above, platforms are actually shaped by an ongoing process that involves both developers and users – for example, Facebook has recently included a function that suggests “friends” for users to tag in news article comment sections, developed in response to an already common user practice.

Drawing attention to how platforms engineer connections for particular purposes does not detract from some of the positive – and potentially emancipatory – connective possibilities that these platforms afford: demonstrated perhaps most famously by the use of social media in the popular uprisings in the Middle East in

95 the early 2010s and also in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 (van Dijck and

Poell, 2013: 8), and more recently the #MeToo movement (Khomami, 21 October

2017). The latter utilised the user-led connective affordances – and viral possibilities – of Twitter to amplify issues around sexual harassment and sexual assault. These kind of digitally-mediated popular movements have also been understood through the logic of “connective action”, which views connective digital media as being “organising agents” for new forms of collective, but personalised, social action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). These kinds of social action are personalised not just through the predominant use of personal social media profiles for co-producing and co-distributing political material, but also through their framing of politics where the personal – “#MeToo”, for example – is the organising locus (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). The relation between such personalised connective action and the personalising logics of social news outlets will be discussed in Chapter 6.

The logic of connectivity enables a framework for examining how the “boundaries between human connections and commercially and technologically steered activities” on platforms are “increasingly obfuscated” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013:

9). Or to put it another way, the connective affordances of platforms and the sociable user practices existent on them are both, to varying degrees, mutually constitutive and mutually dependent.

3.3.3 Datafication

Datafication, another logic proposed by van Dijck & Poell, referred to the tendency of platforms to “render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before” (2013: 9). Datafication transforms sentiments into “likes”,

“reacts”, “retweets”, popular interests and concerns into “trending topics”, and human relationships and social status into measurements based on “friend”

(Facebook) and “follower” (Twitter) counts. Datafication, in this sense, underlies all other social media logics, in so far as data forms the basis for – and the output of – services and interactions on these platforms.

A major characteristic of contemporary, corporate social media – indeed, what is distinctive in these platforms compared to earlier social networks – is the greater emphasis on, and the greater visibility of, the commodification of user data (van

Dijck & Poell, 2013: 9). For observers and theorists of the early social networking platforms, data tended to be viewed as a “byproduct” of these platforms: something which these networks produced but which was not seen, as such, as the grounding logic and modus operandi of the networks themselves (van Dijck & Poell, 2013:

9). The commercial possibilities of datafication are now much more apparent as platforms have “gradually matured” into “data firms” (or data mills): harvesting and selling user data to advertisers and other clients seeking precise, personal and demographic information (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 9). Indeed, it is this access to precise demographic information on Facebook which increases the viability for the kind of micro-targeting that social news outlets perform, in terms of BuzzFeed Oz,

Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv’s focus on young people. Junkee has even admitted that such data on the demographics and interests of young people originally spurred the creation of the outlet (Carson & Muller, 2017: 17). In this sense, datafication informs a key social news logic – personalisation – which I will discuss in detail in

Chapter 6.

The data troves that social media platforms produce are not solely of commercial interest, though. News outlets and journalists have also been able to take advantage

97 of platform analytics – as well as other kinds of digital data – to investigate different issues and tell new stories or tell conventional stories in a new way. While professional journalism has historically favoured textual and visual over numerical elements, the turn towards new forms of data-based and data-assisted journalism has become increasingly prominent as journalism converges with the ongoing datafication of social and political life (Coddington, 2015: 331-332). This emerging range of journalistic practices has been broadly labelled “data journalism” (Gray et al, 2012), although a number of other terms have also been used to describe this phenomena, such as “computational” (Flew et al, 2012; Karlsen & Stavelin, 2014) and “programmer” journalism (Parasie & Dagiral, 2013), as well as

“quantitatively-oriented” journalism (Coddington, 2015: 332).

Data journalism broadly conceived can describe the use of automated tools to comb troves of information (Gray et al, 2012: 2), as Guardian Australia recently did when they scoured government documents and records in their investigation into the close relationship between Australian political parties and lobby groups (Knaus

& Evershed, 17 September 2018). Using infographics, or “data visualisations”, to tell an engaging story can also be described as data journalism. The Guardian, for instance, runs a regular series that uses urban data to compare such things as commute times between different global cities (Kalia, 11 January 2018). In addition, platform analytics have been popular with digital-born news outlets –

BuzzFeed Oz News has used analytics (via third-party software such as

CrowdTangle) to report on, for example, the interactions on social media posts and accounts advocating enrolment immediately prior to the Australia same-sex marriage postal survey (Rushton, 24 August 2017). BuzzFeed Oz was interested to see which posts and accounts were most influential on Instagram, Facebook and

Twitter during this period. In another instance, the international BuzzFeed used

CrowdTangle and another analytics tool called Buzzsumo to uncover and analyse a network of Italian news websites and Facebook pages spreading nationalistic rhetoric and anti-immigrant content (Nardelli & Silverman, 22 November 2017).

At the same time, the data which social media produce is not “raw” (Gitelman,

2013). The assertion that data are merely “raw” resources which clients and researchers then “mine” for analysis actually plays into the mystifying logic of datafication, in that such a view frames social media as neutral platforms (van Dijck

& Poell, 2013: 9). Instead, data is structured: or rather, platforms produce certain kinds of data from certain structured interactions for particular purposes (relating, here, to programmability). In this sense, it would be more accurate to say that platforms “mould” data, rather than simply “produce” data. Facebook likes and reacts, for example, are affordances which enable the expression of certain sentiments on the platform – but they are also programmed features designed to create certain data (that is, user likes and dislikes) in the process producing commodified user profiles, useful for clients. Facebook pages, too, are a platform affordance designed to produce a particular kind of profitable data (user interests, based on what pages they “like”). On Twitter, the “follow” feature is similarly useful for the platform’s business interests. Same applies to the Instagram “follow”, and its like (“heart”) button.

Furthermore, and which adds an extra, distinguishing, dimension to broadcast media’s claim to “liveness”, social media provides the opportunity to view and analyse data in real-time (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 10). Not only do Facebook,

Twitter, YouTube and the like produce massive volumes of user data every second, this data can also be tracked instantaneously. Such tracking of data is particularly

99 lucrative for Facebook, considering the value of real-time information for organisations dependent on these platforms. Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan has previously claimed that content production in his outlet is partly determined through testing: different content is pushed out, and the content that does “well”

(in terms of likes, shares, clicks and comments) shapes the reporting decisions of the outlet for that day or week (Carson & Muller, 2017: 12). In general, “metrics”

(as these type of real-time data analytics are generally known) have become an increasingly integral part of everyday news selection, production and distribution

(Anderson, 2011; Vu, 2014; Welbers et al, 2015). So much so, that this prevalence

– it might even be accurate to say institutionalisation – of social media-based audience metrics in newsrooms has raised concerns from journalists and scholars.

Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Jan Kleinnijenhuis, Nel Ruigrok, & Joep

Schaper studied the national newsrooms in the Netherlands, and found in their interviews with journalists that many saw the use of metrics for news selection to conflict with professional norms (2015). These kinds of conflicts tap into long- running debates within journalism, as to whether journalists should pursue their own professional judgement or the interests of audiences (measured predominantly, in earlier times, in circulation figures and television ratings): what

Michael Schudson previously described as the competing “trustee” and “market” models of journalism (2003). These debates will be attended to in detail in Chapter

4. The increasing centrality of metrics to the contemporary newsroom has also spurred on the rise of intermediary companies, embedded now in a number of global newsrooms, which assist news outlets with metrics while also providing other services (Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018). Valerie Belair-Gagnon & Avery

Holton found in their interviews with these companies that the latter foster profit-

100 oriented values in the newsrooms, and tended to promote themselves as disruptive and connective forces: spurring on “constant experimentation”, along with other values associated with tech entrepreneurialism (2018: 14).

Another possibility that comes with real-time data is platform intervention. The ability to mould data via different affordances, as well track and analyse this data in real-time, provides platforms with the option to intervene and interfere with user practice for various purposes. Social media companies do this regularly. Most infamously, perhaps, was a 2012 incident where Facebook manipulated the news feeds of different groups of users in an experiment that sought to understand the effects of news feeds on the emotional states of users (Meyer, 28 June 2014).

Facebook’s news feed algorithm was tweaked for these different groups, with one group seeing a greater number of positive emotions (based on keywords) and another group shown sadder and more negative content. Facebook then studied the

Facebook posts of these users, to see whether they were more likely to post happier or sadder keywords themselves (Facebook found that their manipulations had correlated effects on user behaviour). Facebook’s study was controversial and condemned as unethical. Yet it also demonstrated the power that platforms have when real-time data analytics are combined algorithmic control – especially when platforms themselves do not necessarily have the legal obligation to justify or even make transparent their own regular manipulations of user activity.

3.3.4 Engagement

“Popularity” was another social media logic that van Dijck & Poell proposed, which referred to the filtering processes on platforms that tended to value and

101 promote more “liked”, and “shared”, and “followed” posts, tweets, and users over others, particularly in the newsfeeds of Facebook and Twitter.

For van Dijck & Poell, “popularity” was a way of thinking about the transition from the ideals of egalitarian and democratic mass-self-communication that accompanied early UGC-led “Web 2.0” technologies, to the more sophisticated filtering techniques which platforms developed to manage and organise the massive volumes of user input that these platforms now receive. This development, van Dijck & Poell argued, was in some ways a return (of course, in a new form) to older anxieties around the agenda-setting power of influential actors, associated with mass broadcast media (2013: 6). These influential actors included news anchors or television personalities, and television and film actors, as well as other kinds of “likeable” people. The promise of more connective, egalitarian, UGC-led social networks, in van Dijck & Poell’s account, appeared to challenge these older dynamics of mass entertainment – while a social media logic of popularity, which tended to promote and subsequently privilege high-profile content and actors on platforms, potentially threatened to return to these older hierarchical dynamics. If content that received the most likes, views and shares became the most visible, then it was logical that the privileged visibility of such content (and the accounts that produced it) would raise barriers for other potential content-creators wishing to gain an audience. YouTube, for instance, is largely dominated by a small number of large channels with millions of subscribers – whose visibility and popularity is reinforced by the privileged place these numbers give them in the algorithmically- determined recommendation sidebars on the platform. Twitter’s list of “trending topics” performs similarly, increasing the visibility of already visible keywords and actors. In this sense, these popularity measures are reminiscent of conventions in

102 mass media, such as Time Magazine’s list of “100 most influential people” or ratings lists in weekly television guides (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 7). It is also not surprising that new forms of online celebrity have emerged since the mid-2000s from users that have gained massive popularity in the platform ecosystem – although the nature and dynamics of this online form of celebrity are distinct from those that were born out of traditional mass media. Crystal Abidin, for example, building on Teresa M. Senft’s earlier work on Internet “microcelebrity” (2008), has studied how online “influencers” utilise the connective affordances of social media platforms to deploy kinds of “perceived interconnectedness” with their followers which work to craft “impressions of intimacy”, in contrast to older forms of mass- media celebrity (2015).

The egalitarian visions of the early years of Web 2.0 have also been further stripped away by later efforts from platforms, as social media matured and commercialised, to monetise popularity. Facebook now receives significant financial returns from the “boost content” feature on Facebook pages, which provides the opportunity for pages to pay Facebook to increase the visibility of the page’s posts. Twitter, too, offers options for paid “Promoted Tweets” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 7). To return to points made in the logic of datafication section above, organising visibility around certain kinds of data categories – likes, shares, clicks, views, and comments

– itself reveals the internal commercial logics of these platforms, in so far as these categories are easily commodifiable. Furthermore, as discussed above, organising content in such a fashion also has provided the opportunity for various third parties, such as CrowdTangle and Buzzsumo, to sell services which measure and analyse metrics on platforms. High-profile users, too, are sought out by companies to

103 monetise their visibility, as is frequently the case with Instagram influencers and

YouTube beauty vloggers (Abidin, 2015).

Still, developing a filtering logic for these platforms would always have been required. Content on these platforms has to be organised in some fashion, although not necessarily in the commercialised form that this logic takes on Facebook. But even then, van Dijck & Poell’s notion of “popularity” does not accurately capture this filtering process, as Facebook and Twitter do not longer – and may never have, really – valued and promoted that which is purely “popular”. Instead, it is that which is most engaged with – the word “engaged” reflecting a multitude of feelings, sentiments and “reactions”, regardless of whether the post, tweet, or user is actually well “liked” – that is placed high in the newsfeed or recommendation hierarchy. In this sense, content which is purposively divisive or inflammatory – and not “popular” – can be potentially lucrative.

One of the most discernible indicators of a social media logic of engagement, rather than one of “popularity”, are Facebook’s reaction buttons. The introduction of reaction buttons, however, is a relatively recent development. Prior to 2016, there were only four main ways to interact with posts on the platform: like, share, report post, and comment. Users had long been frustrated with this limited functionality, and how it skewed interactions towards positive responses. Emblematic of this frustration was the often awkward fashion in which users attempted to respond to friends’ posts about, for example, the death of a relative – for which the “like” button seemed almost comically inappropriate. At the time, van Dijck & Poell argued that this limitation was by design, as Facebook sought to use “Like-scores” to automatically promote “emotive and positive evaluations of topics, rather than asking for complex assessments” (2013: 7). This logic of “popularity” was related

104 to Facebook’s own then-stated goal for a positive space that was to be attractive to old and new users alike, and Facebook had even overtly discussed the correlation between the sole like button and a positive, “sharing” community. At a public question-and-answer session in 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that a potential dislike button would amount to a kind of “voting mechanism”, which was “not something we [at Facebook] think is good”: “I don’t think [a voting mechanism is] socially very valuable or good for the community”, Zuckerberg claimed (Cohen, 12 December 2014). Platform mechanisms that skewed towards positive responses were certainly good for Facebook’s purported goals of socially beneficial connection and “sharing”.

However, by 2015 Facebook had recognised the need to address the popularity of a “dislike” button, as well as the need to deal with the frustrations and awkwardness that came with the limitations for nuanced expression on the platform. Echoing the criticisms from users, Product Design Director for Facebook Geoff Teehan, in a blog post explaining the introduction of multiple reactions, conceded that “not everything in life is Likable” (25 February 2016). Although acknowledging that users could always express an array of nuanced feelings through the comment function, Teehan also recognised how the platform’s affordances encouraged particular interactions: “it’s simple and effortless to scroll down the News Feed and tap the little thumb”, and for comments, “sometimes it can be tough to know what to say; or maybe you don’t really have much to say and you just want to let someone know you heard them” (25 February 2016).

The reaction buttons were introduced globally in February 2016, and came in six types: ‘Love’, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad”, “Angry”, and the original “Like”. Teehan explained that the “reactions should be universally understood” and that they

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“should be widely used and expressive” (25 Feburary 2016) – which explained their simple range, and their visual style which borrowed from popular emoji. Once again demonstrating the ways in which platforms are mutually shaped by both developers and users, Teehan claimed that the reactions chosen to complement the like button were based upon the most used emoji, “stickers” (small images provided by Facebook for use in comments or messages), and the top short comments most commonly posted on the platform. Still, a “dislike” button has remained absent, although Teehan justified this by arguing that a “binary” like and dislike “doesn’t reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives” (25

February 2016).

Facebook shift towards multiple reactions has changed how users express themselves and how they respond to content and other users on the platform, even if these new affordances were based on what users were already doing. Allowing for “Sad” or “Angry” reactions to be a quantifiable metric has meant that it is no longer accurate – if it ever was – to describe a Facebook logic of “popularity”.

Similarly, comments, another important metric for the algorithm, have always been used to express various reactions. On Twitter, it is a similar case: although the platform lacks multiple reaction buttons (affording only replies, retweets, and likes), and while “popularity” remains a key aim for many users (achieved typically through well-crafted, witty tweets) the retweet button has also long not equated to an endorsement. Being deliberately inflammatory or divisive, as perhaps most infamously demonstrated by the current US President, can also be an effective strategy for visibility on Twitter. Due to all this, it is preferable to think about a broader social media logic of engagement, which can account for how both of these platforms algorithmically favour content that is not necessarily well-liked – on the

106 contrary, that which is even purposively divisive. In the next chapter, I turn to how this social media logic of engagement affects news, and in particular, how social news responds to this need to be engaged with.

3.4.5 Self-branding

“Self-branding” is another social media logic, proposed by Brooke Erin Duffy &

Jefferson D. Pooley (2017). In their study of the academic social media platform

Academia.edu – a networking platform which enables scholars to connect and share research – Duffy & Pooley examined how Academia.edu, in its affordances, its architecture, and its business model and entrepreneurial ethos, amplified a logic of self-branding amongst scholars who used the platform (2017: 2). Academia.edu, like other more mainstream social media, explicitly encourages users to perform a kind of self-branding through a user profile – but more implicitly, and also similar to mainstream platforms, “reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring” through the platform’s emphasis on metrics and analytics (profile views, article shares and so on). The culture of self-monitoring on the platform encourages a marketable self, in the sense that users are pushed to perform in certain ways in the hope of attracting the platform’s currency (i.e. views and shares).

Particularly because Academia.edu is a professional platform, the self-branding logic on the site operates with an eye towards employability. This employability emphasis also exists on other ostensibly non-professional platforms, such as

Twitter – where for professionals, such as journalists (and academics), a marketable profile that can be brought from job to job is frequently desirable, and often essential. Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan has stated that he expects job applicants to have “started building up a Twitter profile”, and if applicants do not

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“have a Twitter”, then they are unlikely to get an ongoing job at his publication

(Carson & Muller, 2017: 30). The Twitter profile, in this case, is less about being knowable with audiences – Duggan admits earlier in the same interview that the people who read his publication are mostly on Facebook – but rather about being visible to other professionals, particularly as Twitter has become popular in media and political circles. Social networking, here, combines and converges with more conventional professional networking. The Twitter profile, thus, in many ways forms part of a writer’s and journalist’s CV. In certain cases, such as for Instagram- based “influencers” and YouTubers, the social media profile is the job, and the self- branding and relational labour that comes with these profiles constitutes the bread and butter of their work (Abidin, 2015). Thus, the social media logic of self- branding is bound up with ongoing trends in creative and professional labour.

Even for more recreational, everyday uses of social media, this logic of self- branding is evident. The basic architecture of Facebook, for example, encourages of a form profile-making: carefully chosen display pictures, biographical information, personal interests, and curated Facebook wall. Similar prompts to self- brand are present on Instagram, as well, encouraging the creation and curation of a

“likeable” profile. This kind of identity work that is intrinsically bound up with social media platforms was described earlier by Zizi Papacharissi as part of the

“identity performance” of the “networked self” (2013). Platforms, in Papacharissi’s account, provided a “stage for self-presentation” that affords a “publicity” that is tied to notions of marketability (2013). This neo-liberal sense of the self is also reinforced in the platform experience, in the sense that platform affordances place

“the individual as the centre and source of all interactions” (2013: 208). How social

108 news logics play into, and appeal to, this identity-work and profile creation and management on platforms will be discussed in detail in chapter 6.

3.3.6 Automation

An additional social media logic that has been proposed is that of “automation”

(Duguay, 2018). For Stefanie Duguay, the logic of automation describes how social media algorithms deliberately favour certain types of content (that which is most interacted with or clicked on) while simultaneously work to present these valuations as “objective” processes free from human intervention or bias.

In this sense, automation is a further interweaving logic that both underlies and forms part of other social media logics. Automation manifests through “design, algorithms and discourse” (Duguay, 2018: 22). Facebook and Twitter promoting connectivity through friend or follower suggestions, for example, are automated – in that they are the result of algorithmic processes – but their presentation as automation also masks the commercial goals underpinning these designed platform features. Twitter’s trending topics, for example, are another example of an

“automated” platform functionality – but at the same time, their status as automated potentially deflects from the design decision behind this function and how it organises Twitter functionality and culture in certain ways. Twitter’s trending topics sidebar ties into the platform’s branding as a place for news and things

“happening in the world right now” (Twitter, 2018), while also purposefully attempt to influence discussion on the platform around trending topics – and thus ensure that things being discussed on the platforms are “world” issues. More broadly, when platforms use the term “relevancy” to describe their algorithmic filtering processes, they are deferring to this automating logic as a way of

109 concealing the actual internal decision-making that determines “relevancy”. These claims of automation are particularly problematic when it comes to news, as they tend to deflect responsibility away from social media companies for the kinds of

“news” that is algorithmically valued and the ways that this news circulates on their platforms. This issue has become a high-profile one following the scandals around so-called “fake news” on Facebook. As Duguay noted, when false, untrue and hateful claims circulate on platforms – and even then placed in the “trending” sidebars – social media companies can claim they cannot be held accountable for this malicious content, since their platform technology “only” automatically detects, rather than curates (2018: 25).

In these ways, for Duguay, the logic of automation is key to the processes by which other social media logics are “rendered neutral in their appearance”: since platforms’ “influential mechanisms appear to be motivated, its developers and their corporate interests disappear from view” (2018: 22).

Furthermore, “automation” has also been used in the literature to refer to the embedding of new, automated machine-led practices within news production itself: not just the “data journalism” practices broadly described above, but also the use of artificial intelligence, algorithms and natural language generation techniques to automatically write news content (Carlson, 2015; Montal & Reich, 2017). Software that auto-publishes news content onto websites and social media pages is also used by some news companies (Wu et al, 2018: 13). The use of new automated methods to cut and outsource labour costs has also been a concern amongst media scholars, for example Nicole S. Cohen’s study of Journatic, a US outlet that, through a combination of algorithms and human labour, outsourced the majority of its news production to dozens of freelancers in the Global South (2015). Thus, in various

110 ways, journalism is being “reconfigured” through emerging automated methods

(Parasie, 2015; Wu et al, 2018). Such “reconfiguration” will be an ongoing theme throughout this thesis.

Suffice to say, the history of media logics, both as they operated in practice and their intellectual history as a concept, demonstrates the fruitfulness of this framework in thinking about why news appears and function as it does – and how this is related to the media it is transmitted through and on which it is organisationally and commercially dependent on. The concept of social media logics, similarly, draws attention to the essential features and formats of social media technologies, and the ways in which these features and formats shape the values – and thus the user experience – of social media, while at the same time provides a solid framework in which to begin to understand how – as social media become dominant – these values penetrate and influence the social and political institutions dependent on them. Below, the social media logics outlined above will be discussed in relation to social news logics, themselves a symptom and response to the logics and cultures of social media platforms. First, however, I turn to a process underlining social media logics: algorithms.

3.4 Governance by algorithms

The programmable, connective, filtering, and automated processes described in the previous sections are conducted according to rules coded into the software of platforms. These rules are commonly referred to as “algorithms”. The term has its roots in computer scientist Donald Knuth’s definition, where an “algorithm” is a

“finite set of rules which gives a sequence of operations for solving a specific type of problem” (1968: 27). Although some scholars believe that the term “still lacks

111 analytic stability and coherence” (Caplan & boyd, 2018: 3), in general it is used to describe the rule-driven, problem-solving processes within software through which information is organised, valued, and transmitted. On social media platforms, the problem of how to order newsfeeds is solved through algorithms – which act according to chronology, but also the logic of engagement. Similarly, the goal of creating a “social” environment – according to the logic of connectivity – is solved by suggesting “friends”, “pages” and “groups” (Facebook) and

“followers”(Twitter) to users through algorithms that sort through user data to find related interests and social connections. Furthermore, algorithms operate in ways that mostly lack transparency for the users and organisations dependent on platforms, and also are subject to continual adjustments made by developers, typically without notice. In these ways, algorithms act as “administrative mechanisms” (Caplan & boyd, 2018: 2) for platforms – and thereby as methods of governance through which user activity is ordered and corporate goals are achieved

(Langlois, 2013; Gillespie, 2014; DeNardis & Hackl, 2015).

Due to these qualities, algorithms possess mystifying and naturalising tendencies.

As social media become increasingly “mundane” technologies, causally and routinely used as part of everyday life, algorithmic power becomes extraordinary

(Beer, 2009). In thinking about how social, economic and political life were increasingly dependent on algorithmic media, the designer and inventor Roger

Burrows claimed that “associations and interactions are now not only mediated by software and code” but “they are becoming constituted by it” (2009). Burrows’ assertion recalled Lawrence Lessig’s earlier and famous claim that “code is law”: that “we” – or, in terms of social media, corporate interests – “can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental”

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(1999, 2006). It also recalls James Grimmelmann, who argued that code, or more broadly, software, should be understood as a distinct “modality of regulation”

(2005). In other words, similar to social structures and norms, algorithms order content and social lives as experienced through social media in ways which are both invisible and ever-present, in this case hidden within code and behind internal company non-disclosure agreements. Because of this, processes on social media, such as those which govern value (i.e. measures of engagement), can appear

“natural” due to their ubiquity within and across platforms (such as Facebook,

Twitter, reddit – for the role of the latter’s engagement logic in promoting “toxic technocultures”, see Massanari, 2015) – even though in reality these processes are designed solutions to technical problems (e.g., how to sort content). This naturalising tendency of algorithms on Facebook and Twitter works back to into the logic of automation (Duguay, 2018) – the latter emphasising how algorithms which deliberately favour certain types of content (that which is most “popular”, or most engaged) simultaneously work to present these valuations as “objective” processes free from human intervention or “bias”.

There are clear democratic implications for the above, especially when social and political life and popular communication shifts increasingly onto a few dominant social media platforms, as has happened over the past decade (Gillespie, 2014,

2017; Suzor, 2018; Witt et al, 2019). As stated by Laura DeNardis & Andrea M.

Hackl, how the big social media companies “design their platforms, how they allow content to flow, and how they agree to exchange information with competing platforms have direct implications for communication rights and innovation”

(2015: 769). Even more broadly, for Tarleton Gillespie, human reliance on “public relevance algorithms”, such as those used by Google’s search engine and by social

113 media platforms, increasingly shape knowledge production and certification: that humans are now turning to algorithms to access and identify pertinent information

“is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God” (2014). The consequences of this governing function of social media algorithms for news outlets, and the various ways journalism has attempted to innovate in response, will now be discussed.

3.5 Algorithms and news Algorithms which shape use according to particular logics can have a potential

“homogenising” effect on the organisations dependent on them, and this can be seen in the case of news outlets (Caplan & boyd, 2018). News outlets are increasingly reliant on platforms, and the technology companies that own and operate them, for audiences (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). As print journalism continues to suffer a terminal decline in the Western world (McChesney, 2013;

Schlesinger & Doyle, 2015), and as social media platforms become embedded in and central to everyday Internet use (Helmond, 2015), along with a corresponding decline in direct visits to news websites themselves, the news feeds of platforms have become key sources for news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). Search engines like Google remain important – Simon Crerar, the editor of BuzzFeed Oz, claims that referrals from Google searches “give [BuzzFeed Oz] lots of audience” (Carson

& Muller, 2017: 22). Twitter has also become immensely popular with journalists and public figures, who regularly discuss and share articles on the platform (Bruns,

2012). But largely, it is Facebook that has emerged as the dominant platform for news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). For BuzzFeed Oz, Facebook is “absolutely crucial to its distribution system” – but even more so for Junkee, with co-founder

Tim Duggan declaring that “our audience is not on Twitter”, rather, “they’re on

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Facebook” (Carson & Muller, 2017: 21) – with over 60% of Junkee’s audience in

2017 coming from the platform, compared to just 20% for the combined audience coming from search engines and other social media (the last 20% covers direct web site visits). In another interview, Duggan has claimed an even higher number for

Facebook, stating that over 90% of Junkee’s audience are on the platform (Fulton,

2017: 52). For Pedestrian.tv co-founder Chris Wirasinha, “content will naturally flow to the platforms with the greatest audience” (Edensor, 17 October 2016) – and at the moment, with over 2 billion monthly users as of 2017 (Constine, June 28

2017), that platform is Facebook.

Due to this reliance on Facebook, social news outlets – and all commercial news outlets – need to satisfy the logic of engagement to survive. Indeed, despite the originally purported potential of Web 2.0-derived technologies to provide previously hidden voices a platform, and despite the otherwise low barriers to publication and distribution, user and organisational experiences on Facebook and other platforms are ones characterised by the ongoing threat of invisibility (Bucher,

2012). Because of this, users and organisations are incentivised to behave in certain ways. In this sense, Facebook’s news feed algorithm – which continuously classifies, sorts, and ranks content posted to the platform – performs “disciplinary” work in its “material structuring of visibility” (Bucher, 2012: 1176). Tania Bucher, drawing from the French social theorist Michel Foucault’s work on “regimes of visibility” (1977), argued that Facebook’s then-news feed algorithm, called

“EdgeRank”, worked to shape user behaviour by emphasising visibility “as a reward”, while simultaneously punishing behaviour which did not satisfy its values with invisibility (2012: 1174). In the case of news outlets, those that readily complied with – or, worked out the “secret” of – the Facebook visibility algorithm,

115 were rewarded with early success. BuzzFeed and other emerging outlets – such as

EliteDaily and UpWorthy – grew significantly in the early 2010s through headlines that combined emotional cues (laughter, outrage, pathos) with social directives

(“like”, “click”, “share”) that were designed to increase engagement on Facebook, and whose articles came packaged with outrageous, or relatable, or – as in the case of UpWorthy – heartwarming content (Meyer, 8 December 2013; Oremus, 3

January 2016; Caplan & boyd, 2018). These peculiar stylistics, native to both the logics and cultures of social media platforms, will be discussed in depth in subsequent chapters.

However, even then the disciplinary work of algorithms is ongoing – as algorithms are altered by developers without warning. Between 2013 and 2017, Facebook changed the news feed algorithm numerous times, sometimes to combat the apparent exploitation of the algorithm by outlets but also frequently in response to user practices – highlighting the mutually-constitutive processes between users and platforms. First in late 2013 was a response to the reported dominance of “clickbait” on the platform (of which BuzzFeed had been accused of), with Facebook introducing new measures of “high quality” content defined as whether users continued to interact with articles – e.g. through sharing them or commenting on them – after they had been clicked (Meyer, 8 December 2013). In 2014, Facebook addressed “click-bait” content once again, this time by further refining their definition of ‘”high quality” content by taking into consideration such variables as how long people spent reading an article away from Facebook – as apparently users quickly closed article windows once they realised they had been “baited” (El-Arini

& Tang, 25 August 2014). And over the course of 2015 and 2016, Facebook added more changes to the news feed – including the promotion of “native videos”

116 embedded directly into the platform (rather than shared via platforms like

YouTube) as well launching “Instant Articles” in May 2015, a feature which reduced the load time for news articles from news outlets partnered with Facebook

(Reckhow, 12 May 2015).

This recursive process – continually amending the news feed algorithm in line with emerging developments and new corporate goals – indicates three points crucial to my interests in social media logics and news. Firstly, the increased importance of news for Facebook over the last decade is evident, with the changes documented above indicating measures in which Facebook attempted to wrangle further control of the news content disseminated on its platform: both in a technical sense (the various alterations to what kind of news content was valued, as well the embedding technology of “Instant Articles”) and in a commercial one (its partnerships with news outlets). Secondly, it is evident that this recursive process is mutual: with both

Facebook and outlets responding to each other. The “native video” feature came along at a time when news outlets were beginning to devote more resources to video, particularly after programmes like HBO’s Last Week Tonight and the

Australian commercial broadcaster Channel 10’s The Project found great success with users sharing YouTube clips from their programmes on Facebook and Twitter

(Guinness, 24 March 2015). The introduction of “native video” was a tactical ploy by Facebook to capitalise on this success, at the expense of rival platforms, while the feature also further incentivised video production by news outlets seeking clicks and views – culminating in 2017 with a new industry mantra: “pivot to video” (Varian, 26 December 2017). And thirdly, from these changes is a discernible development from a rather basic logic of “popularity” (likes, shares, clicks, etc.) to a more defined logic of engagement. In these ways, news outlets and

117 social media platforms operate in tandem: anticipating and creatively responding to both particular actions and the overall logics of the other.

3.6 Social news logics

I now return to my proposed social news logics, first introduced in Chapter 1. These are particular organisational principles, in the more institutional sense of the term

“logic”, that respond to the logics – in the “media format” sense of van Dijck &

Poell’s conception – and user cultures of Facebook and Twitter.

My social news logics framework was developed in dialogue with the material I collected during my research. In this way, I took an iterative approach: starting with the literature and the theory, then analysing collected material, then returning to adjust the theory so to develop new ways of thinking about the material encountered, then analysing more material with the new theory, and so on. An example of theory that was redeveloped in light of my analysis of collected material was van Dijck & Poell’s notion of a social media logic of “popularity”: as relayed above, I realised in my analysis of interviews with BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv staff members, and from my own observation of their social media operations, that seeking “popularity” was not an entirely accurate description of social news activity on platforms (“engagement”, here, being a better term). This process of constructing my logics framework, therefore, was both robust and reflexive – robust, in the sense that it was created and moulded in relation to empirical phenomena, and reflexive in that it was continually applied and redeveloped in response to such phenomena.

I have synthesised this framework to create, for the purposes of analysis, three social news logics – that of engagement, sociability, and personalisation. As

118 signposted in Chapter 1, these three logics are not necessarily entirely descriptive of social news phenomena and there could be other logics that may be useful for understanding the operations and content of BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv. These three logics were, however, the most useful ways of analysing the findings in this thesis. The social news logic of engagement is the commercial imperative for social news outlets to maximise monetisable audience attention and interaction metrics on social media platforms: likes, reactions, shares, comments, clicks, and so on. Such engagement metrics are essential for visibility on Facebook and Twitter (Bucher, 2012). At the same time, the logic of engagement encapsulates the attempts by social news outlets to increase civic participation, by creating content and writing news articles that converse with the reader or viewer about topics deemed (by BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee or Pedestrian.tv) of political and social importance. The kind of participation that the outlets seek to boost take can the form of civic action (such as enrolling to vote in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey), or a more general civic participation, of being more informed about issues that are (as decided by social news outlets) relevant to the reader or viewer: by embodying a conversational style, rather than a more conventional presentation of “facts”, social news outlets seek to make their audience feel more involved in the issues being reported. These aspects of engagement – audience metrics maximisation, on the one hand, and civic participation, on the other – are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and indeed the former is bound up with the latter, and the latter is sometimes performed to achieve the former.

The social news logic of sociability denotes the various ways in which BuzzFeed

Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv seek engagement. By the term sociability, I am

119 referring to how these outlets craft their content to be pleasurable to share amongst peers on platforms. Here, I draw from, but also move beyond, van Dijck & Poell’s proposed social media logic of connectivity by attending to the positive social affordances of pleasurable interaction and participation, engaged by the textual attributes of news content. Social news outlets achieve shareability through embodying the vernaculars and pop-culture sensibilities of platform cultures. The acronyms, memes, GIFs and slang through which BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv speak through, and report their news in, reflect the suitability of these outlets’ content for the kind of everyday, connective socialising that occurs on

Facebook and Twitter, and also Instagram (where the outlets also have a presence).

These sociable elements tend to be explicitly affective: that is, such things as humorous or outrageous headlines and reaction GIFs (looped visual artefacts used to convey emotive responses) invite feeling and encourage users to share this feeling, through platform affordances. Still, as the culturally-specific characteristics of such vernaculars suggest, social news’ sociable potential is limited – or rather, the outlets I studied are sociable precisely due to their constitutive nature: of being targeted directly at one group (young, politically progressive and social media literate users) and typically against another (older, and/or conservative people).

Social news outlets’ targeting of specific demographics also forms part of the third key operational logic: personalisation. By this, I mean the tendency of these outlets to appeal to and foreground the personal: both in the sense of the frequent use of personal voice within their news content, and also how writers from these outlets often position themselves within the stories they are telling and the issues they are reporting on. In this way, social news outlets are not “objective”, but neither are

120 they biased: instead, they feature what I term an explicit and transparent positionality. Furthermore, the operational logic of personalisation denotes the conversational – and thus personable – style in which social news articles tend to be written: in other words, the fashion in which articles are written as if the writer is talking to another person. Lastly, personalisation is a business strategy for these outlets, as social media platforms – via their logic of datafication (van Dijck &

Poell, 2013) – allow news organisations to target and promote themselves to small and defined demographics, while remaining economically lucrative. This kind of micro-targeting also plays into the personalised and user-curated experiences – bound up with what Duffy & Pooley called the self-branding logic (2017) – of social media platforms, where users are encouraged to create a profile and “follow their interests” (Burgess, 2015).

3.7 Conclusion

“Media logics” has been an evocative and influential concept, yet the term lacks a shared understanding nor a consistent use. There is a discernible division between understandings of the term that are institutional-focused – which place emphasis on organisational practices – and media- (or format) focused conceptions that place emphasis on technologies and how they structure use. In this chapter, I have traced how the latter conception of the term, in van Dijck & Poell’s influential work on

“social media logics” (2013) and in other subsequent literature, has been applied to social media, particularly around the role of platforms and their algorithmic processes. I proposed that social media logics provide a robust framework to begin to understand how news operates on platforms. For the purposes of the present study, I then selectively built on social media logics, in dialogue with the social news material I collected, to develop three social news logics that I use to analyse

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BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv in depth. I termed these three logics

“engagement”, “sociability”, and “personalisation”. These social news logics are understood in the institutional sense, as operational responses to the governing logics, and user cultures, of the social media platforms on which these news outlets are dependent.

Now that this background and definitional work has been achieved, I turn to substantiating these social news logics through the critical examination of salient examples: articles, videos, “about” webpages, interviews and so on, along with the ongoing case study of the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, in which

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv played a significant role, and in which these logics were particularly evident. Each of the next three chapters will elaborate on an individual logic and the operations relevant to it, beginning with the social news logic of engagement, and following with sociability, and then personalisation.

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Chapter 4: Engagement

4.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I critically examined “media logics”, and argued that there is a discernible conceptual conflation between a usage of the term that places emphasis on the operations of “the media” as an institution, and another that understood the term by way of the formal characteristics and “valuing” principles of different mediating technologies. In this context, I then proposed “social news logics” as institutional reflections of and response to the algorithmic valuing operations, technological affordances, and user cultures of social media platforms.

I outlined three social news logics: engagement, sociability, and personalisation.

In this chapter, I explain in detail the social news logic of engagement, elaborating on its components and themes through a critical evaluation of pertinent textual material: videos, articles, Facebook posts and comments sections, and interviews by other researchers and journalists with key figures from BuzzFeed Oz News,

Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. I first examine scholarly conceptions and uses of the term “audience engagement”. Interest in this concept has increased in recent years in tandem with the growing perceived need for new ways of attracting and maintaining audiences on social media platforms. I will then relate this discussion of “audience engagement” in the literature to interviews with BuzzFeed Oz News,

Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, in which co-founders and editors of these outlets continually emphasise audience attention metrics and social media algorithmic valuing operations in their news selection and production processes. I then examine how such a drive for monetisable audience attention and interaction metrics on

Facebook can lead, in the case of the social news outlets under examination here

123 and also ABC News and the News Corp-owned News.com.au, to deliberately divisive and provocative news content that can arouse strong negative engagement and dislike: demonstrating why the more neutral term “engagement” has been chosen to describe these news operations, instead of (like in the case of van Dijck

& Poell’s social media logics) one of simple “popularity”. Nonetheless, there is noticeable difference between the trolling operations of the more conventional ABC

News and News.com.au outlets and the “constitutive humour” of social news.

In the latter half of the chapter, I examine the more civic operations – that is, those that aim to increase political participation of various kinds – that can be understood within the rubric of engagement. Social news’ civic operations can take the form of aiming to increase political action, such as campaigns to increase youth enrolment or requests to call political representatives about particular issues that the outlets deem concerning. These civic operations can also be less activistic, and simply aim to make the reader or viewer feel more involved in politics: notably by explaining the news in a conversational style, and thus better equipping the reader or viewer to participate in political debates, and other aspects of civic life. Both of these civic-minded elements are then discussed in greater detail in the context of the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, in which BuzzFeed Oz News took great lengths to inform their (predominantly young) audience about the rather complex details of the postal survey, while Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv played a considerable advocacy and activist role for the “Yes” side.

These two aspects contained within the social news logic of engagement, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, are not necessarily mutually exclusive: instead, they tend to operate in tandem with each other. The creative fashions in which

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv seek engagement provide an entry

124 point to the two other social news logics that will be discussed in the subsequent chapters: sociability and personalisation.

4.2 Audience engagement

A relatively recent turn by news outlets towards “audience engagement” has attracted considerable scholarly attention (Nelson, 2018). Rooted partly in the ideals and technological capabilities of the participatory citizen media (Wall, 2015) discussed in the previous chapter, audience engagement, as an emerging concern and commercial goal for news outlets, has differing interpretations. Yet, as Jacob

L. Nelson puts it, the broad desire for audience engagement possesses “one underlying belief: [that] journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place” (Nelson, 2018: 1). This could be because it is believed that a news and journalism that embeds or even places audience engagement at the forefront will increase audience loyalty (Chung & Nah, 2009; Vujnovvic, 2011; Lischka &

Messerli, 2016). Juliane A. Lischka & Michael Messerli, for instance, argue that embedding sharing buttons, comment sections and other participatory affordances on news websites can help increase audience retention, a conclusion they came to from their survey of readers of Swiss news sites (2016).

Engagement can also build trust (Lewis, Holton & Coddington, 2014). In the latter sense, Seth C. Lewis, Avery E. Holton, & Mark Coddington introduce the concept of “reciprocal journalism” in order to understand the various ways journalists can use the affordances of digital media to “community build” through direct, indirect, and sustained forms of online exchange with users (2014): reciprocity and transparency, here, being key to trust. In a related argument, Monica Guzman has

125 argued that reciprocal goals which took “audience engagement” seriously are also beneficial because a journalism that directly responds and interacts with audiences would be a more “relevant” journalism (2016).

Proposed ways to increase audience engagement are also varied. Some advocates, like Lewis et al above, focus on tools and platforms (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016;

Nelson & Webster, 2016), other advocates propose that journalists employ a range of techniques to make their work more participatory (Davis Mersey, Malthouse &

Calder, 2010). For others, both platform tools and innovative journalistic techniques are utilised in pursuit of a different kind of “engagement”, one that is understood less in terms of audience retention and more about how news can increase civic engagement (Konieczna & Robinson, 2014). Magda Konieczna &

Sue Robinson examined a number of digital US non-profit news outlets, all which attempted to boost community and citizen “engagement” through participatory affordances and innovative forms of “quality” journalism that told stories in new, engaging, ways (2014). As will be documented here and in the following chapters,

Australian social news outlets also write and produce innovative news content with similar beliefs regarding the best ways to reach and retain audiences – although without the financial struggles the non-profit outlets that Konieczna & Robinson studied suffered from (2014).

Nelson also examined the various intermediaries that have emerged in response to the news industry’s current concern with audience engagement, and which consult with news organisations about ways to increase audience interaction and attention maximisation in its various forms – the firms themselves an indication of the growing centrality of this concern for contemporary news outlets (2018). However,

Nelson found that the “engagement metric” was still “elusive” in the news

126 organisations he interviewed, with the latter more likely to see “engagement as a means to an end rather than an end in itself” – signalling more a desire to build audiences and audience trust for continued survival and possible commercial success, and less so for reasons of inherent civic good (2018: 14).

Certainly, this more instrumental approach to understanding and pursuing audience

“engagement” – using audience metrics as measures of audience interest – was found in interviews with senior staff from social news outlets. This appeared to be largely due to the strict demands for reacts, comments, shares and clicks made by social media platforms and their algorithms. Junkee, for instance, uses multiple tools, such as ChartBeat, NewsWhip, and BuzzSumo, to monitor which of their articles are receiving clicks, likes, shares, etc. in real time: “… within ten seconds you can tell if that story is going to do well or not. So that then determines what your next follow up is” Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan has said, in an interview with journalism researchers Andrea Carson & Denis Muller (2017: 11). This recursive process – testing articles on platforms, seeing what users and the algorithm do with it, and writing the next article according to the gathered results

– can be even quite unforgiving, according to Duggan: if an article is not receiving sufficient interactions, “more often than not, you give up on it” (Carson & Muller,

2017: 11). As Duggan tells it, this rather ruthless disciplining process is governed largely by real-time social media data analytics (according to the social media logic of datafication) and the Facebook algorithm:

Data is a huge part of what we do… So almost every piece of content we look at

[and] figure out why it’s working, why it’s not working, how we can do it better.

(Carson & Muller, 2017: 12).

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Junkee also tests content on other social media platforms, namely Twitter, before posting to Facebook, according to Duggan:

Often we’ll test things out on Twitter through different kinds of headlines, and then push it through Facebook, using what we’ve learnt on Twitter. (Carson & Muller,

2017: 12).

This tweaking of the attention-seeking elements of social news articles, which include headlines and post captions, between platforms was evident on a number of occasions in my study. A 2017 article on a federal government minister’s offensive statement on same-sex relationships (titled “Kevin Andrews’ Latest

Statement on Marriage Equality Is Honestly Just The Dumbest Thing”) featured different post captions on Twitter and Facebook (Stott, 14 August 2017). On

Twitter, the tweet promoting the article was captioned with “Loving the Respectful

Debate™” (Junkee, 13 August 2017). On Facebook, the post caption was “Loving gay couples are just like Kevin’s cycling buddies apparently” – a reference to

Andrews’ remark that reduced same-sex love to the bond between good “mates”

(Junkee, 14 August 2017). Going by Duggan’s comments, such tweaking is unsurprising, considering that the Twitter post received only 2 retweets and 3 likes

(a relatively low level of audience interaction), compared to the 243 reactions, 79 comments, and 71 shares the post received on Facebook (a fairly significant amount of engagement, for a Junkee post).

Yet, in this interview Duggan assures Carson & Muller that data and algorithms do not play an entirely deterministic role in the Junkee newsroom. There remains an ongoing negotiation between, on the one hand, the metrics and what the algorithm

128 appears to be telling Junkee staff, and a more traditional “journalist’s hunch”, says

Duggan:

The science can tell you so much, but you then need someone, a journalist with data experience, to analyse that and make a prediction off the back of it. The computer can’t tell you that. (Carson & Muller, 2017: 12).

Duggan here is performing journalistic expertise, reaffirming a craft-based professional identity and resisting the technological determinism of “the computer”. Still, Duggan’s remarks are not purely performative, as the role of such expertise and sub-cultural knowledge can be seen in the different versions of the

Andrews article above. The fact that the Twitter post received few audience interactions does not fully explain the change of caption: in my close following of

Junkee’s Twitter account between 2016-2018, it was quite common for article posts to receive interaction metrics (likes and retweets) in the single digits. This is consistent with Duggan’s claim that Junkee’s audience is “on Facebook”. More strikingly, the change from the ironic and meme-like “Loving the Respectful

Debate™” to the more descriptive Facebook caption “Loving gay couples are just like Kevin’s cycling buddies apparently” demonstrates Junkee’s familiarity with the different audiences and sub-cultures on the two major platforms. The

“Respectful Debate™” phrase was a popular sarcastic and ironic expression during the 2017 survey amongst social news writers and within the progressive Australian publics on Twitter in which those writers circulated. The phrase poked fun at and critiqued the federal government’s insistence that the postal survey would be a

“fair” and “balanced” debate free from vilification, the trademark (“™”) symbol working here to signify the phrase as a rather vacuous slogan. Presumably, in this case, Junkee felt that the phrase would not have the same resonating currency on

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Facebook, a platform with a more general audience likely to be unfamiliar with

Twitter’s in-group jokes and memes.

Although both social news outlets are youth-oriented, BuzzFeed Oz News operates in a more traditional fashion than Junkee, with reporters – Junkee typically labels their staff “writers” (Carson & Muller, 2017: 10) – covering designated beats, such as breaking news and Indigenous affairs (Carson & Muller, 2017: 13). Still, real- time data from Facebook along with the platform’s algorithm remain key components of the news process. In his interview with Carson & Muller, the editor of BuzzFeed Oz News Simon Crerar describes similar disciplinary work to that which Junkee undergoes– distinguishing the current reiterative process from the more traditional news production line:

A kick-arse viral post is a weird combination of skill, planning and luck, but there’s one thing every viral has: an outstanding thumbnail and headline combination. And there’s a master class on how to make them.

Crerar, like Duggan, reaffirms the value of professional expertise and cultural knowledge. For Crerar, BuzzFeed Oz reporters are distinguished by what appears to be a youthful competency with and enthusiasm for digital technology, combined with a literacy with Internet and platform-based cultural vernacular:

And that’s where it’s different from when you and I were reporters. Then, you just had to get the story, someone else would edit it, it would go to a copy queue (for publication) and the next day you’d wake up and either the boss had butchered everything or the treatment was all wrong, and you didn’t have much input.

Whereas here, they build it in CMS [content management system]. They write their own headlines. We have a thing called optimiser. So you have four or six

130 alternative headlines and thumbnails, and before we run it on social, it usually runs on our website and the algorithm figures out which headline and thumbnail will work. (Carson & Muller, 2017: 15).

What those “outstanding thumbnail and headline combinations” consist of will be explored in the subsequent chapters. But what is striking here – besides the seemingly greater autonomy for reporters, which also doubles as a greater workload for these reporters – is how embedded an operational logic of engagement (the process of maximising likes, reactions, comments, and shares) appears to be in BuzzFeed Oz’s news production. In another interview, Junkee co- founder Neil Ackland was blunter in his assessment of his job as a

“communicator”: describing it as a “game” of “thumb-stopp[ing]”, in reference to enticing users to pause their scrolling on mobile devices (Edensor, 10 March 2016).

For both of these social news outlets, the lack of transparency from Facebook lends

“the algorithm”, as Crerar put it, an almost mystical quality (it “figures out which headline and thumbnail will work”) which at the same time naturalises its values by embedding them in a dependent news production process. Robb Stott, managing editor of Junkee, has been vocal about his concern with the power of Google and

Facebook over news outlets, stating that both companies “control our fates in so many ways” (Samios, 21 December 2017). Comments from Pedestrian.tv co- founder Chris Wirasinha, made to Australian media industry outlet Mumbrella, are also rather blunt regarding this point:

Content at the moment is very much shaped by social media platforms and the search engines that it’s distributed through… how that content looks will be dictated by what those platforms want to achieve. (Edensor, 17 October 2016).

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Additionally, in this context, Wirasinha states that:

We’re seeing a huge push towards video and also the growth of live platforms which align with Facebook’s broader business ambitions [italics added]. (Edensor,

17 October 2016).

These comments from Wirasinha not only describe the immense influence of

Facebook’s profit motive, but also reveal an assumption from Wirasinha – accepted as obvious and natural – that Pedestrian.tv will have to “align” themselves in accordance with the platform’s corporate agenda. At the same time, Wirasinha, like

Duggan and Crerar, argue for a distinction between “clickbait” and meaningful news content that grabs and sustains attention: he has criticised Facebook for previously valuing clicks “over engagement with the story on the other side [i.e, time spent actually reading and viewing content]” (Samios, 21 December 2017).

Wirasinha, here, is promoting “engagement with the story” so as to indicate the apparent quality of the news content that Pedestrian.tv produces as opposed to the

“clickbait” from other, seemingly less reputable born-digital outlets. His remarks should also be understood in relation to the business model of Pedestrian.tv compared to those of “clickbait” outlets. For Pedestrian.tv, as discussed in Chapter

2, is a highly commercial outlet, which boasts on its “About” page about its entrepreneurial ethos and its close business partnerships with prominent brands.

When Wirasinha talks about “engagement”, then, he is not only positioning his outlet against low-quality digital news, but also, although not overtly, suggesting that Pedestrian.tv produces commercial content at a higher standard. That is, its adverts are “engaging” by being embedded within interesting, conversational, humorous, relatable, or relevant content. In these ways, Wirasinha is implicitly promoting and justifying native advertising as a respectable news business practice.

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All of the above strongly indicate that social news outlets depend on satisfying metrics-hungry algorithms for their own commercial survival – but that does not preclude creative ways to seek and satisfy such engagement metrics. On the contrary, if Duggan, Crerar, and Wirasinha are to be believed, social news is distinguished by the novel fashion in which they attempt to attract readers and viewers – young ones, in particular – to their content. The following section will attend to a particular phenomenon on social media – trolling – which will both solidify my critique of van Dijck & Poell’s social media logic of “popularity”, and also provide an introduction to the peculiar stylistics of social news, and how they operate in relation to the technological logics and user cultures of platforms.

4.2.1 Trolling for reactions, comments, and shares

In a recent and somewhat polemical piece, Jason Hannan argued that social media had “restructured” the “logic of public discourse” into one in which “trolling had gone mainstream” (2018: 1). Hannan argues that the “popularity contest” on

Facebook and Twitter – echoing here van Dijck & Poell, although Hannan does not reference them – has sidelined “impersonal fact”, as “lengthy, detailed disquisitions do not fare very well against short, biting sarcasm” and comments that “however inane, rack up a far greater number of likes” (2018: 7-8). “Trolling” – tribalistic discourse, whereby provoking your political enemies in the pursuit of retweets, reactions, and comments is preferable to deliberative consensus-building processes

– therefore, for Hannan, is the dominant mode of communication on social media.

While this may be an overly dim view of social media discourse, the “trolling” framework is actually quite useful for understanding how numerous news outlets operate on social media as they seek to satisfy the logic of engagement. Still, this

133 framework will need to be broadened to encompass not only the practices of partisan provocateurs, but also how a faux-naivety can be adopted by outlets in order to deliberately sow discord in the comment sections of posts – and thereby boost their engagement levels. In her work on trolling subcultures, Whitney

Phillips notes that the word “troll” has roots in fishbaiting, and that for early participants of Internet web forums, trolls were those that “fish[ed] for flames” – in other words, sought divisive and incendiary responses (2015: 15). Phillips found that a common theme in Internet scholarship on trolls was that of deception. Trolls were those that, through utilising the anonymising affordances of the Internet, deceived other users of their purposes, and once inside an Internet space began to sow discord for their own amusement (2015: 15-17).

News outlets, responding to the social media logic of engagement, can perform similar trolling acts – of both the partisan and faux-naïve kind. This is the case with both legacy and social news outlets, although as will be argued below and in subsequent chapters, social news is better understood as performing “constitutive humour” than strict partisan trolling. A number of examples will be closely examined: some from established mainstream news outlets, and others from the social news outlet Junkee. This short qualitative analysis does not claim to be exhaustive, and the time period in which these posts appeared was chosen largely because it was around the time this chapter was being prepared. Nonetheless, the aim here is to illustrate how news outlets, by tapping into social and political antagonisms, can boost their engagement levels and satisfy algorithms – and thus how these algorithms can favour divisive content.

The first example is a Facebook post from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

(ABC). As discussed in the previous chapter, the ABC is Australia’s major public

134 broadcaster. This post, made to the official ABC News Facebook page (which has over 3.6 million likes) on March 21, 2018 linked an article about the possible role of climate change in recent extreme weather events (ABC News, 21 March 2018).

The article was headlined “Can extreme weather events be attributed to climate change?” and the post was captioned: “It was just a matter of time until the climate change discussion reared its head.” At the time of writing, the post received 133 reactions, 230 comments including replies, and 13 shares: not exactly low, but still not as high as other posts during the period (which could reach into the thousands, as demonstrated by the next example). The comment section, though, displayed in abundance the kind of engagement of interest here. Within the comments, there was discord: with many users responding directly to the rhetorical question posed by the article’s headline. There were then comments responding to these comments, and the comments that were most provocative were pushed up to the top of the list – this was in accordance with Facebook’s default “top comments” setting. Tellingly, Facebook describes the “top comments” setting as one that favours “most relevant comments”, highlighting how Facebook naturalises engagement as a taken-for-granted value. Since the algorithm takes multiple reactions into account – “Love”, “Angry”, “Sad”, “Haha”, “Wow”, and “Like” – these comments were prioritised not because of their contribution to a “discussion”, but rather mostly because of their tribalistic or provocative nature. The top four comments railed against their opponents – “deniers” or “socialists” or “greens” – and in turn, received dozens of replies and numerous diverse reactions. It was not only the headline that influenced these kinds of diverse and discordant responses: the caption itself insinuated that “the climate change discussion” was an unwelcome, even irritating, development in the extreme weather story. This was

135 implied by the distanced fashion in which that “discussion” was described, and also in how a reader could interpret the “reared its head” comment as communicating irritation, considering how the description recalls the phrase “reared its ugly head”.

This article was not necessarily an extreme example, either – other ABC News posts within the two weeks after the climate change post also possessed similar deliberately divisive qualities which tapped into antagonisms around so-called

“political correctness” and race. For example, an article titled “Political correctness

‘stifling Australian cinema’” (ABC News, 24 March 2018) and captioned: “A once gutsy beast that surprised the world with critically acclaimed films like Wake in

Fright, Romper Stomper, Gallipoli or Picnic at Hanging Rock, much of Australia’s film industry has seemingly withdrawn into a safe space.” The term “safe space” likely was intended to serve as bait, considering the term’s prominent place in conservative discourse, particularly as a pejorative against progressives. The post received even more attention and interaction than the climate change one: receiving

451 reactions (mostly “Like”, “Sad”, and “Haha”), 51 shares, and 156 comments and replies at the time of writing, with these comments and replies being mostly divisive in nature.

Another similar ABC News post received even greater levels of engagement: an opinion piece titled “Jesus wasn’t white: he was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern

Jew. Here’s why that matters” (ABC News, 29 March 2018). The post was captioned with a question, in scare quotes, that asked “Why do we continue to allow images of a whitened Jesus to dominate?” Posted just in time for Easter, it received over 4,800 reactions (the top three being “Like”, “Haha”, and “Love”), 1,067 shares, and over 1,180 – largely discordant – comments and replies. The rhetorical question in the post caption likely encouraged such disagreement in the comments,

136 and the “OPINION” tag framed the article as a singular viewpoint rather than a scholarly argument grounded in academic research (the writer was a Biblical

Studies lecturer). Such framing not only downplayed the scholarly merits of the piece, it also implicitly invited commenters to counter the article’s “opinion” with their own opinions. Many of the top comments were from individuals who took the opportunity to post provocative comments about Jesus being an “imaginary friend” that “didn’t exist” – comments which received numerous replies from people who took offense.

Another example is a post from the News.com.au Facebook page. The Facebook page is popular, although not as largely followed with only 954,000 likes compared to the ABC News’ 3.6 million. The post was made at 31 March 2018, and featured an article about a group of white men performing blackface as a way to “celebrate”

Good Friday – they dressed as “slaves” and carried a pale mannequin, presumably meant to represent the religious figure (news.com.au, 31 March 2018). The article was headlined “‘Absurdly unacceptable’ picture sparks outrage”, and the post was captioned “A group of blokes out on the beers claim they were just ‘having a laugh’ when they posed for this picture – but now they’ve been slammed.” The post received, at the time of writing, 363 reactions (mostly “Haha”, “Like”, and

“Angry”), 33 shares, and 229 comments and replies. From my study of the

News.com.au page during this period, this was a fairly successful post, as the majority of News.com.au posts only achieved reactions, shares, comments in the double digits. The comments and replies took the bait: with the top four comments either expressing anger at News.com.au for posting the story (“Must have been a slow news week for you wankers”, wrote the top comment) or expressing outrage at “social justice warriors” and others that “get offended by everything”

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(news.com.au, 31 March 2018). In response to these comments, there were replies that argued in disagreement. The article headline worked to fan these flames by using distancing devices (“Absurdly unacceptable” is quoted in the headline, so as to depict this as a judgement others, not the article, made) while the caption downplayed the seriousness of the incident by way of framing the group as “blokes out on the beers” – an Australian phrase which, like the expression “boys will be boys”, works to dismiss toxic, callous and offensive masculine behaviour through appeals to boyish playfulness. Both of these devices fuelled the outrage (directed at the reported outrage) in the reactions, comments, and replies.

News.com.au again exploited hot-button social justice issues for engagement not long after the blackface article. On 8 April 2018 the page posted an article titled

“Ticking time bomb explodes: ‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman’”, and captioned: “Transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard has satisfied every criteria under Commonwealth Games rules to qualify for the women’s lifting event. But rival federations aren’t happy about it.” (news.com.au, 8 April 2018). The post received even more engagement than the blackface article, with 811 reacts (“Like”,

“Angry”, and “Haha”) and 611 comments and replies, along with 138 shares. The comments section was, not surprisingly, rather toxic: the top comment, as ranked by Facebook’s default “relevant comments” sorting mechanism, was a transphobic

“joke”, with over 1,300 “Likes”, “Hahas”, and “Loves”. It received over 225 replies. The next top comments, taking inspiration from the headline, were users arguing over the merits of “gender theory”.

Junkee has participated in posts of a deliberately divisive nature, although as will be explained below and elaborated in subsequent chapters, this participation is both a symptom and response to the logics and cultures that fuel trolling on Facebook

138 and Twitter. On 19 March 2018 the Junkee Facebook page (which currently has over 280,000 likes – a fairly large number, considering Junkee’s explicitly narrow target audience) posted an article headlined “‘Annihilation’ Is Proof That Women-

Led Sci-Fi Is Better”, and the post was captioned with “Do we really need another

‘man saves world, man gets girl’ plot line?” (Junkee, 19 March 2018). The article was a critique of masculine norms – such as “the hero’s journey” – in the sci-fi genre, and how the recent women-led film Annihilation (2018) presented new possibilities to challenge these norms. However, the provocative headline and caption did also appear to be written to bait those who are critical or antagonistic to feminist ideas – with this possibility partly confirmed by the significant presence of complaining male users in the comments. The post received 420 reactions (the top three were “Like”, “Love”, and “Haha”), 10 shares, and 50 comments and replies – a quite significant amount of interactions for the page, considering during this period most Junkee posts only accumulated reactions, shares, comments, etc. into the double digits. Two of the top four comments were from the Junkee page itself, as it replied to antagonistic (and mostly male) commenters with GIFs of

American singer – and feminist pop icon – Beyoncé (captioned with “Who run the world? Girls”) and a GIF of dancing male dancers, captioned with “All the dudes suddenly slipping into our comments section rn [right now]”. There were angry replies to these GIFs, which were then followed up by more GIFs from Junkee (one which read: “Thank you so much to our unbelievable fans!”). Junkee also made an ironic reference to trolling in these GIF responses, with a visual quote of Admiral

Ackbar (a character from the original Star Wars trilogy) shouting “It’s a trap!” in response to a male user accusing Junkee of “bait[ing] people into reading [their] article” (Junkee, 19 March 2018). The Ackbar image and quote is a popular and

139 longstanding meme, with its own entry in the Know Your Meme database (Know

Your Meme, 2018a).

Junkee made a similar post on 15 March 2018, headlined “This Art Isn’t For You:

Why White Men Need To Stay In Their Lane” and captioned with “We don’t need to hear straight, white male opinions on everything.” (Junkee, 15 March 2018). The post received 270 reactions (top three were “Like”, “Love”, and “Haha”), 26 shares, and 74 comments and replies, and similarly antagonistic responses in the comment section. Like the previous article examined, Junkee responded to a number of these antagonistic comments with pop-culture GIFs, further fanning the flames. In response to male users complaining about Junkee’s “clickbait”, the

Junkee account posted a GIF of cartoon paratroopers, with the text “IT’S RAINING

MEN” laid over it – the caption for this comment was “Our comment section rn”.

In another instance, Junkee posted a comment which offered “men” some “advice”: accompanying this comment was a GIF from popular teen comedy Mean Girls

(2004), featuring Regina George, clique queen, yelling “SHUT! UP!” Both of these

Junkee comments, due to their accumulated reactions – both positive and negative

– rose to the top. Below, there were comments that showered Junkee with praise for their article – “FUCKING PREACH IT JUNKEE [hands clapping emoji]” wrote one user – while other comments received numerous (antagonistic) replies to their complaints about “snowflakes” and “identity politics”.

Lastly, on 18 March 2018 a video was posted to the Junkee page titled “Junk

Explained: What The Hell Is Dividend Imputation?” (Junkee, 18 March 2018). The post was captioned: “Here’s how rich boomers are using an extremely sneaky scheme to steal your money.” In the 2-minute video, (now former) Junkee writer

Osman Faruqi talks about “why giving tax credits to wealthy retirees is actually

140 cooked”. As evidenced by this use of Australian slang (“cooked” meaning something that is stupidly, almost humorously, unjust), in the video Faruqi’s speech is characterised by particular sensibilities associated with youth culture, such as ironic and self-deprecating humour. Faruqi begins the video by saying that “if you’re a normal person” and “you don’t hate your life” then “you probably aren’t paying any attention” to a then-recent, “extremely boring”, report into a tax scheme that made it “easier… for rich old people to take our money”. The rest of the video is a rather detailed, though still concise, explainer on the intricacies of the tax scheme. The video received 164 reactions (top three being “Like”, “Angry”, and

“Love”), 46 comments and replies, and 69 shares. In the comments, users were debating both the merits of the tax scheme – one of the top comments criticised

Junkee’s take on it as “over-simplifying a complex issue” – while another accused

Junkee of spreading “offensive, divisive and completely unhelpful bullshit”.

Another top comment, however, cheered on Junkee: “and that’s the truth!”

What these examples demonstrate is how the affordances and technological logics of Facebook both enable and even encourage these kinds of deliberately divisive practices when outlets pursue attention and interaction metrics, and thus visibility, on the platform. Although sensational and polarising news content is by no means new – Phillips even notes the “thin line” separating Internet trolling and the profitable and provocative material regularly circulated by corporate news media

(2015: 95) – this phenomenon seems to intensify when users have opportunities to directly respond to the article and to each other, and when visibility is an algorithmic reward determined by the accumulation of such engagement metrics.

All the outlets described above demonstrated a familiarity with contemporary cultural, social, and political sites of conflict – race, gender, environmentalism, and

141 inter-generational injustice – and played them for engagement. Junkee’s posts, though, exhibited a number of differences from those by ABC News and

News.com.au.

Firstly, they did not “deceive” in the same manner as the other outlets, as their news framing – their position on the issue – was not masked behind a distanced and performative “objectivity”. On the contrary, rather than being distant Junkee was actually present: in the comment sections, engaging – and combating – users.

Secondly, Junkee demonstrated not only a familiarity with these sites of political conflict, but also the pop-cultural infused vernaculars through which they are often enacted on social media platforms. It should be noted here that other Junkee posts

I scanned during the latter weeks of March similarly featured Junkee replying to comments with GIFs. These examples indicate that there is more going on here with Junkee – and, I will argue, with the other social news outlets – than a trolling framework will be able to encapsulate. As foreshadowed by the interviews with

BuzzFeed Oz News editor Simon Crerar, Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan, and

Pedestrian.tv co-founder Chris Wirasinha, there was something distinctive about those headlines that made them particularly adept at engagement. These articles were a form of identity performance, which was combined with a humour grounded in popular platform vernaculars, while they also – even ironically – responded to the algorithmic need for engagement. Rather than just “trolling”, the complex operations that characterise social news can be better understood as “constitutive humour”: as both generative and magnetic amongst like-minded users, but also inherently exclusive as it targets a distinct out-group. This concept, drawn from

Whitney Phillips & Ryan M. Milner (2017: 92), allows for trolling behaviours to be incorporated into a more thorough understanding of how social news operates

142 on social media platforms in tandem with the latter’s technological logics, but also without reducing this news to trolling. Instead, “constitutive humour” – and its associated concepts of sociability and positionality, as will be discussed in the coming chapters – can also present positive developments for news and journalism as it exists on social media.

I now turn to a discussion of these more positive developments. Maximising likes, reactions, shares, and comments for commercial purposes is a central concern of social news outlets’ daily news production. Yet seeking attention and interaction metrics is also a goal for other, more outwardly benevolent, concerns. Some of the activities and outputs of social news outlets, it will now be shown, can be understood to be pursuing that different sense of “engagement”, as outlined earlier

– the one closer to the civic sense of the term.

4.2.2 Social news outlets and civic practices

The Junkee video on the dividend imputation scheme described above is evidently seeking a different kind of engagement than the one at the focus of the previous section. Rather than purely in search of attention and interaction metrics, the video sought to arouse affective and intellectual investment from users who were also implicitly understood as citizens, or at least voters. Faruqi’s attempt to explain a complex issue through informal, ironic, and irreverent language not only sought to be a more entertaining take on an otherwise “boring” topic, but also, through

Faruqi’s simple but not simplistic explanation, intended to leave their young viewers better informed, and thus better equipped to participate in civic life.

Potentially, the video could even influence the future outcome of the tax scheme in question.

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Such “explainers” regularly feature in Junkee. Recently, in their “Junk Explained” series, they have produced articles on the significance of an October 2018 federal byelection (Stott, 18 October 2018), on the staffing crisis in Australia’s nursing homes (Fidge, 11 October 2018), and on the September 2018 leadership crisis in the ABC, which brought to light attempts by the ABC chairman to fire a number of high-profile journalists who wrote articles critical of the federal government

(Koslowski, 27 September 2018). Other notable Junkee explainers include a piece on a suspicious $444 million dollar federal grant given in June 2018 to a Great

Barrier Reef foundation that had links to the mining industry (Koslowski, 6 August

2018). More ostensibly silly phenomena have also received Junk Explainers, such as esoteric Twitter memes (Lenton, 3 September 2018). All these explainers are written in the informal, conversational, and irreverent style featured in the tax scheme video.

On the subject of explainers, Junkee co-founder Duggan in his interview with

Carson & Muller says that they – and, indeed, Junkee – were born out of a splintering media and information environment:

“The traditional silos of where you get your news from was fragmenting [in the early 2010s]. No one was sitting down at 8:30pm to watch a show on Channel 7 anymore. They were starting to look at YouTube. And there was so much information out there that people found it hard to navigate their way through it. So that was the impetus for us to launch Junkee. We were a music publisher up until then. We had no credibility in pop-culture space. And Junkee was meant to be for pop-culture junkies. It was meant to alleviate FONK – that Fear Of Not Knowing.

So, we did things like explainers; things that are now pretty commonplace. We were one of the first people to start doing explainers in Australia. We call them

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Junk Explains… We also looked a lot to the US and saw the rise of things like

BuzzFeed over there. The changing of the guard was happening with news.”

(Carson & Muller, 2017: 18)

According to Duggan, Junkee was defined early on by a mission to find new means to reach, interest, and retain (in this sense, engage) audiences in a news media environment characterised by fragmentation and information saturation. While other outlets – such as the online ABC News – now regularly produce explainers, social news outlets, in Duggan’s account at least, led this “changing of the guard” in this regard. Even if Duggan is overstating Junkee’s innovativeness here, it is still significant that this ability to reach, sustain, and educate audiences is the self-image that Junkee’s co-founder wishes to present. In a subsequent interview with journalist Eleanor Dickinson, Duggan again emphasises this image of Junkee producing intelligent content, in contrast to other outlets: he states that he and his co-founders wanted to “de-stupidify” the Internet, and instead “treat the audience like they had brains” (8 December, 2018). Neil Ackland, Junkee co-founder and current CEO, has also made similar comments, stating in a separate, earlier interview that the outlet sought to counter what they felt was pop-culture “being dumbed down” in the news (Robin, 26 March 2014). Due to this approach, according to Duggan, Junkee’s audience “suddenly blew up” (Dickinson, 8

December, 2018). The significance of Junkee addressing the social fears associated with “FONK” – that is, both of not knowing but also not knowing as much as your friends – will be discussed in the following chapter.

As Duggan indicates, BuzzFeed Oz News runs explainers, too – although not in a uniform style. Some are, typical of BuzzFeed, written in a listicle format: like an explainer on the frequently unjust restrictions that many young renters face in

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Australia, titled “Here Are 11 Things That Are Harder For Renters To Get Away

With” (Ryan, 19 October 2018). In another BuzzFeed Oz article, titled “The

Government Had A Pretty Terrible Week. Here Are Just A Few Of The Things

That Went Wrong”, reporter Josh Taylor uses a listicle format to summarise the multiple issues – from “accidently” voting for a white supremacist slogan in the

Senate, to leaks that suggested serious diplomatic conflicts with Indonesia after

Prime Minister Scott Morrison signalled his intention to move the Australian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – that faced the federal government in mid-October

2018 (Taylor, 19 October 2018). Another, titled “I Know This Sounds Boring But

The Budget Superannuation Changes Will Probably Affect You”, explains a 2018 plan by the federal government to eliminate inactive superannuation accounts, by redirecting funds from dormant accounts to the tax office (Sainty, 8 May 2018).

Funds are then accessible upon request. As the title suggests, the article is written in a chatty and personable fashion: “if you, like me, did not pay attention to whatever super fund was on the piece of paper you had to sign before you started working at a café/shop/call centre…[then] you, also like me, probably ended with multiple super accounts”. In this way, the reporter, Lane Sainty, admits the dry nature of the policy change but also takes pains to stress how it will affect

Australians, “especially young people”.

This kind of chatty style, which is common BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv news content, is not just a marker of relatability – that these social news outlets, as stated in the above example, are “like” you. Although, as will be discussed further in Chapter 6, this personable relatability is certainly a significant characteristic of social news. This conversational style, moreover, attempts to assist and guide readers through the news: even headline elements, such as “I Know This Sounds

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Boring”, and the frequent use of “Here” (“Here Are”, “Here’s Why”, etc.) not only are designed to capture attention, but also explicitly guide readers’ attention to the most significant aspect of a particular news item or story, to engage them and help them understand news in a crowded information environment.

This explicit attempt to assist readers engage with the news departs from established norms, in particular what Michael Schudson has termed the informed or “good citizen” model of journalism and democratic engagement (1998). This model, which had its beginnings in the US in the early 20th century, placed the onus on individuals – “citizens”, who collectively formed the “public” – to be informed of the news so that they could participate in the political process (Schudson, 1998;

Zuckerman, 2014: 155-156). That is, keeping up with the news – which was a packaged selection of reports written in a style which favoured distance and impartiality at the expense of emotion, as Deuze has noted (2005) – was framed, in this model, as an individual responsibility. Journalists need only – indeed, should only – dispassionately report the “facts”, and the public will decide what to make of them. Although originating out of the specific context of a partisan, party-based

19th century US press (Schudson, 1998; Zelizer, 2013), which it was aiming to counter and reform, the “good citizen” journalism model still largely persists, with the objective news format being perhaps its most visible legacy. Social news, by not only helping readers navigate a deluge of news content but also by recognising that keeping up with the news can be a difficult, even dull, task, represents a significant progressive shift from established norms.

Social news’ shift away from objective news formats, however, has also resulted in some more striking challenges to norms around impartiality. In the next section,

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I discuss how social news outlets, through their advocacy and activism in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, sought to encourage readers to act.

4.2.3 Advocacy and activism in the same-sex marriage postal survey

As described in Chapter 1, the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey was commissioned by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National Australian government to gauge nationwide support for same-sex marriage. A positive survey result was presented as the precondition for action on the issue, but – controversially – it did not bind the government to vote in any particular way. The vast majority of established news outlets, such as those owned by Fairfax Media and News Corp, as well as the ABC, took an objective and “balanced” approach to covering the postal survey: although editorials from the outlets tended to advocate the “Yes” vote, articles nonetheless reported on the issue in a typically dispassionate and impartial fashion – most notably, they preferred the neutral term

“same-sex marriage” over the more politically-charged “marriage equality”

(Power, 23 October 2017).

Social news outlets did not follow this trend: instead, their support for the “Yes” vote tended to be explicit in their coverage. In the case of Junkee and Pedestrian.tv this advocacy manifested in outright activism. The latter was both a result of the progressive politics of the outlets’ editors and writers, but also an outcome of the peculiar circumstances of the survey. By relying on post, there were concerns from the “Yes” campaign that young people may not be familiar with physical mail, and may also have also forgotten to update their address details with the Australian

Electoral Commission (AEC), and thus would be disadvantaged during the survey.

Social news outlets, by being primarily directed at young people, attempted to

148 assist the “Yes” campaign by pushing young people to update their address details, and also by encouraging young people to enrol. Furthermore, there was a rather tight deadline: the postal survey was announced on 8 August 2017 with an enrolment deadline (including a deadline to update address details) of 24 August

(Yaxley & Norman, 8 August 2017).

Such attempts to engage young people into action, within such a short timeframe, were manifested in a number of different strategies. Junkee and its teen-focused outlet Punkee provided links to the AEC website in Facebook posts, directing followers to “enrol and update” (e.g., Junkee, 10 August 2017; Punkee, 14 August

2017). Another Junkee post sought to portray a sense of positive momentum to the

“Yes” campaign, telling readers to “get it done” and featured an embedded tweet from the AEC which detailed the impressive (“68,000”) enrolment transactions on their website. (Junkee, 10 August 2017). Social news outlets also produced articles informing readers of the workings of the survey, and reminding them of the tight enrolment deadline (Fry, 10 August 2017; Faruqi, 11 August 2017). These were typically written in the informal and conversational style discussed above – as with this article from Pedestrian.tv titled “Folks, You’ve Got 14 Days To Enrol For The

SSM Postal Vote Next Month”. “Do it. Right now. Put your lunch down and check… I’ve made it easy for you, all you have to do is click right here” writes the article’s author, guiding the reader to AEC enrolment link (Fry, 10 August 2017).

A Junkee article, released on the same day and titled “People Are Flooding The

Electoral Commission To Update Their Details For The Postal Plebiscite” (Faruqi,

11 August 2017), deployed similar language: “if you aren’t on the electoral roll, or you’re worried your address isn’t up to date, you can sort it all out on the AEC website in less than five minutes”, the writer states – “Go for it”. This Junkee article

149 also had explainer elements, with the writer detailing the peculiar circumstances of the postal survey, and how young people are “particularly vulnerable” since they

“tend to move around a lot more than older Australians”. BuzzFeed Oz, too, produced similar articles, such as one released on the 24 August titled “Guys, It’s

Actually The Last Day You Can Enrol For The Same-Sex Marriage Survey”

(Sainty, 24 August 2017).

In these ways, the above articles take the form of what Matthew Charles has called

“advocacy journalism”: when reporters find it “no longer sufficient to report the news as mere facts”, and instead “engage” with the story in order to get “their audience to act” (2013: 387). These articles attempted to “jolt” (2013: 387) readers into enrolling, and thereby help enact social change. Besides providing links in articles and Facebook posts, other methods were also employed by Junkee and

Pedestrian.tv in order to boost enrolment rates. In particular, this took the form of

Twitter hashtag activism. The use of hashtags for activist purposes has become fairly common, and has been researched extensively by scholars. Most notable in this regard were the many studies on social media use within the popular uprisings in Middle East during the early 2010s (dubbed the “Arab Spring” by Western observers). Fieke Jansen studied the mediating role that Twitter and other platforms played during the organising of activism and protest in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and

Tunisia, using the term “digital activism” to describe such phenomena (2010).

Jansen also noted how Twitter and specifically English-language tweets appeared to be used to draw international attention to the uprisings. Zizi Papacharissi &

Maria de Fatima Oliveira, on the other hand, examined how “affective news” was circulated by participants within the #egypt hashtag during the protests (2012).

Such news blended “fact and emotion” and was imbued with the “drama” and

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“compelling” appeal of “instantaneity”, which the authors argue was “engaging” for those participating in and following the uprising (2012: 279). Scholars have also researched the use of Twitter hashtags by people from marginalised backgrounds. Sherri Williams has noted how hashtags have “emerged as an effective way to share information and spur action about a demographic that seems to get little support from its nation – black women” (2015: 342). Sarah J. Jackson

& Brooke Foucault Welles, furthermore, studied the use of the #Ferguson hashtag, which formed a “counter-public network” for the protests that followed the shooting of 18-year old Michael Brown by a white police officer (2016).

Like the phenomena studied above, Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, sought to use Twitter hashtags to get a topic – that is, the importance of enrolling in time for the postal survey – trending, and thereby draw attention to the issue. With the aim of pushing enrolments and enrolment updates in the last hours before the deadline, both outlets

– in conjunction with other youth-focused outlets, such as Vice, Broadsheet, and

FBi Radio – “went dark”, temporarily removing advertising from their websites and devoting their official social media accounts to posting links to the AEC as well other information about the survey (Stott, 23 August 2017). Included in these social media posts was the hashtag #EnrolAndUpdate. It is difficult to determine the effectiveness of such hashtag activism in detail: nonetheless these hashtags were fairly visible in the postal survey-related “Yes” campaign tweet data that I collected during this time (the methods by which I retrieved this data are detailed in the introduction). During the 23-25 August, immediately before and after the enrolment deadline, #EnrolAndUpdate was significant in terms of visibility: being the 5th most visible hashtag. Still, the hashtag’s visibility was rather small compared to the #MarriageEquality hashtag, which was contained in 7,732 tweets during this

151 period. #EnrolAndUpdate, in contrast, attracted only 594 tweets. The sample contained a total of 13,795 tweets.

Posts from the outlets involved in the “going dark” initiative were varied in nature, but all contained LGBTIQ-imagery. One such posts included a rainbow-coloured

GIF displaying the word “Enrol”: capitalised, and flowing in and out of the coloured background in an almost mesmerising fashion (PEDESTRIAN.TV, 23

August 2017). Other posts featured factual infographics on the postal survey, each in a different colour of the rainbow. One of these posts, from Junkee, emphasised the importance of enrolling by describing the low participation rate of the last voluntary postal vote: “half the population didn’t take part” (Junkee, 23 August

2017).

Beyond the enrolment-focused social media activism, social news outlets used other strategies to boost the “Yes” vote: for instance, for the period the postal survey, Pedestrian.tv added a rainbow flag to its logo, and included a “VOTE YES” icon in the banners on its social media pages, and on its website.

As I lack access to detailed enrolment data – such as clickthrough rates from the social news links to the AEC website – it is difficult to measure the precise impact of the activism discussed above. Still, at least according to significant actors within the “Yes” campaign, social news activism seemed to have a positive outcome for the “Yes” vote: Sally Rugg, who ran the progressive lobby group GetUp!’s campaign for marriage equality, after the winning “Yes” vote was announced on

11 November tweeted that Junkee made a “huge contribution” to the campaign, and that the outlet led “a big enrolment push” (Rugg, 11 November 2017).

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According to Rugg, Junkee staff even “held phonebanks to turn out the vote” – although it is unclear if that activity was done in an official capacity.

While BuzzFeed Oz News did not participate in the “going dark” initiative – and thus did not perform overt activism for the “Yes” side – the outlet still made considerable efforts in seeking civic engagement. The BuzzFeed Oz Politics official Twitter account posted reminders to enrol and update – although without

Junkee’s and Pedestrian.tv’s hashtag (BuzzFeed Oz Politics, 8 August 2017).

BuzzFeed Oz reporter Lane Sainty was also highly active during the survey, both in terms of article output and also the considerable coverage of events and issues that she provided on her Twitter account. Included in such tweets was an infographic explanation of the survey’s complex process (Sainty, 7 August 2017), which was regularly updated. Other tweets provided important information for overseas voters (Sainty, 23 Auguist 2017). In addition, in the weeks leading up to the enrolment deadline, Sainty posted and regularly updated a question-and-answer article about the survey, titled “We Tried To Answer Literally Every Question

About The Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey” (14 August, 2017). The questions were sent by readers via email. This article was followed by a Facebook question- and-answer session, streamed live and co-hosted with fellow BuzzFeed Oz reporter

Alice Workman (BuzzFeed Oz Politics, 22 August 2017). The live stream lasted nearly an hour, and received considerable attention and interaction metrics: with over 45,000 views, 246 reactions (“Like”, “Love”, and “Angry” being the top three), 178 comments and replies, and 70 shares. Similar to the other social news explainer content analysed above, the live stream was informal, with co-hosts

Sainty and Workman regularly sharing jokes. After the live stream ended, the official BuzzFeed Oz Politics Facebook account also replied to additional questions

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(and light-hearted remarks) in the comment section, demonstrating attempts by

BuzzFeed Oz to engage with Facebook users. Furthermore, while Sainty and

Workman did not overtly support the “Yes” side during the live stream, subtle advocacy was evident in a rainbow-coloured BuzzFeed banner hung behind the two reporters.

4.3 Conclusion

“Audience engagement” has therefore become a prominent theme in newsrooms, and a significant concern for news outlets – although there has been significant disagreement about what “engagement” entails, and the means by which it can be sought. There have been two main interpretations of “engagement”: one which places emphasis on the potential for a more “reciprocal” or civic journalism that takes advantage of platforms’ interactive affordances to seek dialogue with audiences; the other, which interprets “engagement” as the maximisation of audience attention and interaction metrics – clicks, likes, comments, shares, and so on – for commercial benefit. BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv are guided by and organised around “engagement” although they offer, in many ways, a third way outside this commercial/civic binary. These social news outlets, like others dependent on social media platforms for audiences, do need to accumulate a sufficient level (determined by algorithmic processes) of attention and interaction metrics to remain visible on Facebook and Twitter. However, this need has not excluded the outlets from performing “engagement” in the second, more civic, sense: here defined as an attempt to address readers as citizens, capable of political action. BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, as documented in this chapter, produce novel content that tries to help readers navigate and understand the news – a break from traditional news forms which tend to simply aim to

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“inform”, and place the onus on the reader to “follow” the news. At the same time, this more civic-minded news content, written in or spoken through slang, humour, and a fluency of Internet and platform vernacular, is also potentially lucrative in terms of attention and interaction metrics, at least according to Junkee co-founder

Duggan. Social news content, in these ways, is entertaining – both in the sense of being explicitly pleasurable, but also engaging and stimulating. Furthermore, as documented in the case of the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, social news outlets perform engagement in an activistic sense, by encouraging them to enact change (by, for example, enrolling to vote).

In the next chapter, I elaborate on two distinctive qualities of social news that I have touched on in the above discussion of the social news logic of engagement.

On the one hand, their “constitutive humour”, and on the other what I have been calling their informal and conversational style. As I argue in the next chapter, these two qualities form part of a social news logic of sociability, grounded in the connective logics and everyday vernacular cultures of social media platforms.

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Chapter 5: Sociability

5.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I noted how BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv’s content was distinguished by a humorous and conversational style, along with what seemed to be a literacy in the pop-culture-infused vernaculars of the Internet. These styles and this literacy appeared suitable to social media spaces where socialising is typical, and for platforms where such socialising is a major function. Still, these textual elements were only broadly described. In this chapter,

I examine these elements in greater detail by elaborating on the social news logic of sociability. Sociability, here drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel, refers to the “feeling for” and the “satisfaction in the very fact one is associated with others”

– a kind of “togetherness, a union of others” (1971: 128). As stated in Chapters 1 and 3, by conceiving of a social news logic of sociability I refer to how these outlets attempt to facilitate socialising through news content. Such facilitation, grounded within the connective logics of social media, is a crucial operating practice – and a key distinguishing feature – of the social news genre.

I first return to the social media logic of connectivity, examining how the concept is useful for understanding the ways in which “boundaries between human connections and commercially and technologically steered activities” on platforms

“are increasingly obfuscated” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013: 9). A social media phenomenon, I argue, that captures this obfuscation particularly well is “sharing”.

I then frame social news as a news genre that emphasises sociability through shareability, conceiving this latter quality as both emerging from and tapping into the connective affordances of social media platforms. Considering that what sparks

156 the “impulse to sociability” (Simmel, 1971: 128), that is, to connect and share, is not only an outcome of the technical affordances of a platform – for not all content is shared, and some spreads more than others – I frame shareability as an “attribute of a media text” (Jenkins et al, 2013: 4). In this sense, shareability is not just a quality inherit to certain news stories, as some scholars have earlier conceived it

(Harcup & O’Neil, 2016). Rather, social news’ content embodies textual qualities

– such as humour, informal and conversational tones, snark, wit, and a prevalence of pop-cultural visual media such as GIFs and memes – that are suitable for the everyday sharing practices on platforms because they reflect the everyday vernaculars of these platforms. I then qualify the shareable and “togetherness” potential of social news by returning to the concept of “constitutive humour”

(Phillips & Milner, 2017), noting how the vernaculars and humour of these outlets articulate an implicit “us” that excludes an equally implicit “them”. Finally, I examine the ways that social news’ sociability operated during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey: in particular, how it was used to aid their enrolment push immediately prior to the survey.

5.2 Connectivity and sharing on social media

As discussed in Chapter 3, the social media logic of connectivity describes how social media platforms not only enable connections between users, but also engineer them – and with certain commercial purposes in mind. Examples were given in that chapter about how algorithmically-determined friend and page recommendations on Facebook, on the one hand, help connect users to others but, on the other, also help develop fuller user profiles that would be of interest to

Facebook’s advertising partners. A phenomenon which acutely captures what van

Dijck & Poell have called the “Janus-face quality” (2013: 9), the double-sided

157 nature, of the social media logic of connectivity is sharing. As will be explained below, sharing – like connectivity – is symptomatic of the commercial logics of social media platforms, but also exemplifies the kinds of participatory potentials that emerge from the affordances of these platforms. “Sharing” is both a mystifying marketing term, and a term that actually meaningfully articulates the kinds of pro- social possibilities that social media platforms offer. In these respects, social news, being a news genre that is both a symptom of and a response to the logics and cultures of platforms, similarly embody these seemingly contradictory qualities – as I began to indicate in the previous chapter. Social news both promotes and exploits the affordances and practices of sharing, but also demonstrates a creative answer to the sharing and connective imperatives on platforms, with positive implications for the future of digital journalism.

“Sharing”, like connection, is a particularly ubiquitous term in the social media ecology. The term has been enthusiastically popularised by social media companies themselves, not just in how they have labelled the affordances of their platforms

(e.g. Facebook’s “share” function), but also in their marketing – where sharing has considerable presence. Perhaps the most notable example is the Facebook homepage, which announces that the platform “helps you connect and share with the people in your life”. The term also holds a prominent place in other social media platforms, which since the latter half of the 2000s have all at one time or another marketed themselves as platforms for sharing. Twitter’s mission statement in 2017 was to “give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly” (2017). The image-based platform Instagram, on the other hand, describes itself as “a community… who capture and share the world’s moments”

(2018). Over on the YouTube “about” webpage, the platform states that they

158 believe “the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories” (2018). The sharing descriptor has also gained purchase outside of the major social media companies. As Nicholas John notes, the taxi-like car-hailing application Uber and the short-term rental platform Airbnb both have been described as forming part of an emerging “sharing economy”: being platforms for “car-sharing” and “home-sharing”, respectively (2017: 69).

Notable in this regard, social news outlets have also made numerous references to sharing when differentiating their content from other, typically legacy, news outlets. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has previously spoken of BuzzFeed’s expertise in sharing, claiming that BuzzFeed has a great understanding of “what people share and why people share and what stories are interesting” and criticised legacy outlets like The New York Times for having “stories [that] are boring”, even if they still do “a lot of tremendous journalism” (Salmon, 2014). For BuzzFeed, having skills in “sharing” is a key employment criterion: for instance, a recent advertisement for a BuzzFeed Oz News science reporting internship position emphasised the need to be able to “write and produce stories that people want to share” (Rushton, 17 May 2018). BuzzFeed Oz News editor Simon Crerar, in his interview with Andrea Carlson & Dennis Muller, similarly emphasised sharing as a BuzzFeed expertise, stating how his outlet’s “understanding of how content shares” makes BuzzFeed a “really good [native advertising] partner for brands”

(2017: 45). In the press release announcing their launch of Junkee, what was then

Sound Alliance stated that young people “share content on social media that makes them look knowledgeable or funny” and that Junkee was to be built with those sharing practices in mind (Junkee, 2013). Junkee co-founder Neil Ackland has also previously stated that the outlet does “a lot” of research “looking at the psychology

159 of why people share content” (Doyle, 3 July 2015). And although Pedestrian.tv has not explicitly used the word “sharing”, it has previously boasted of its “unique understanding of content, culture and media” that can help brands “connect with

[their] audience”: thus suggesting knowledge about the platform ecologies where sharing flourishes (Pedestrian,tv, 2016).

In the above contexts, sharing has multiple meanings. Most obviously, the term refers to the technological affordances that enable networked communication and the replication and distribution of artefacts, such as images and videos, amongst users. But these technical explanations do not fully capture why this particular term

– sharing – has been chosen by platforms and social news outlets as a common, even dominant, descriptor. To understand this usage, the term’s overly pro-social values must be examined: as “share” is a word with almost purely positive connotations.

Although originating as a rather functional descriptor of the equal partition of a concrete thing such as land, sharing has since come to more broadly signify notions of giving and selflessness (John, 2017). The term sharing can also suggest the revelation of intimate feeling along with other acts of personal transparency – the kind which platforms like Facebook have a commercial interest in. In this regard, as John has argued, those using the term “seek to harness more than just its technical meaning of certain aspects of computer-mediated communication” (2017:

61). There are thus pragmatic – that is, commercial – reasons for the frequent use of the term: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for example, need to encourage users to share personal information so that platforms can sell this data to advertisers. For platforms like Uber, as Trebor Scholz argues, the sharing metaphor works to mystify an unregulated and exploitative taxi business with the positive

160 pro-social values associated with carpooling (2017). In these ways, as Tom Slee argues, the “so-called sharing economy” – which include other platforms, such as the freelance labour marketplaces Taskrabbit and Airtasker – “extends harsh free- market practices into previously protected areas of our lives” (2017). Social news outlets, too, also have a commercial imperative for sharing – and this is where the logic of engagement, particularly when it comes to optimising the impact of native advertising campaigns, comes in. Due to this commercially-driven mystification of sharing by digital media companies, Russel Belk has described the use of the term as a cynical “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” – and thereby prefers to describe such

“phenomenon” as “pseudo-sharing” (2014). To return to the discussions around

Web 2.0 in Chapter 3, there is a sense that there is a discernible development here from a culture of user-led user-generated content (UGC) to one dominated by sharing: from a participatory culture characterised by the mutual creation and distribution of content to the commodified distribution between users of, on the one hand, labour on platform-based marketplaces, and on the other, products, such as native advertising articles from social news outlets. Throughout this chapter, the tensions between these two eras – what Jean Burgess has described as two distinct

“platform paradigms” (2015) – will be an ongoing theme.

But regardless of motivations, both platforms and social news outlets depend on users voluntarily giving something to others: whether that is labour, time, property, personal information, images, videos, or news articles. There is a necessity, here, for sociable environments and content that can facilitate this giving. By “sociable”,

I refer to Georg Simmel’s writings on “sociability”, Simmel was interested in the

“motives of association”, and argued that the “impulse to sociability in man” drove associative “forms of existence” that “often only later calls forth that objective

161 content” – that is, ulterior purposes – “which carries the particular association along” (1971: 128). In these ways, for Simmel, sociability is a “play-form of association”. I now scrutinise what exactly sparks this desire to playfully associate with others, specifically on social media. For the “impulse” to connect and share on platforms is not only an outcome of technical affordances, as not all content is shared, and some content spreads more than others. Moreover, when Peretti boasts of BuzzFeed’s expertise in sharing, he speaks of it almost as a textual quality: that, unlike BuzzFeed, the New York Times’ articles are “boring” and that there are reasons why some content is more shareable than others. In other words, BuzzFeed understands and can cater to the sociable impulse.

The question of what makes some content – in particular, news content – more shareable than others, and thus more likely to facilitate sociability, has attracted attention from journalism and media scholars (Hermida et al, 2012; Phillips, 2012;

Harcup & O’Neill, 2016). For Alfred Hermida, Fred Fletcher, Darry Korell, &

Donna Logan, news sharing was becoming “central” to the “way people experience the news”, and was bound up with “social recommendations”: that is, news sharing on platforms had to do with users distributing news content with each other, in trusted exchanges (2012: 821-822). Such “personalised social news streams”,

Hermida et al argued, undermined the gatekeeping editorial role of professional news outlets (2012: 822). This point will be taken up in greater detail in the next chapter, on the social news logic of personalisation. Angela Phillips investigated news “virality” and considered sociability as a “third pillar” of “good” journalism

(alongside “speed” and “trust”), although the term here mostly referred to journalists utilising the connective affordances of platforms that enabled the

“spreading” of news content (2012). However, Phillips did not fully attend to

162 broader questions about the potential “spreadable” and sociable qualities of news content itself.

Tony Harcup & Deidre O’Neill more recently proposed that shareability is itself an emerging news value, and while they find it difficult to pin down exactly what makes some news content more shareable than others, they suggest it has something to do with emotional responses: shareable stories are those that make readers “laugh” or “angry” (2016: 11). Shareability here is a quality inherent to a story – for Harcup & O’Neill, some stories just trigger the impulse to share more than others. This may explain shareability to a certain extent: for instance, articles such as a Pedestrian.tv report on a US actor’s mysterious tweet about “Sex gifs” – with writer Ben McLeay musing that it was quite likely that actor Dean Norris mistook Twitter’s status update bar for the platform’s search box – could exemplify the qualities of shareability as proposed by Harcup & ONeill (23 May 2018). The

“Sex gifs” story also received considerable engagement on the Pedestriant.tv

Facebook page, with over 110 comments – most of these consisting of users tagging friends, a typical sociable sharing practice – and 207 reactions, demonstrating the shareable potential for these kinds of inherently humorous stories. In my close following of the Pedestrian.tv Facebook page over 2016-2018, most posts would only accumulate reactions, comments, and shares into the double digits. Another Pedestrian.tv with significant Facebook engagement metrics – titled, “The Actual Natalie Portman Is Casually At An AFL Team’s Pre-Season

Training” (Tyson, 28 November 2018) – also exemplifies this form of shareability, the story being about the famous US actor’s surprise appearance at an Australian football team’s training session. The thumbnail photo, too, which features the rather incongruous sight of Portman wearing the jersey of the Melbourne-based

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Demons team, also lends the story this inherently intriguing quality. The story received heavy engagement, with over 878 reacts, 268 comments and replies – again, largely consisting of users tagging their friends – and 15 shares.

It was also this form of shareable content, as discussed in the second chapter, which

BuzzFeed was originally – and to a considerable extent, continues to be – known for: fun but, as implied by the initially wary reaction to BuzzFeed by legacy journalists, somewhat light-hearted content such as viral Internet videos and pop- culture listicles. To a large extent, this content remains very profitable for the company: at the time of writing, the Facebook page of BuzzFeed Australia – which specialises in listicles, pop-culture articles and video content – has far more followers (2.5 million) than the BuzzFeed Yarns (formerly BuzzFeed Oz News) page which only possess a comparatively low 62,000, suggesting that this kind of shareability continues to be very popular and lucrative. Even then BuzzFeed

Australia’s content is not entirely frivolous: to return to the critique of the

“tabloidization” argument discussed in Chapter 2, many of the pop-culture articles produced by the BuzzFeed Australia team actually engage with issues around gender, sexuality, and relationships in a thoughtful way. As an example, an article titled “We Need To Talk About Hot Karl In ‘Love Actually’” (Stopera, 29

November 2018) celebrates male same-sex attraction by way of analysing an minor character in the early 2000s cult favourite Christmas-themed romantic comedy,

Love Actually (2003). Furthermore, BuzzFeed Australia’s Editor-at-Large Jenna

Guillaume runs a regular series that looks back at popular teen and romance films from the 1990s and 2000s – such as American Pie (Guillaume, 22 July 2018) and

10 Things I Hate About You (Guillaume, 24 June 2018) – in articles that tap into nostalgia but also offer critical reassessments of the gender politics of these films,

164 albeit in an irreverent and informal style. Articles on the popular fantasy-romance book and film series Twilight – such as one titled “31 ‘Twilight’ Guys Ranked

From ‘Dead To Me’ To ‘Bite Me Please’” perform similar functions, reflecting on female experiences of puberty and celebrating teen sexuality (Guillaume et al, 27

November 2018).

Still, while Harcup & O’Neill’s framework may explain shareability to a certain extent, it does not fully capture the sense suggested by Peretti and the Junkee and

Pedestrian.tv “About” webpages. Peretti’s complaints about “boring” stories,

Junkee’s proclaimed intention to create content that will make their readers seem

“knowledgeable or funny” and Pedestrian.tv’s “unique understanding of content, culture and media” allows for a broad enough canvas of news stories, with the main discriminating feature being a general desire to attract and retain audiences through humour, “culture”, and intelligence. As indicated throughout this thesis, BuzzFeed

Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv write on a range of news topics, including serious stories in the traditional sense. Topics commonly associated with the “hard news” label, such as the economy, parliamentary politics, and social and cultural issues are all found in their regular reportage. In the case of BuzzFeed Oz News, the outlet even has reporters who are members of the federal Parliament’s Press

Gallery. Due to this, rather than just attempting to gauge the shareability of individual news stories, social news outlets instead demonstrate that we need to think about shareability as emerging from what Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, &

Sam Ford have called the “attributes of the media text” (2013: 4). In the case of social news, such attributes are deeply embedded in digital cultural phenomena.

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5.3 Shareability emerging from platform vernaculars

As stated in the second chapter, social news is centrally driven by platform vernaculars – a term coined to describe the aesthetic sensibilities, grammars of communication, and social conventions which “emerge from the ongoing interaction between users and platforms” (Gibbs et al, 2014: 257). Snark, informality, playful irreverence, and pop-culture content are, to various degrees, commonly found in social news content. Internet memes and reaction GIFs, the latter referring to the use of looped visual artefacts to convey affect (Miltner &

Highfield, 2017: 5) tend to be included as part of the organic flow of text within articles. A Pedestrian.tv article headlined “Q&A Gives Up, Announces Australia’s

Most Cooked Pollies For QLD Special” demonstrates this mixture of political news, somewhat obscure pop-culture references, and meme and GIF content

(Adams, 10 August 2018). The article reports that the ABC’s panel programme

Q&A would be having a Queensland special, inviting some of the country’s most controversial politicians – including far-right figures Pauline Hanson and George

Christensen – to debate issues facing the state. Q&A, which, the article tells the reader, “bills itself as the public broadcaster’s premiere forum for challenging ideas and policy positions”, has been previously criticised by other social news outlets for its conflict-and-controversy driven programming (Faruqi, 16 August 2016).

Rather than being a prestigious forum of rigorous debate, the article tells us that

Q&A “more closely resembles an ideological Beyblade battle” – a reference to a

Japanese toyline popular in Australian schoolyards in the early 2000s – “duked out by the nation’s most prominent cookers” (“cooked” being Australian slang for something that is absurdly and despairingly cruel and unjust). To further draw the connection between politicians bickering on television with children fighting in a

166 schoolyard, the article includes a Beyblade GIF in the text, showing a child-like character launching a Beyblade disc from a handheld device. The ironic joy expressed in the headline at the prospect of this spectacle runs throughout the article, with the author telling the reader that Q&A “promises to let it fucking rip”

(like one would do with a Beyblade). The headline image, too, is edited for vernacular-based humour: it is a Q&A promotional image featuring headshots of the upcoming panellists, with the lines “o no aunty” (a common affection term for the ABC) “wat is u doin bb?” (“baby”) added on top.

Junkee articles also exemplify similar textual qualities – as demonstrated in an article on instability in Australia’s governing Liberal Party in late 2018. Titled “Just

A Bunch Of Liberal MP Tweets That Are Extremely Funny Now That The Party

Is Imploding” (Stott, 27 November 2018). After reporting on the resignation of government Member of Parliament (MP) Julia Banks, the article states that the government “now only commands 73 votes on the floor of the House… which means it’s MINORITY GOVERNMENT TIME”. As another example of the civic engagement practices discussed in the previous chapter, the article then goes on to explain what a minority government is for those readers unfamiliar with the term – although this is prefixed by “tl;dr: It’s very bad news for the government.”

“TL;DR” is a popular shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”, the term having origins in Internet discussion forums as a response to posts that were deemed unnecessarily long or boring by other users. The use by Junkee here is thus an ironic reflection on the complex and somewhat dry details of Australia’s parliamentary system – a nod to readers from Junkee that they know that the procedures of parliamentary politics can be uninteresting. The rest of the article consists of an embedded list of

“extremely funny” older tweets of “Liberal MPs saying dumb shit”, that is,

167 criticising the instability of the previous Labor-led government: which are humorous in light of the similar instability which the incumbent Liberal-National government was suffering from when the article was written.

Social news outlets also make use of memes in thumbnail images. For example, a

BuzzFeed Oz news article about Facebook’s efforts to tackle the sharing of nude images of ex-partners without consent – a practice known as “revenge porn” – referenced a popular “send nudes” meme in its sub-title and in its thumbnail image

(Esposito, 10 November 2017). The BuzzFeed Oz article even went further and remixed this “send nudes” meme with another popular 80s-style text generator meme, called “Retro Wave” (PhotoFun, 2018) – indicating the fluency of social news writers with what Limor Shifman has described as the multi-layered intertextuality typical of Internet memes (2014: 41). The use of memes in thumbnail images is also evident in a Junkee article, again on the late 2018 Liberal

Party instability and titled “Lol, Scott Morrison Might Be About To Lose Yet

Another MP” (Clift, 29 November 2018). The image contains a picture of then-

Prime Minister Morrison juxtaposed against the cartoon dog from “This Is Fine” meme, the latter being a comic strip of anthropomorphic dog drinking at a coffee table, declaring that things are “fine” despite their house burning around them. The

“This Is Fine” meme has a history in platform-based political discourse: in particular, the image became popular on Twitter following the 2016 US

Presidential election, as a way of articulating the concerns of many and their state of shock after the Republican victory (Know Your Meme, 2018b). Furthermore, the article, as evident in the title, makes use of other forms of platform vernacular: in one instance by describing Craig Kelly, the conservative MP threatening to quit the Liberal Party, as a “climate change-denying Sky News stan”: “stan” here

168 meaning fan, the term having roots in the 2000 song from rapper Eminem called

Stan, which tells a story about an over-zealous rap fan. Sky News is Australia’s

Murdoch-owned 24-hour cable news channel, infamous in the country for its far- right television personalities.

Emoji (cartoon images used to express emotion or denote certain activities) are also common in the thumbnail images used to promote and visual articles within social media feeds. Such as in a BuzzFeed Oz News article titled “If Your NBN Sucks,

Telstra Might Give You Compensation”, where an angry-face and a dollar-sign emoji are plastered on top of an otherwise conventional photo-op of then-Prime

Minister Malcolm Turnbull visiting a telecommunications worksite (Taylor, 8

November 2017). The National Broadband Network (NBN) is a national telecommunications infrastructure project in Australia, established with the goal of upgrading the country’s Internet speeds and replacing existing cable networks.

However, since it was announced in 2007 the project has been beset by problems and has suffered significant political interference – BuzzFeed Oz’s angry-face emoji was thus aiming to tap into ongoing public frustration. In a Junkee article, emoji were used in a more complex and multi-layered fashion. Titled “Mojo Juju

Has Written A ‘Love Letter’ To Andrew Bolt After His Rant About Her New

Album”, the article reports how singer-songwriter Mojo Juju, who is of Filipino and Indigenous ancestry, was criticised by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt for

“complaining” in a recent song about her complicated relationship to her father, her identity, and to Australia (Richards, 27 November 2018). In response, Mojo

Juju wrote a satirical “love letter” to Bolt, thanking him for the “shout out” and for

“doing such an excellent job of demonstrating” why writing such songs “was so important to [her].” The Junkee article thumbnail, in reference to this, contained a

169 picture of Mojo Juju juxtaposed against an image of a smiling Bolt, with a pink love heart emoji nestled between. The love heart was not only a reference to the topic of the article – the “love letter” – but an ironic joke at Bolt’s expense, the insinuation here being that “loving” such a notorious figure for Australian progressives would actually be absurd.

What all these examples demonstrate is that when social news outlets emphasise their shareability, they are not just referring to their informal and conservational style, as examined in the previous chapter, but also indicating their embeddedness within the broader connective cultures of social media platforms. To put it more specifically, they are signifying that their content both speaks and reflects the vernaculars that emerge from the intersections of platform, user practice, and broader Internet popular culture. The everyday-ness of these vernaculars indicate the suitability of social news for the forms of inter-personal communication prevalent on platforms. Ryan M. Milner conceptualised memes as an “everyday vernacular” (2016: 84), and the etymology of vernacular itself has origins in the description of speech patterns both non-elite and ordinary (Burgess, 2007). The use of emoji is striking here, considering its prominent place within popular instant- messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp: indicating again social news’ relationship to everyday platform-mediated socialising. To further ground social news within the popular culture of the Internet, these kinds of humorous, witty and ironic vernaculars are also reminiscent of what Tim Highfield has called the “irreverent Internet”, where “engagement with issues, texts and events takes more jokey forms” (2016: 2029). Therefore, when BuzzFeed Oz News editor Simon Crerar claims – as quoted in the previous chapter – that a “kick-arse viral post” requires “an outstanding thumbnail and headline combination” (Carson

170 and Muller, 2017: 15), he is referring to the connective and thus sociable potential of both the playful vernaculars ubiquitous to platforms and the “jokey” sensibilities of platform cultures.

Not only is humour a dominant textual feature of social news, but humorous

Twitter reactions, in the form of embedded tweets, are a regular component – and even sometimes the main topic – of articles. For instance, an October 2017 Junkee article about the reactions on Twitter to five federal politicians being forced to resign from Parliament (because of dual citizenship issues), which also contained in abundance the textual elements described above (Langford, 27 October 2017).

Titled “All The Best Twitter Reactions To A Bunch Of Politicians Getting Booted

From Parliament”, the article presented numerous humorous tweets written in the snarky, pun, and GIF-heavy styles common on the platform. The article used

Australian colloquialisms – summing up Twitter reactions as “pretty… fucking stoked” – and deployed slang associated with Internet meme cultures, by declaring only to highlight the “spiciest” of roasts, “spicy” being a common descriptor of particularly humorous or poignant memes (Know Your Meme, 2017). The headline image was a Simpsons meme, drawn from an infamous episode of the long-running

US cartoon series wherein the Simpsons family visits Australia only to eventually be subjected to a literal booting after the troublemaker son, Bart, offends the locals.

In the image, Bart Simpson’s face is replaced with that of the agrarian conservative

MP Barnaby Joyce, and Homer’s – who is rushing over to defend his son from the boot – replaced with the head of then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

An earlier Pedestrian.tv article featured similar elements. Titled “Twitter Reacts

To Mike Baird’s Shock Resignation With Shade & Lockout Gags”, the article reported on the “shock” resignation of former New South Wales state Premier Mike

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Baird from politics (Bruce-Smith, 18 January 2017). Like the above Junkee article, the Pedestrian.tv report mostly consisted of embedded tweets “having a bloody great time with the gags”, as the report’s author put it. Gags, here, being an

Australian colloquialism for “jokes”. Many of the embedded tweets were humorous and witty tweets reacting to and commenting on Baird’s resignation, mostly from popular Twitter accounts and the verified (“blue tick”) accounts of

Australian journalists. The “shade” described in the article’s title refers to the popular Internet slang for (usually veiled) criticism. There are numerous other examples of these “Twitter reacts” articles – like a BuzzFeed article on Twitter responses to an announced remake of 1990s teen film Clueless (Blackmon, 26

October 2018), a Pedestian.tv article on tweets criticising popular reality television show The Bachelorette for its “transphobia” (Story, 10 October 2018), and Junkee article on “All The Most Hilarious Reactions” on Twitter to a trailer for a live- action remake of the 1990s animated Disney classic, The Lion King (Lention, 23

November 2018).

This practice of embedding tweets or using tweets as the main story of an article indicates how news outlets have partially adopted and negotiated with the forms of participatory, “citizen” journalism practices discussed in Chapter 3. These embedded tweets do recall and resemble earlier news practices such as the vox- pop, where reporters took to the streets to request comment from “ordinary” people, these people typically serving to colour news stories with a pseudo-democratic coating while simultaneously reinforcing a chosen news framing (Dekavalla,

2012). The frequent use of the word “people” by social news outlets, rather than a

“curated selection of people on Twitter”, is in this sense similar to the discursive strategies deployed by vox-pops. Yet there is still a stronger participatory element

172 in the practice of embedding tweets. This is evident simply by the ability for readers to click through to these tweets, and interact with the users who made them.

Nonetheless, and to return to issues around user-generated content and sharing brought up earlier in the chapter, the practice of embedding tweets in news articles produced by news outlets with paid staff is fundamentally distinct from the user- led possibilities that Web 2.0 was celebrated for heralding. In many ways, UGC – in the form of tweets – is re-embedded into formal news production, as a form of potentially lucrative, metrics-wise, content: ideally to be shared and thus re- distributed and consumed amongst users.

Nonetheless, that Twitter is a regular news story for social news outlets not only indicates the fluency and intimacy of these outlets and their writers with social media platforms and platform cultures, but also how Twitter – and the participatory cultures of other platforms – have emerged as, not necessarily opposed to news media, but at least competing spaces for what Couldry previously described as the

“mediated centre” (2003). This can be seen especially clearly in a Junkee article titled “The Herald Sun Published This Cartoon And People Think It’s Just A Little

Racist” (Koslowski, 11 August 2018) – and notice, here, the headline’s jokey-but- serious and ironic (“Just A Little”) sensibilities. The article was about how users on Twitter reacted to an overly racist cartoon in News Corp’s Melbourne-based daily newspaper, the Herald Sun. The cartoon, which was attacking the Victorian

Labor government’s decision to ban News Corp’s Sky News from playing in train stations after the cable channel interviewed a prominent neo-Nazi, depicted the

Victorian transport minister turning off a television in a self-righteous fashion while racist African caricatures punched and vandalised public property in the background. Three tweets were embedded in the article, all damning the Herald

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Sun’s decision to publish the cartoon. One of them was from a verified user, the other two with over 560 followers and over 4,500 followers, respectively.

Pedestrian.tv has published similar kinds of articles, such as a piece titled “‘60

Minutes’ Is Copping Heat For A Creepy Interview W/ NZ PM Jacinda Ardern” –

“W/” being a shorthand for “with”, again indicating social news’ gestures towards the vernaculars of platform-based communication (Tyeson, 26 February 2018).

The article reports on Twitter reactions to long-running current affairs television programme 60 Minutes’ interview with then-newly elected New Zealand Prime

Minister Jacinda Ardern. The interview was criticised for “being decently sexist at best, and intensely creepy at worst” – by focusing, most notably, on her private life and her appearance (her pregnancy, her marriage, and her “attractiveness”) rather than her leadership or her policies. In terms of tweets, in contrast to the above

Pedestrian.tv article on Mike Baird’s resignation, there was only one verified user embedded in this article: the 7 other embedded tweets were from un-verified users with varying amounts of followers (from just 43 to nearly 4,000).

This trend of social news outlets performing media criticism via Twitter reaction articles, and the connection that this shows between BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv and Twitter’s callout culture, will be discussed in the next chapter – but suffice to say here that this particular article shows Twitter’s nature as a critical and competing media space. At the same time, the Junkee and Pedestrian.tv articles indicate how social news outlets attempt to recapture media authority through articles such as these: that is, by embedding participatory practices into commercial news. “Twitter reactions” and other Twitter-focused articles are therefore not just sources of humorous content, a kind of “best of” list of humorous content from social media – although certainly, these are major functions. Rather, Twitter

174 reaction articles are also an emerging news article genre which demonstrates news outlets’ ongoing negotiation with participatory platforms the authority over

“society’s centre” (Couldry, 2003).

I now turn towards a connective quality that drives the sociability of social news, and which has been present in most of the examples above but not yet discussed so far: affect.

5.4 Creating connections through affect

Through their fluency with the vernaculars of platform-based user cultures, social news content performs and elicits a peculiar kind of affective connectivity. In discussing the dynamics of “affective publics”, Zizi Papacharissi argued that feeling is key to how publics on Twitter connect, communicate, and collaborate

(2015). Papacharissi described these networks as emergent “structures of feeling”: drawing, here, from Raymond Williams’ concept of a mood or lived social process which, although its constitutive elements are common enough to be recognisable by contemporary observers, yet lacks a definite form to be recognised as a mood or process during the period of its formation (1977). Williams drew attention to how these processes emerge and form through “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (1977: 132). For Williams, such emerging structures of feeling could be identified, for instance, in the mid-19th century novel: with writers like Charles Darwin and Emily Bronte each portraying poverty, exposure and isolation as elements of a wider social failure of the times. This shift in feeling about the contemporary condition of industrial Britain was in contrast to a dominant “early Victorian ideology” which located poverty and deprivation in the failures of individuals (1977: 134).

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Papacharissi, argued that hashtags, memes, and other visual artefacts could be viewed as such “constitutive elements” of an emergent networked and platform- mediated structure of feeling, in that these visual artefacts tend to serve as

“affective gestures” that “provide the basis of how individuals connect and tune into the events in the making” (2015: 62). In this sense – and, in particular, this is where the possibilities of social news as a progressive genre for journalism are evident – the affective qualities of these emergent phenomena, emerging from the intersections of platform and user practice, can be understood as performing a positive democratic function, in so far as their connective qualities “potentially sustain and mediate the feeling of democracy” amongst participants (Papacharissi,

2015: 32). Although Papacharissi discussed this structure primarily through an analysis of Twitter, many of these constitutive elements can also be seen on

Facebook – where memes and other visual artefacts perform a similar affective and sociable function, in conjunction with the platform’s connective logic. Facebook, as discussed in Chapter 4, has over the years increasingly encoded affect into the platform’s affordances, via affective visual gesture: in 2015 Facebook brought GIF keyboards to its popular Messenger app (Russel, 6 July 2015) to more easily enable visual communication in chat, and in early 2016 Facebook introduced a multitude of reaction buttons to posts (Teehan, 25 February 2016).

This emerging structure of feeling is similarly present in social news content, where these affective gestures appear in abundance. The use of such visual content, along with the irreverent and outwardly emotional responses like outrage or humour that regularly feature in articles and headlines, invites feeling and encourages others to share this feeling via the connective affordances of platforms. This is an important distinction from conventional news articles, which can and do elicit targeted

176 emotional responses, but remain mostly dispassionate in form. While explicitly emotive and playful headlines have been used by tabloid newspapers, perhaps most famously the England-based and News Corp-owned The Sun, to boost circulation

(McLachlan & Golding, 2000), article content in these newspapers still mostly lacked the kinds of overtly affective qualities that will be discussed in detail below.

Social news, in these ways, responds to Charlie Beckett & Mark Deuze’s call for an increased role of emotion in journalism, to take advantage of an “emotionally charged networked environment” so as to “inspir[e] connection” (2016). These affective elements are evident in a Pedestrian.tv article titled “The Best & Most

Savage Signs From Today’s Student Strike For Climate Action” (George-Allen, 30

November 2018). The article reported on a “student strike”, which protested the lack of policy on climate change from Australia’s politicians. The primary and high school protesters sought to draw attention to the fact that it was the younger generations that would have to suffer the consequences for the inaction from

Australia’s current political leadership. The Pedestrian.tv article explicitly expresses enthusiasm for the student protesters, who have “warmed the cockles of everyone else’s hearts”: “look at those little social activists go!” the author writes,

“you exercise your right to protest, you little bloody legends!” Feeling is upfront here – indeed, the kind of positive and connective feeling essential to a protest and broader social movements. There is a sense here that the article is part of that broader protest, pushing along and maintaining not only the anger – “[Prime

Minister] Scott Morrison”, the author warns, “we await your resignation” – but also the positivity that emerges from cautious optimism, the latter working as a driving force for action: “maybe there is hope for this cocked-up world of ours after all!”

The article, in these ways, rather than dispassionately reporting on the protest,

177 instead presents itself as part of the protest itself through the use of a collective

“we”, the latter which also implicitly includes the reader. Such affirmations of collective unity encourage a sharing of feeling – presumably through sharing this article – in order to maintain the action because, as the article writes, for Australia’s political leaders there “ain’t no way you’re coming back from all this”.

A Junkee article on the same topic had similar qualities. Titled “The School Strike

4 Climate Action Is Going Absolutely Off Because The Next Generation Rules”

(Feltscheer, 30 November 2018a), the article reports on the “absolute scenes going down right now” in Australia’s major cities, “all fuelled by a generation of kids rightfully shitting themselves about a future facing the worst of the increasingly dire climate situation”. As is evident from these two quotes, the article is abundant with expressive and affective language, used to highlight the gravity of the planet’s climate crisis, but also the hope that “these legends” are inspiring: “the next generation is coming and they’re pissed off. Go get ‘em champs”. The embedded tweets in this article and the Pedestrian.tv article discussed above – mostly consisting of pictures of students with colourful and witty protest signs, accompanied by tweet captions such as “I believe the children are our future” and

“this is awesome” – assist this affective work: encouraging readers to feel their way into the news events.

A BuzzFeed Oz article on the student climate strike also contained affective elements, albeit to a lesser degree than the Junkee and Pedestrian.tv articles. Titled

“Please Enjoy These Signs From Students Protesting Climate Change Inaction”

(Scott, 30 November 2018), the article reported on the strike in Sydney with an emphasis on the witty and profound signs and placards present at the protest. The headline’s directive to “please enjoy” the signs indicated that feeling was upfront

178 in this article – and the headline image, featuring school students holding a sign stating “KISS MY ‘ACTIVIST’ ASS”, demonstrated how humour mixed with pride (for both the resilience of the climate movement, and the courageous school students) was a significant driver of this feeling. The caption accompanying the headline – “The (striking) kids are alright and right”, a play on a song title from

1960s rock band The Who – reinforces this feeling of pride, along with a feeling of hope.

In these articles shareability manifests through affective elements that explicitly emphasise connection and togetherness. This is news content that encourages readers to share a feeling, most likely via the connective affordances of social media platforms.

5.5 Constitutive humour instead of “togetherness”

What all the above indicates is that, even when engaging with “hard news” topics like parliamentary politics and climate policy, social news is fun or at least feels good to share amongst peers. At the same time, the playful, emotive, and connective sociable practices which social news taps into and embodies reflect a certain user: young, and pop-culturally literate. The Simpsons reference in the

Barnaby Joyce citizenship scandal article discussed above is evident of this – and

The Simpsons references are not uncommon in the social news outlets under analysis, having appeared as thumbnail images for a number of Junkee articles on recent and significant Australian political scandals. These include an article on an infamous phone call between then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the then- newly-inaugurated US President Donald Trump (Faruqi, 2 February 2017), a report on the internal party turmoil within the governing Liberal-National Coalition

179 following the citizenship crisis of 2017 (Langford, 17 February 2018), and an article on the mood of the Australian public after the inconclusive results of the

2016 federal election (Faruqi, 4 July 2016). These Simpsons references are not just humorous, but also targeted at a particular demographic of young Australians who grew up with daily Simpsons reruns on television during the late 90s and throughout the 2000s – memories of which that have become increasingly nostalgic for this generation, as they move into their late 20s. Furthermore, these Simpsons references, such as the Barnaby Joyce “booting” meme discussed above, are also occasionally sourced from popular Simpsons-themed Facebook pages. These include the politically progressive The Simpsons against the Liberals (2018) page, which has over 100,000 followers and similarly taps into the same generational familiarity with and nostalgia for The Simpsons.

This kind of generational targeting by social news outlets is also evident in humour made at the expense of those from the older, “baby boomer” generation. These occur in Junkee articles lamenting the growing cost of higher education (Faruqi, 25

October 2017; Gillespie, 8 September 2017) – which complain about the free education enjoyed by “boomer” voters and politicians – and in other Junkee articles which mock the awkward fashion in which “boomers” try to market products to

“millennials” (Langford, 1 September 2017) and ironically commiserate about the prevalence of “angry boomers” on Australia television (Watson, 22 August 2016).

Jokes about “angry boomers” are also frequent in Pedestrian.tv articles, such as one reporting on the spectacle of dozens of disgruntled “baby boomers” ranting in the comment sections of a Facebook page (Hennessy, 12 March 2017). Other boomer-themed Pedestian.tv reports include an article about “millennials” (a term usually describing those born in the mid-80s to mid-90s) hijacking Twitter hashtags

180 to get back at “boomers” for “destroying [the] world” (Bruce-Smith, 5 September

2016), the remark a reference to how young people have been born into a world suffering the effects of decades of climate inaction. Another Pedestrian.tv on this generational theme reports on a “millennial” designer using the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to fund the creation of ironic “Make Smashed Avocado

Affordable Again” hats (Bruce-Smith, 18 October 2016). The reference, here, being a middle-aged columnist in the News Corp-owned The Australian who surmised that housing was only unaffordable to young people due to the latter’s excessive spending on brunch items. While BuzzFeed occasionally makes playful jokes about “baby boomers” – as in listicles like “Just 22 Baby Boomers Who Are

Terrible At Texting” (Ziegler, 13 August 2018) – the outlet tends to lack the same kind of accusatory generational humour that Junkee and Pedestrian.tv often possess.

Due to these characterises the sociability of these social news outlets must be qualified by referring back to Witney Phillips & Ryan. M. Milner’s concept of

“constitutive humour” (2017: 96), introduced in the previous chapter. Precisely because the humour of these social news outlets is constitutive, in the sense of bringing people together through laughter, the implied “us” of this humour also targets and frequently excludes an equally implicit “them”. Humour, in this constitutive sense, has a generative function: it helps builds and sustain “social worlds, across degrees of mediation” (Phillips & Milner, 2017: 96). It is also magnetic: attracting attention “within the implicit groups” as well as “externally to the group” (Phillips & Milner, 2017: 99), in the form of additional similarly minded participants or, as in the case with the trolling examples in the previous chapter, those targeted by this humour. This reduces the connective potential of these outlets

181 outside of their targeted demographics, and raises legitimate concerns about fragmented audiences on platforms. These issues will be greater depth in the

Conclusion Chapter.

All the above vernacular, affective, and constitutive textual elements were on display in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Below, I return to the case study to elaborate on the arguments presented in this chapter, and to also examine more closely the ways in which BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv are deeply in tune with pop-cultural moments and meme cycles, which work to enhance their shareability and, in the case of the postal survey, their advocacy and activism.

5.6 Sociability in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey

In the previous chapter, I examined how social news outlets – in particular, Junkee and Pedestrian.tv – attempted to boost the enrolments of young people in the 2017 postal survey on same-sex marriage. I conceived this kind of activism as a form of civic engagement, in terms of explicitly encouraging young people to take political action, which comprised a broader social news logic of engagement. This activism was seen to be necessary by the outlets and other activists, I noted, due to the peculiar circumstances of the survey: that young people were disadvantaged not only because they had lower enrolment rates in comparison to other groups, but also because they were more likely to have address details that needed updating

(the perception being that young people move more regularly than older demographics). Thus, ensuring young people “enrol and update” – and also familiarise themselves with the postal system – was essential to the “Yes” vote winning.

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In this respect, there were many creative ways that the social news outlets attempted to boost enrolment and update rates. A short Junkee video posted to

Facebook describes “all the things you can do in the time to takes to

#EnrolAndUpdate” (23 August 2017): “all the things” being simple activities – humourously acted out by Junkee staff – such as eating an apple, making tea, watching a Bachelor recap (this being a reference to Junkee’s regular commentary videos on the popular reality dating television show), playing table tennis or

“watching a Smash Mouth music video”. The latter refers to a meme centred around the pop-group Smash Mouth, popular in the early 2000s and perhaps most famous for their song “All Star”. “All Star” appeared in the successful 2001 animated fantasy film Shrek, itself also now a recurring meme. In the Junkee video, the camera zooms in on a laptop playing the film clip to “All Star” – in the clip, lead singer Steve Harwell sports iconic elements of early-2000s fashion: spiked hair, small sunglasses, goatee, skate shoes – while a Junkee staff member nods aggressively to the song, in an ironic display of affection. Such ironic enjoyment for Smash Mouth would have likely resonated with Junkee’s young audience at the time. The video ends by stating “It’s not hard… update your AEC details before

Aug 24”.

Other social news Facebook posts advocating enrolment also referenced pop- culture and utilised trending memes. For example, a post from Junkee’s teen outlet,

Punkee, featured an image of Arya, a character from the hugely popular fantasy television series, Game of Thrones (14 August 2017). The image is divided into two panels, both taken from a scene in a then-recently-aired episode of the show’s

7th season. In the top panel, the Arya character has unrolled a scroll, staring intently at it with a look of disbelief. She is crouching, hiding behind a bed in a dark room:

183 the implication here being that she does wish to be seen (in the actual episode the character was sneaking into the bedroom of an antagonist). In the second, bottom, panel, the scroll is shown: although here, it has been edited to read “enrol to vote

& update your AEC details before August 24”, written humorously and incongruously, due to the gritty fantasy setting of the series, in what looks to be comic sans font – a font that is also the subject of a meme (Know Your Meme,

2018c). The post is captioned with the URL for the Australian Electoral

Commission’s (AEC) enrolment webpage.

In addition, a post from the BuzzFeed Oz Politics Facebook page about the survey also referenced pop-culture and meme culture, in similarly complex and creative ways (19 August 2017). The post featured a screenshot of a tweet from prominent former Australian cricketer Shane Warne, who expressed support for

“#marriageequality” by retweeting a tweet from Australian actress Margot Robbie, who similarly declared for the “Yes” side. Robbie’s tweet also contained a link to the AEC enrolment webpage. The BuzzFeed Oz Politics Facebook post was captioned with “Call off the survey, we’ve got the answer we need” – the joke here being an ironic appreciation for Warne, himself a “national treasure” (as one of the comments below the post put it) famous for embodying in abundance many discernible traits of “blokey” White Australian masculinity: such as a love of meat pies, beer, cigarettes, sport, and an exaggerated heterosexuality. Adding to the complex layers of humour at work here was an implied joke about Warne’s infamous womanising: that Warne was retweeting and agreeing “100% !!!!” with

Robbie – who is young, blonde, and conventionally attractive – would not have been lost on BuzzFeed’s intended audience.

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In these ways, social news outlets not only once again demonstrated their literacy with meme cultures, but also attempted to tap into the connective potential of such cultures to boost enrolment rates. Particularly notable here was how, perhaps with the exception of the Warne post, how specifically current these memes were: both

Smash Mouth and Game of Thrones memes were popular in 2017, although the

Arya meme in the Punkee post was especially popular during the weeks in which that post was made. In these ways, the outlets were tapping into current meme cycles and partaking in the sociable replicability inherent to memes as a cultural and textual form (Shifman. 2016). By “meme cycles” I refer to the ways in which popular memes and meme formats tend to, like news cycles, dominate particular moments in time. Clearly, the outlets were hoping to encourage further meme replication and sharing, and thus hopefully boost enrolment rates, whether by users tagging Facebook friends in the comment sections of the Facebook posts or through users copying-and-pasting the memes created by the outlets and sending them, via chat applications like Messenger, to their peers. The potential “social network effects” (Saxton & Wang, 2014) of such peer-to-peer user sharing practices attest to the strong imbued sociability of these kinds of activist messaging. Gregory D.

Saxton & Lili Wang described “social network effects” as the result of peculiar forms of advocacy strategies designed for social media, whereby “social pressures” and more “casual” forms of political participation drove the success of the online campaigns they studied (2014: 851).

Furthermore, the end of postal survey also saw especially prominent examples of the kind of affective, connective, and constitutive elements discussed earlier in this chapter. An article by Pedestrian.tv reporting on the survey results demonstrates the notable role of affect in inspiring connective togetherness in social news

185 reporting on the “Yes” victory (Feltscheer, 7 November 2017). Titled “Final ABS

Update Shows Whopping Number of You Legends Voted in SSM Survey”, the article not only reports on the high 78.5% turnout in the controversial postal survey, but also explicitly expresses enthusiasm for this high turnout. Its personal address

– “you legends” – also intends to make the reader feel good about this result, the assumption being that they are active participants in this victory. This is distinct from the activity of the legacy outlets, as the ABC, The Age, and The Daily

Telegraph tended to just report, as in tell, the reader of a result that happened.

Declaring the turnout a “bit of a big deal tbh [“to be honest”]” this feel-good sense is further reinforced when the writer expresses gratitude to Australia for its “fucken

GOOD WORK” and expresses that he “LOVE[s] YOU V MUCH WITH ALL OF

MY GAY HEART.” Australia, here, is hailed as a feeling community brought together by a victory for love and social justice. GIFs are deployed affectively as well: A humorous GIF of Marilyn Monroe waving goodbye with the caption “Bye

Bitch!” both celebrates the end of a process about which there was so much ambivalence and ends the article with a potent dose of camp affect.

Numerous other social news articles on the “Yes” vote victory mobilised such affective elements. For instance, a Pedestrian.tv article which announced the victory for the “Yes” side beared the celebratory headline “WE BLOODY DID IT:

Australia Says ‘YES’ To Marriage Equality” (Hennessy, 15 November 2017). The headline not only evoked feelings of national togetherness (as indicated by the capitalised “WE”) but also connoted the euphoria of the moment through a breakdown in polite speech: the “BLOODY” here jutting into the headline, almost as if the writer cannot conceal their feeling, while the word at the same time serves as a reference back to that national togetherness, as “bloody” holds a traditional

186 place within Australian slang. The article contained a GIF of a small boy giving a thumbs up, told the reader that “this is your victory”, and ended with a touching and poignant “Fuck, this is beautiful”. Similar discursive and affective elements were evident in a Junkee article titled “Yes! Yes! Yes! Australia Has Delivered Its

Verdict On Marriage Equality” – the “Yes”s in the headline here both announcing the result of the survey and connoting the celebratory feeling that this result has caused (Faruqi, 15 November 2017). Notably, this article was also evidence of how these affective elements could be combined with the explainer qualities discussed in the previous chapter, as the article not only announces the result but also presents a detailed reflection on the survey, explaining to the reader how “we [got] here”, as well as providing some commentary on how the survey “backfired” on conservative politicians who had hoped that a postal process would discourage young people from participating – instead, “record numbers of young people enrol[ed] to vote”. The article ends by explaining the “next steps” towards legalising marriage equality.

Typical of its house style, one of the ways that BuzzFeed Oz covered the result was through a listicle headline: “Australians Reacting To The Same-Sex Marriage

‘Yes’ Vote Might Make You Cry” (Guillaume, 15 November 2017). The listicle was also alternatively captioned in a Twitter post from the official BuzzFeed Oz account as “39 Heartwarming Photos That Show How Australians Reacted To The

‘Yes’ Vote” (BuzzFeedOz Politics, 14 November 2017). The listicle delivers on these explicit assurances of affect with a selection of joyous imagery, comprising mostly of people in tearful embrace or fist-pumping in celebration.

Articles from the major legacy news outlets the ABC and The Age also displayed elements of affective togetherness in their coverage of the “Yes” victory – The

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Age’s lead article was simply titled “YES” and spoke in celebratory language of

“historical social change” and a “thumping victory for supporters of change”

(Massola & Koziol, 16 November 2017). ABC articles on the “Yes” vote victory also contained celebratory connotations, although operating somewhat vicariously via quotes from “Yes” campaigners – as in an article titled: “SA votes Yes for same-sex marriage in ‘victory for love’, Premier Jay Weatherill says” (ABC News,

15 November 2017). There appeared a greater concern, here, for the appearance of neutrality. The News Corp-owned The Daily Telegraph, was more muted, and tended to focus on the fallout of the survey: both for conservative members of

Parliament who advocated for the “No” side and for the Australian Labor Party, whose federal seats in Western Sydney had significant rates of “No” votes. Even for the ABC and The Age, however, outside of opinion pieces, such celebratory feeling was connoted or implied rather than – as seen in the social news reports on the same news story – explicitly expressed. Furthermore, The Age article told the reader of the “historic social change”, rather than explicitly assumed the reader’s involvement in such change – “you legends”, “WE BLOODY DID IT”, and so on

– as seen in Pedestrian.tv and Junkee articles. The implication being in The Age article that the “Yes” and “No” side were two opposing forces to be reported on, which the assumed “objective” reader had to be informed about.

In the next chapter I attend closely to these kinds of personal and personalised elements in social news, as I elaborate on a social news logic of personalisation.

5.7 Conclusion

In a similar fashion to “audience engagement”, the perceived need to be

“shareable” has become a prominent concern for news outlets and the scholars

188 studying them. Again, as with audience engagement, there is considerable disagreement amongst outlets and scholars about what “shareability” entails and how it can be achieved. BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv’s emphasis on creating content suitable for “sharing” is therefore not entirely unusual. Instead, it is both the innovative content that these outlets are creating, and the ways in which such content indicate how news is transforming in relation to the connective and affective cultures on social media platforms where sharing proliferates, that is striking. In contrast to previous scholarly claims, these social news outlets demonstrate that “shareability” is not just a quality of individual news stories and topics. Instead, when BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv speak of and promote their “shareable” qualities, they are talking about broader stylistics.

Through my close analysis of numerous articles, videos, Facebook and Twitter posts, along with interviews, I have argued that these social news outlets respond to this need to be “shareable” by becoming sociable. That is, content from

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv is designed to be fun and pleasurable to share with others by being conversational, through embodying “platform vernaculars” (Gibbs et al, 2014), and through attuning to the “affective publics” of platforms (Papacharissi, 2015). Through operating and performing in these ways, social news outlets become suitable for the kinds of everyday socialising and interpersonal socialising that are major functions of social media platforms. In these ways, I move beyond conceptions of shareability as being qualities of particular news stories: instead, shareability is a sociable quality that emerges from the

“attributes of a media text” (Jenkins et al, 2013: 4). Thinking about shareability by emphasising sociability places less emphasis on the stories that are being told and the issues that are being reported on, and more so on how they are being told and

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reported. From this shift in emphasis, scholars and practitioners will hopefully

become more aware of the creative and innovative ways in which outlets can reach

and engage audiences.

At the same time, such social news content – at least as exemplified by BuzzFeed

Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv – also has limits to its reach. These social news

outlets, I noted, embody a humour which frequently targets political and

generational others, and thus often excludes a “them” just as much as it attempts to

constitute an “us” – and this exclusion is typically central to the magnetic potential

of these outlets. This issue does raise legitimate concerns regarding the

fragmentation of news publics on social media platforms, and related issues around

news polarisation. In the next chapter, which elaborates on the social news logic of

personalisation, I discuss this issue of targeted news audiences in more detail, along

with other personal and explicitly positioned elements of the social news content.

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Chapter 6: Personalisation

6.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I examined how social news outlets attempted to maximise attention and interaction metrics through sociability – that is, by being pleasurable and fun to share within and across social media platforms. Key manifestations of this social news logic of sociability were a constitutive humour and informal and conversational styles that frequently utilised personal and collective pronouns – rather than a dispassionate and “objective” voice, the latter typical of legacy news outlets and core to what Mark Deuze has described as journalism’s “professional ideology” (2005). In this chapter I elaborate on these and other elements found in

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, developing my conception of a social news logic of personalisation.

In elaborating on this social news logic of personalisation, I first turn to how micro- targeting is an explicit business strategy on social media platforms. Micro-targeting is economically viable on Facebook and Twitter, as the two platforms allow outlets to promote themselves to highly specific audiences. Because of this, I argue, social news’ positionality can succeed in personalised – both in the sense of being user- curated but also algorithmically-reinforced – social media spaces. However,

“personalisation” is not just a business strategy, but also refers to attributes of social news texts. In this regard, I then discuss how BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv have a tendency to appeal to and foreground the personal: on the one hand through the use of personal pronouns within its news-writing and, on the other, through the explicit presence and positioning of social news writers within the stories they are telling and the issues that they are reporting on. Due to this,

191 social news is frequently not “objective”, and tends to not only eschew “balance” but overtly criticise the need to be balanced. Yet these qualities do not mean social news is necessarily biased: instead, social news features a transparent positionality.

As evident from their activism during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, this positionality in the case of BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv has a tendency to explicitly demonstrate consistent support for and identification with politically progressive causes. Here I draw a link back to and elaborate further on the discussion of constitutive humour in the previous chapters, and the relationship between social news content and cultural-political practices on social media. I then return to the case of the 2017 postal survey, looking at how the foregrounding of

(typically LGBTIQ) identity in social news content, both by staff writers and contributors, was another distinguishing characteristic of social news coverage of the survey – in comparison to the “objective” reporting and “opinion” writing found in the ABC, The Age, and The Daily Telegraph.

6.2 Personalisation as a business model

BuzzFeed Oz News, and Junkee and Pedestrian.tv in particular, have been fairly open about their desire to reach a specific group: young progressives. In his interview with Andrea Carson & Denis Muller (2017), Junkee co-founder Tim

Duggan has discussed demographic targeting at length. Duggan stated that the idea for Junkee emerged from a gap that they discovered from a study they commissioned on the Australian youth media market, a study which is ongoing and has been, as Carson & Muller note, “one of the largest longitudinal studies of

Australian youth” (2017: 17). According to Duggan, this market research indicated that his company should target youth (“defined as 35 and under”) and focus on, as

Carson & Muller phrase it, “identifying trends about their fears and most salient

192 issues” (2017: 17). From this information, Duggen and what would become Junkee created media “products” for the Internet. As Duggan tells it, around 2013 “most young Australians” were becoming “really disillusioned by politics”, particularly the “inertia” displayed by the country’s political leaders. After the conservative

Tony Abbott became Prime Minister in that year’s election, Junkee “saw that people needed somewhere to rebel against what was happening”. Abbott’s election

“was our gift”, Duggan claims – and after that election, Junkee “became the voice of young people disillusioned by politics” (Carson & Muller, 2017: 17). Duggan, in a later interview with journalist Eleanor Dickinson, restates this self-image of

Junkee as a progressive “voice”: again telling a story of how he and his co-founders

“harnessed” the anger that “most young Australians” had with Tony Abbott, and using this anger “turned the site into this beast we renamed Junkee Media”. “We knew it was the future”, he claims (8 December 2018). In these ways, it appears that progressive politics functions as a form of branding for Junkee.

Both BuzzFeed Oz News and Pedestrian.tv also have distanced themselves from expectations that they should write with broad audiences in mind. In the case of

BuzzFeed Oz News, editor Simon Crerar says “there’s no expectation we’ll cover everything”, and their articles tend to follow what “will catch fire” on social media

(Carson & Muller, 2017: 20). Pedestrian.tv, according to its “About” webpage, began because founders Chris Wirashina and Oscar Martin “wanted to change the publishing game by creating a platform that would resonate with young Australians in an entirely new way” (Pedestrian.tv, 2018). This proclamation from

Pedestrian.tv is promotional discourse, but it is consistent with how, in contrast to larger legacy news outlets, social news does not attempt to have a wide coverage

193 of stories of the day, seeking a broad audience: rather, “news content is niche with the outlet’s primary audience front of mind” (Carson & Muller, 2017: 17).

These young audiences, moreover, are on social media – particularly, Facebook.

As discussed in Chapter 4, social news outlets primarily seek their audience, and the lucrative attention and interaction metrics that such an audience hopefully will provide, on Facebook. While niche media has existed long before social media – as the Chapter 2 discussion on zines and the 1980s queer press detailed – there is nonetheless a connection here between Junkee, BuzzFeed Oz, and Pedestrian.tv’s narrow forms of audience targeting and the centrality of social media to such audience targeting, which form the foundation of their business models. The data approach that Duggan emphasises as a founding component of Junkee, and a significant contributor to the outlet’s ongoing success, also appears to correlate with this focus on social media: particularly as the latter provides outlets with the ability to specifically target a narrowly defined and datafied audience. In this sense,

I return here to what Jose van Dijck & Thomas Poell called a social media logic of

“datafication”: the tendency for social media to render into data aspects of the human experience which had not been quantified before, and to mould this data for particular commercial purposes (2013). Data, here, is created to be commodified – that is, designed to capture information useful to clients – and sold to advertising partners or news outlets largely dependent on platforms for their audiences. Van

Dijck & Poell described that, in this way, platforms act both as social networks and as “data mills” (2013).

Certainly, as sponsored Facebook posts from social news outlets indicate, this use of commodified data is a major way that these outlets reach their audiences.

Sponsored posts are posts that appear in Facebook newsfeeds, paid for by clients

194 and algorithmically targeted at specific users. This targeting is based on Facebook data categories. The BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv sponsored posts that have appeared in my newsfeed help reveal the relationship between this kind of data-based audience-targeting and social news business models. As an example, when inquiring about why I had received a sponsored post from BuzzFeed

Australia, Facebook informed me that I was “seeing this ad… because BuzzFeed

Australia wants to reach people based on their activity on the Facebook family of apps and services”. Such “activity” included “sharing links to their website, interacting with their content… or directly interacting (such as messaging) with them”. Other reasons why “you’re seeing this ad”, Facebook stated, included that

“BuzzFeed Australia wants to reach people aged 25 to 35 who live or have recently been in Australia”. Facebook goes on to tell me that such information is “based on your Facebook profile ad and where you’re connected to the Internet”.

Undoubtedly, there were other reasons, based on my social media data, why I was seeing this sponsored post. Nonetheless, the post demonstrated how BuzzFeed was able to pay Facebook to promote themselves to me, and users like me – that is, 25-

35 year olds who have a connection to Australia. Junkee sponsored Facebook posts

I have received are similar, with the platform claiming that I am seeing these posts from the outlet because Junkee “wants to reach people 18 and older who live or were recently in Australia”. Such promotion would have to be crucial if, as Duggan claimed in the case for Junkee, this young audience spent most of its time on

Facebook and other social media platforms.

The data-based social news business model can also be understood the other way round, in terms of users seeking out Facebook pages – which include those operated by social news outlets – that fit their “profile”. In these ways, social news business

195 models operate in relation to how platforms encourage users and prospective users to “follow their interests” (Burgess, 2015). Jean Burgess argued that in the late

2000s and early 2010s, a new “platform paradigm” emerged – one which displaced earlier sites built on “the convergence of user-created content with social networks” with platforms that offered “bespoke models of publishing and distribution of such content” (2015: 282). Here, we return to the earlier discussion about the transition from UGC participatory cultures to platforms based around “sharing”. Burgess describes this “platform paradigm” as both “a way of organising our thinking about the social media landscape as much as it is a way of organising the burgeoning business of connecting users with their creative content and each other [emphasis in original]”. In this sense, when platforms invite users to “follow their interests” there is an underlying commercial logic at play. By encouraging users to explicitly follow their personal “interests”, and by privileging the personal “profile” – the latter being the centre of all interaction – social media platforms create the conditions in which niche outlets with specific demographics like BuzzFeed Oz

News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv can thrive.

This double operation – of both promoting outlets to users based off the latter’s profile data, and encouraging users to “follow their interests” which then work to develop this data profiling, in a continuous reinforcing loop – is best viewed as a kind of personalisation. Stephanie Ricker Schulte has argued that personalisation refers to the “predictive” capacities of digital and computer technologies (2016).

Rather than “customisation”, which connotes the user choosing from an array of different options, personalisation, for Schulte, “suggests content can be predetermined, often by algorithms in service of corporations”. Thus,

“customisation is by me” while “personalisation is for me”. Social news, then,

196 operates through such a logic of “personalisation”: by catering for but also anticipating and, to an extent, reinforcing, a personalised social media experience.

Textual elements of social news can also be understood within this personalising logic. For instance, positionality: by explicitly positioning themselves within stories and in against other political perspectives, social news outlets are also positioning themselves within a social media ecology, and positioning themselves towards certain user “interests” and “profiles”.

The use of personal pronouns and the grounding of personal identity can, too, be understood in relation this personalising logic: in so far as personalised social media spaces are more conducive to the informal, the conversational, and the personable, along with various forms of identity construction. Carson & Muller note this when distinguishing the “informal conversational language of social media” that BuzzFeed Oz uses in comparison to the “traditional news constraints of detachment and authoritativeness” that characterises legacy media (2017: 14).

Crerar has claimed that BuzzFeed Oz’s “core offering is shareable content that taps into [their] audiences’ sense of identity” (Demilta, 23 March, 2014), and that they are “doing the news” but are also “thinking about how [they] can tell the story to

[their] audience” (Christensen, 10 September 2015). In a similar vein, in his interview with Dickinson, Junkee co-founder Duggan claims that to be successful, outlets need to perform such an ongoing personalisation: to speak to audiences “in their language”, and “speak with them every day and continually re-adjust [their] assumption” about that audience (8 December, 2018). Pedestrian.tv co-founder

Chris Wirsasinha has spoken about his outlet’s business strategy in a comparable fashion, stating in an interview with journalist Yolanda Redrup that Pedestrian.tv

“always wanted to be a mirror for [their] audience to see their world reflected back

197 and translated in some way for them” (2 September 2018). The centrality of identity on social media has been previously discussed by Zizi Papacharissi, who argued that what she then called “social network sites” derived their “appeal” from

“providing a stage for self-presentation”, which allowed for individual and collective identities to be “simultaneously presented and promoted” (2013: 207).

Social news outlets, at least as they depict themselves in the interviews above, appear to be tapping into, catering to, and reflecting this kind of identity construction.

However, as will be discussed at length below, positionality and personable stylistics cannot be wholly reduced to a commercial logic, even if these textual characteristics work in tandem with such a logic. Rather, they can also present opportunities for critical journalism.

6.3 The personable and the personal in social news-writing

Throughout the previous chapters, I have noted how BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv have all deployed a style that appears to speak and talk with their readers and their viewers. I previously discussed this style as informal and conversational – and thus engaging and sociable. I argued that this style was engaging because it guided readers through the news and explained important issues and news events, presenting a break from dominant “informed citizen” models of journalism, which tend to simply state “facts” and thus place the onus on the reader to inform themselves. Moreover, it was sociable in the sense that it tended to embody vernaculars prevalent on social media platforms, thereby demonstrating social news’ suitability for the kinds of everyday connective and sharing practices on those platforms. Yet there are also other elements present –

198 albeit to varying degrees at different times – in social news content, even if they could broadly be described as informal and conversational. These elements are both personal and personable, such as that pertaining to an amicable conversation between individual people.

A number of social news articles demonstrate this point, like a Pedestrian.tv article on a then-recent decision by the micro-blogging platform Tumblr to ban

“pornographic” material titled “Tumblr Has 100% Banned Porn, Meaning There Is

No Longer Any Point To Tumblr” (Hennessy, 4 December 2018). The article is written as if it is the personal perspective of an embodied individual: “Look,” the article begins, not unlike the preface to the statement of an opinion, “I don’t consider myself some kind of business genius.” The writer then goes on to concede:

“I would struggle to successfully own and operate a lemonade stand, and I make zero excuses for that”. And then, “that being said” – again following the recognisable structure of the confession of a personal take on an issue – “I think it’s [a] very poor business decision for Tumblr to ban porn, which it just did”. This is followed by personal reasoning, mixed with the irreverent and crude humour typical of Pedestrian.tv: “Nobody uses Tumblr except horny freaks now”. The article then personally addresses Tumblr: “You’re alienating your key demographic”. Following this, there is an explanation of the controversial decision to ban pornographic material from the platform, describing the ban as a decision resulting from the new management at Tumblr, and sparked by the Tumblr app being removed from Apple’s App Store over a “child pornography incident”.

Therefore, the article still presents and explains the news, albeit styled as a personal delivery of, complete with personal a take on, that news. The article concludes with a personal musing on the consequences of the ban: “It will be interesting to see

199 who is left on Tumblr… if the community kicks up a stink about the ban”. And then, the humorous punchline, complete with a reference to an Internet subculture:

“Probably like ten guys who love vaporwave GIFs” – “vaporwave” being a musical genre and aesthetic sensibility that is grounded in a nostalgia for analogue synthesisers and 1980s corporate excess (Beauchamp, 18 August 2016).

Another article from Pedestrian.tv beared similar qualities. Titled “‘Evangelion’ Is

Hitting Oz Netflix Next Year In A Huge Boon For Huge Nerds” (McLeay, 27

November 2018), the article reports on the recent announcement that popular 1990s

Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion¸ would be coming to the

Australian version of the streaming platform Netflix. The article begins in a similar fashion to the one above: “Look,” the author writes “if you’re the type of person that’s excited about the fact that Evangelion is coming to Netflix, there’s a fair chance that you already have the box set kicking around somewhere in the house”.

Once again, it is as if the writer is speaking with an embodied “person”, a “you” that is not just a universal “citizen” (as in the “informed citizen” model of journalism) but rather a distinct individual with their own tastes and habits. “But”, the article continues in that same conversational style, infused with personal perspective: “let’s be real: who can be fucked digging around in a cupboard and fucking with discs when you can just press a button. No one, that’s who.” This preamble is followed by news that Netflix has announced that Neon Genesis along with other popular anime were “heading to the platform”.

A light-hearted Junkee article also shared the qualities described above. Titled

“Science Says Dump Him And Get A Dog”, the article reports on a recent study which purportedly demonstrated the benefits of sleeping with dogs, compared to human companions (Feltscheer, 30 November 2018b). Like the articles discussed

200 above, the Junkee report begins with a preamble, written from a personal perspective: “I’m a man who dates men”, the author writes, “so allow me to be the first to state that men suck! We’re the worst in many many aspects of existence, but bed sharing has to be up there on the list”, a list which also includes “ruining the world in general”. This personal admission is then followed with some humorous observations about sleeping with men: “[as] anyone who’s been the little spoon to a man-shaped big spoon knows”, the author here reaching out for confirmation of his personal experience, “the hellish combination of beard stubble scratching your neck, ear shattering snoring… often lead to a garbage night’s sleep.” This is followed by a description of the study’s findings, which is summarised by the author as “dogs rule and men drool”. The article ends with humorous passing reference to cats (who scored lower than dogs, in terms of comfort and security, in the study), jokingly describing them as “fluffy hell beasts” and “lazy pieces of shit”. This kind of jokey and ironic framing was also characteristic of the article’s general reporting on the study: the article ends with

“Thank you science! We now have proof that the dogs are better than men and both are better than cats. Sorry everyone, its fact”. In this way, the article seems to be parodying news reporting of novel “scientific” studies, overtly making reference to the perception that such studies are sensationalised by news outlets.

Thus, as these examples demonstrate, there is a tendency to foreground the personal within social news reporting. Such personable elements as examined above are not separate from social news’ sociability: on the contrary, they are bound up with and enhance it. Nonetheless, there is a distinct social news logic at work here. This is even more evident in political reporting, where the personal plays a distinct role in telling a story and explaining its significance and meaningfulness. In a Junkee

201 article announcing the creation of an Asian-led superhero film in the massively popular Marvel franchise, the author emphasises the personal significance of such a film. Titled “Marvel Is Making An Asian-Led Superhero Movie And I’m Crying”

(Yeo, 4 December 2018), the writer tells the reader that “I have waited my whole life for this” – after announcing that Marvel is also considering “Asian and Asian-

American directors”, she states: “I have already astral-projected to the future and bought my ticket.” After providing further details on the new film on superhero

Shang-Chi, the author writes that “bringing on Asian creators will hopefully go a long way to tackling Marvel’s issues with Asian representation”: “I want my badarse Asian superheroes” as “it’s well past time they got here”. In these ways the personal is weaved into news reporting: the significance of the story is relayed personally in the way that provides further understanding for the reader as to why such a story is newsworthy. At the same time, this article functioned largely as a report on the film announcement. It was not an “opinion” piece that accompanied another, “objective” report on the announcement.

Other Junkee articles exemplified similar qualities. A piece titled “Let’s Talk

About Deadnaming, Misgendering, And How To Not Do It” reported on an incident in September 2018 when whistle-blower, and prominent transwoman,

Chelsea Manning was “deadnamed” – called by the name she was previously known before her transition – by an Australian journalist at a panel event

(Langford, 4 September 2018). The article, which functions both as a report and an explainer, goes on to discuss the problem with deadnaming, and why it is such a

“big deal”. In doing so, the writer brings in their own experiences: describing how being deadnamed can make you “feel out of place and really ruin your day”: “take it from someone who received upwards of five emails calling them the wrong name

202 in just the time it has taken to write this article”. “It’s exhausting, and shitty”, the author writes, “and slowly chips away at any good mood you might have started off with.” Another Junkee article, reporting on comments made by the federal conservative MP Barnaby Joyce about housing affordability, also contained elements of the personal but blended with the constitutive “us” sense discussed in the previous chapters. Titled “Barnaby Joyce Told Young People To Move To

Armidale For The Cheap Rent While Living Rent Free”, the author criticises

Joyce’s dismissal of issues to do with rising rents and property prices – controversially, Joyce was also purportedly living rent free in a friend’s large property at the time (Faruqi, 12 February 2018). Faruqi, after providing a report on

Joyce’s comments, Joyce’s own housing situation, and the state of housing affordability in Australia, goes on to write: “He wasn’t just lecturing us, he was spitting in our face” – “us” being “struggling” young people. There is thus a rhetorical appeal, here, to a constitutive “us” – but Joyce’s comments are also taken personally: “it’s one of the grossest displays of hypocrisy so far”, Faruqi states, writing from the position of a young person.

In the section below on the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, I examine in detail the various ways that the personal – and particularly, LGBTIQ identity – was foregrounded in social news’ outlets coverage of the survey, especially in articles from Pedestrian.tv. First, though, I attend to a specific issue that has underlined the articles examined above, and has characterised the content and activity from social news documented throughout this thesis: that being BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and

Pedestrian.tv’s departure from “objectivity”. Below, I discuss social news’ non-

“objective” positionality, and argue that it should be understood as an original

203 intervention into the impasse around “objectivity” as a measure of trustworthiness and quality in news reporting.

6.4 Positionality and challenging “objectivity”

For decades, scholars have engaged in an ongoing demystification of the concept of journalistic “objectivity”. Gaye Tuchman notably conceived objectivity as a

“strategic ritual” that protected journalists from the “risks of their trade”: in her study of various US journalists, Tuchman found that by presenting their work as

“objective” these journalists attempted to “mitigate” occupational hazards, such as libel suits from those affected by their reporting (1972). Tuchman argued that textual elements, such as the presence of various quoted individuals within news articles, worked to create the appearance of a detached objectivity. News, in this account, follows the “informed citizen” model of journalism: a presentation of

“facts”, the journalist’s daily task being the “processing [of] information called news” (1972: 662). In a similar vein, Michael Schudson located the construction of journalistic objectivity in the context of the commercial competition of the 19th

US press industry: in these crowded markets, “objectivity” became a marker of accurate and reliable news product and, by extension, quality journalism (1978).

The idea that the news can be a distanced, detached, and neutral source of factual information had also been challenged by other 20th century scholars. Stuart Hall,

Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, & Brian Roberts, in their extensive study on the mugging “moral panic” in 1970s England, argued that news media is crucial to the “reproduction of dominant ideologies” (1978: 60). Here, “objectivity” was argued to be a signifying system which masked, sometimes unconscious, ideological commitments. Hall et al emphasised, news media role’s in reproducing dominant ideologies was not the result of a “conspiracy” but rather a “product of a

204 set of structural imperatives [their emphasis]”: Hall et al pointed to the reliance of news media on powerful sources for their daily news production, which resulted in a “structural subordination” of the news to powerful politicians, police sources, business people, and so on (1978: 59). They also drew attention to the importance of news framing, as a framework that sets and limits interpretations of something deemed newsworthy, even if such news material otherwise beared conventional markers of objectivity (1978: 58). Similar arguments regarding the role of news media in reproducing dominant ideologies were later made by Edward S. Herman

& Noam Chomsky: here, news media work to “manufacture consent”, as a result of their close relationship with the corporations that financed them (1988).

More recently, Mark Deuze has studied objectivity in the context of an overarching “occupational ideology” of journalism, as a value-system which validates and gives meaning to the work of people in that profession (2005: 446). Objectivity, in this argument, is bound up with other values which provide foundation for journalistic “professional identity” – such as “autonomy”, “public service”,

“immediacy”, and “ethics”. Deuze was not necessarily critical of this ideology or value-system, nonetheless his arguments serve to demystify the processes by which journalistic identity is constructed: that is, by recognising it as a construction

(rather than a “natural” outcome).

The possibility, and even the need to be, “objective” has been criticised by other scholars. As discussed in the second chapter, notions of “objectivity” have tended to be intertwined with – particularly white (Mindich, 2000) – masculine ideals of rationality, calmness, and distance. In this context, Luke Pearson, founder of born- digital outlet Indigenous X, has noted how “objectivity” is racialised in so far as his

“Indigeneity is perceived as a form of inherent bias, whereas whiteness brings with

205 it at least the potential to feign objectivity” (6 January 2016). The ability to have a

“disembodied” perspective, therefore, is a privilege afforded to some bodies over others. The traditionally “feminine”, such as emotive forms of storytelling, have often been labelled “tabloid” and thus delegitimised, as Catherine Lumby has argued (1997: 117-118). In this respect, US talk show programmes in the 1990s, such as Ricki Lake and Oprah were praised by feminist scholars as being “markers of an expansion in the range of issues and voices becoming audible through the media” (Turner, 1999: 62). For example, Gloria-Jean Masciarotte argued that instead of a “mass subject”, which dominant news media tended to project onto viewers – particularly those who were “women, working or lower class, and people of colour” – Oprah Winfrey gave “voices to this mass subject, showing the struggle, the necessary resistance, the catch on the level of the everyday” (1991: 103).

Objectivity, in these arguments, tended to marginalise under-privileged voices by ignoring diverse perspectives, especially from people of colour. Other scholars had earlier even questioned the possibility of being “objectivity” – that is, being able to transmit “reality” as is, from a vantage point of nowhere – noting that perceptions of reality are always informed by the social and cultural circumstances of the embodied individual doing that reporting (Merrill, 1984).

This substantial body of literature indicates that social news outlets’ departure from standard norms around objectivity should be grounded in a long history of such norms being critiqued. Social news’ personal elements, and its explicit perspective- taking, have a relationship with scholarly arguments (particularly by those from traditionally marginalised backgrounds) as well as televisual and so-called

“tabloid” trends from these earlier times. Still, as I argue throughout this chapter, there are emerging elements which make the social news style distinct, and which

206 pertain to the particular platform ecologies in which it is situated. Moreover, there is a need to conceptualise exactly what this personal and personable style is, rather than just defining it against what it is not. Thus, the kinds of explicit perspective- taking and personal presence found in social news should be described as a transparent positionality. By positionality, as I briefly discussed in Chapter 2, I refer to how social news outlets transparently position themselves within issues and stories, explicitly demonstrating consistent support of and identification with political causes and against other political positions – or individuals and outlets with those positions. My usage of “positionality” has roots in feminist theory

(Alcoff, 1988) and standpoint theory (Hartsock, 1983; Haraway, 1988). That is, positionality critiques a view-from-nowhere “objectivity” by acknowledging what

Linda Alcoff described as the already-existing “network of relations” in which knowledge is always situated, produced, and shaped (Alcoff, 1988: 433). In this sense, my usage of positionality also owes a debt to Donna Haraway’s work on

“situated knowledges” (1988). Furthermore, as Nancy C. M. Hartsock argues, the

“standpoint” of – particularly marginalised – identity can be a “vantage point” for a powerful critique of existing social relations (1983: 284).

The explicit perspective taking in social news, therefore, is not bias. Long regarded as a “slippery concept” (Wamsley & Pride, 1972: 450), bias by definition cannot be explicit or overt; rather it connotes slanted or selective news coverage of particular political candidates or issues concealed within otherwise “objective” news content (Eveland & Shah, 2003; Hopmann et al, 2012). The explicit positionality of social news should also be distinguished from an editorial stance or news framing, such as with the different news agendas of the left-leaning

Guardian Australia or a conservative News Corp daily newspaper, where overt

207 perspective is still confined to editorials or opinion. In this latter sense, the positionality of social news can even present opportunities for a renewed, critical journalistic project – a question that will be returned to below in the postal survey case study.

Furthermore, social news outlets are also frequent critics of journalistic “balance”.

Balance is an established journalistic norm in the Western context, but it has been contested. Robert Entman claimed that balance “aimed for neutrality” by presenting “both sides” in “any significant dispute” with “roughly equal attention”

(1989: 30). However, scholars, particularly those studying science coverage, have critiqued balance by arguing that not all sides deserve “equal attention”. James W.

Dearing examined the coverage of “maverick science” in US newspapers – in this usage, pseudo-science or lone scientists whose conclusions are rejected by a scientific consensus (1995). Dearing noted how “balancing” these claims by mavericks against the consensus was used to “create controversy” and gave undue to credibility to these claims. In a similar fashion, Maxwell T. Boykoff & Jules M.

Boykoff, in their study of climate science coverage in the US, found that by considering all views equally, otherwise prestigious and respected newspapers like

The New York Times and The Washington Post had over-represented discredited perspectives and thereby distorted public perception of the solidity of global warming science (2004). They termed this phenomenon “balance as bias”. More recently, Graham N. Dixon & Christopher E. Clarke examined the autism-vaccine controversy, whereby claims, originating from a now-discredited study linking autism in children to vaccination, fuelled a (still ongoing) anti-vaccination movement (2012). Specifically, they studied “balanced” articles reporting on the controversy: participants in their study, they found, were more likely to believe

208

“experts were divided on the issues” and in this way, they argued, “false balance” caused to “heighten uncertainty around certain science” (2012: 358). Balance has also been criticised for placing arguments in a reductive for-or-against and for its tendency to promote party-political conflict to the detriment of other more marginalised voices (Wahl-Jorgensen et al, 2017). Balance can also be easily exploited by political strategists: this was evident during the 2017 postal survey, itself an exercise in “hearing both sides” so as to stall policymaking on a well- supported human rights issue.

Social news outlets, in their criticism of balance, tended to echo these arguments made earlier by scholars. In a Pedestrian.tv article titled “Tom Tilley Spoke To A

Neo-Nazi On ‘Hack’ & People Are Understandably Pissed”, the writers criticise the decision by the publicly-funded youth radio station Triple J to interview a lead organiser of the far-right “Unite the Right” rally that occurred in Charlottesville in the US in August 2017 (Hennessy & Story, 15 August 2017). The rally resulted in the death of anti-fascist protestor, who was killed after one of the far-right protestors ran a car into the anti-fascist bloc. For the most part, the article’s writers criticise Triple J’s decision in the dry, humorous, and somewhat sarcastic style as seen in other social news articles: they report that, “for inscrutable reasons”, the team from the Triple J radio programme Hack “thought that the underrepresented angle on this situation was the explicitly Nazi one”. The article then goes into more sombre reportage, examining how “there’s no lack of clarity” regarding the far- right organiser’s “ideology”, and that while “Hack’s style is both lauded and criticised for being strenuously non-partisan”, such an “approach collapses… when you’re interviewing a literal Nazi.” The writers criticise the notion that “all viewpoints ought to be represented”, noting that genocidal ideas are not a “balance”

209 to anti-racist ones: “‘I want to kill you’, does not constitute a balanced response to

‘I want to be alive’. There’s a fundamental disconnect here which free speech discourse does not quite capture”. The writers continue this intelligent critique of dominant journalistic practice by adding that “when you end up interviewing actual literal Nazis… you not only mainstream that kind of belief, you also shift the window of acceptable discourse to include explicit white supremacy.” This media criticism continues, with the writers stating that “Let’s be clear here: white nationalism isn’t a political belief that can be implemented without political repression, mass violence and genocide”. In these ways, again like other social news articles examined throughout these chapters, Pedestrian.tv blended multiple article genres by being, all at once, a report on the incident and the backlash, an explainer of the incident, and an intelligent piece of media analysis and critique.

Junkee has also criticised established news broadcasters who, in pursuit of balance and impartiality, have given airtime to problematic, dangerous, and hateful voices.

In an article “The Response To The Sam Dastyari Video Is A Perfect Snapshot Of

Our Racism Problem”, the writer criticises commercial radio and television broadcasters which, after a racist attack on an Iranian-born federal senator, provided a “platform” to the far-right figures who led the attack by asking them to explain their motivations and hear their views (Faruqi, 9 November 2017). Such interviewers, the article’s writer Osman Faruqi argues, “served no purpose other than to project the voice of those who attacked [Senator] Dastyari, and to legitimise their perspective”. Faruqi locates this ongoing tendency by Australia’s news media to “amplify the voices of the far-right” in both the political motivations of right- leaning media actors (such as the conservative News Corp), and the “extremely white” Australian “media ecosystem”, which is “unrepresentative of the diversity

210 of the wider population”. Such a media ecosystem is unable to recognise or deal with racism properly, Faruqi argues, because most who work within this ecosystem have no experience of it. Racism, in this predominately white media ecosystem that follows conventions around impartiality, balance, and “free speech”, is thereby depicted as something to be “debated”. Outside of social news, this criticism of

Australian news media’s racism has also been made by other writers of colour, such as Ruby Hamad (2018) and by Celeste Liddle (8 November 2018), who have discussed these issues at length in recent years.

Other performances of “balance” by Australia’s news and current affairs media have also been criticised by Junkee and Pedestrian.tv – for example, the decision by the ABC panel programme Q&A to invite an accused sexual harasser onto an episode dealing with #MeToo, the latter a movement focused on supporting and giving voices to survivors of sexual assault and harassment (Langford, 24 January

2018; McLeay, 23 January 2018). As Junkee noted, the ABC’s problematic response to this criticism was to raise again the importance of balance: “as always”, the ABC wrote in a statement provided to Junkee, “the panel will represent a variety of perspectives and experiences, exposing Australian citizens to a range of views and ideas they may oppose, as well as those they support”. These Junkee and

Pedestrian.tv articles, like the Pedestrian.tv article on Hack, featured numerous embedded tweets criticising the decisions by the broadcasters. BuzzFeed Oz News, for its part, has also criticised the practice of airing bigoted views and providing platforms to dangerous individuals: for instance, an article titled “It’s Not Good

Enough In 2018 For Australian TV To Be Giving Controversial Men A Platform” condemned the decision by a reality television dating programme to feature a self- described “alpha male” who “wants… to be obeyed” (Pritchard, 31 January 2018).

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The writer criticised this practice as both exploitative – the producers were seeking

“shock value” – and also “dangerous”, in so far as it worked to perpetuate harmful ideas about masculinity.

In these ways, therefore, social news outlets criticise impartiality and take overt perspectives in their news-writing, thus eschewing “objectivity”. The merits of this kind of news-writing were articulated by Junkee’s Faruqi, who not only criticises the “impartial” practices of Australian news media, but also intelligently advocates for perspective in journalism, grounded in personal experience, as a matter of

(although he does not use the term) public responsibility. Rather than being

“impartial”, more diverse perspectives – but not necessarily all perspectives, all the time as balance dictates – are needed so as to recognise and report responsibly on social issues like racism, sexism, and homophobia. Otherwise, by regularly

“debating” racism, for example, and by regularly providing precious airtime to malicious and hateful actors, Australian news outlets work to perpetuate harm.

This media criticism by the social news outlets also had a strong relationship to particular platform-based politics and cultural-political practices pertaining to those politics. Specifically, these articles appear to call out other outlets for problematic practices, in such a way that recalls similar practices on social media, the latter forming part of what is typically labelled “call-out culture”. Call-out culture, as Asam Ahmad notes, refers to the “tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organisers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour or language use by others” (Ahmad, 2015). Such Twitter- based call outs tend to be included in social news media criticism, in the form of embedded tweets – as noted above. But they also tend to form the basis for these kinds of social news articles: as evident in article titles such as “People Are Angry

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With This Newspaper’s Graphic That Appears To Show Same-Sex Attraction As

Unhealthy” (Esposito, 12 July 2017), and “People Are Mad Sky News Got The

Guy Who Wants Hitler’s Photo In Every Classroom For A Friendly Chat”

(Rushton, 6 August 2018). These two articles were from BuzzFeed Oz News. Other such examples from Junkee include: “Andrew Bolt Said ‘Up To Half of Child Are

Gay’ So Of Course He’s Being Roasted” (Woods, 19 June 2017), “International

Celebs Are Dragging A Herald Sun Cartoonist Over His Depiction Of Serena

Williams” (Clift, 11 September 2018), and “An ‘SMH’ Article That Uses Verbal

Blackface To Satirise Chris Gayle’s Sexism Is Being Torn To Shreds On Twitter”

(Hawkins, 9 January 2016). As discussed in the previous chapter, the use of

“People” here is standing in for Twitter users. In many ways, then, the call outs that form part of and fuel what Jean Burgess, Peta Mitchell, & Felix Münch have described as “social media rituals” (2018) – the kinds of platform-specific patterned responses to acute events or controversies, occurring through the affordances and vernaculars of social media platforms – serve as content for social news outlets. I have discussed this issue in greater detail in another paper, on social news’ participation in and reportage on a social media ritual that occurred around another “balance” controversy (Hurcombe, 2019). These call outs – and the fact that they are directed typically at the same targets, conservative news outlets and politicians – can be linked back to, once again, the notion of “constitutive humour”.

At least in the sense that there is a consistent and assumed “us” – young, politically progressive, already opposed to conservative news and right-wing politicians – and that such criticism is typically written with wit. In all these ways, social news’ media criticism should be grounded within the specific context of political-cultural practices on social media.

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Such grounding provides an opportunity to qualify the positive potential of the kind of media criticism that social news performs. Ahmad argues that there is an underlying performativity to call-outs, that calling-out can become “a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are”

(2015). There is certainly an element of this in some of these call-out articles: as in articles of instances of cultural appropriation – the practice of dominant cultures adopting elements of an oppressed minority culture, which is seen as distinct from equal cultural exchange. Pedestrian.tv articles such as those titled “Nicki Minaj

Cops A Load Of Hate For ‘Cultural Appropriation’ On Snapchat” appear to contain such moral performative elements, with the article opening with the line: “and the latest in a long list of celebrities who haven’t learned that appropriating cultures is a big NO-NO in 2017 is none other than Ms Nicki Minaj” (Galea, 5 June 2018).

Another Pedestrian.tv article titled “Kendall Jenner’s Newest Shoot Is Being

Scorched Over Cultural Appropriation” is similar, with the writer stating that “Ah

Kendall Jenner. I love ya, but GOD do you make it hard sometimes” (Harding, 24

October 2018). In addition, a Pedestrian.tv article titled “HONEY, NO: Zac Efron

Unveils Dreadlocks Via Insta & Heaven Help The Comments”, which reacts to the actor’s new look with a GIF of a screaming Ned Flanders, a popular character from

The Simpsons, and reports that a “slew of V. unhappy fans” have accused the Efron of “cultural appropriation” (Galea, 6 May 2018). BuzzFeed does this as well, such as in an article titled “Jameela Jamil Is Not Holding Back After Cardi B Responded

To Her Detox Tea Comments” – “[Actress] Jameela Jamil is known for speaking her mind”, the writer states, “and that’s part of the reason people love her so much”

(Henry, 7 December 2018). A distinction must be made, however, between these celebrity-focused articles, and the kind of call-out culture Ahmad was critiquing,

214 which was primarily people calling-out problematic practices by non-celebrities.

This is also not to say that the celebrity behaviours that social news outlets are reporting on and criticising are not problematic. Rather, it is the somewhat performative nature of such articles, alongside what could be an exploitation of platform-based political conflict and celebrity feuds for news value, which appears distinctive of social news content in these instances.

This issue of exploitation and amplification of political conflict is more concerning, potentially, when it comes to reporting on far-right actors. Whitney Phillips has argued that, during the 2016 US federal election, journalists played a role in amplifying extremist content on the Internet and the messaging of bigoted individuals (2018). Journalists, she argued, even when taking an “explicitly critical stance” helped make these messages, and their messengers, “much more visible than they would have otherwise been, even when the reporting took an explicitly critical stance” (2018: 6). The reporting on and calling out of similar messaging, usually from Australia’s hyper-partisan columnists at News Corp, run similar risks, then. As noted above, the activities of Australia’s conservatives are a common topic for social news articles: as in Junkee articles reporting on columnist Miranda

Devine’s defence of Catholic Cardinal George Pell’s historic sexual assault charges

(Dixon-Smith, 29 June 2017) and fellow News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt’s blog post attacking the LGBTIQ anti-bullying initiative Safe Schools (Woods, 19 June

2017). Other Junkee articles of this kind included a piece about how conservative columnists like Bolt were “grumpy” after a Greens party federal senator called then-Immigration minister Peter Dutton a “fascist” (Clift, 23 March 2018), as well as another on how Bolt was “sour as fuck” (meaning, very upset) after Dutton lost a leadership contest in the right-wing Liberal Party (Clift, 25 August 2018).

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Pedestrian.tv also regularly reports on conservative News Corp columnists, such as those by Mark Latham praising then-Republican presidential primary contender,

Donald Trump (Hennessy, 28 March 2016) and, again, comments made Bolt about

#BlackLivesMatter, a movement protesting police killings of black people in the

US (Adams, 11 July 2016). Other Pedestrian.tv reports included an article about

Devine’s columns comparing Australian LGBTIQ activists to the Islamist terrorist group, ISIS (Hennessy, 2 February 2016), and Devine’s praise of Trump (Bruce-

Smith, 2 March 2018). BuzzFeed Oz News, for its part, does not report nearly as often on these News Corp columnists as the other two social news outlets.

These call-outs are all overtly critical of the columnists – again, to go back to constitutive humour, these kinds of articles perform a usually witty attack on the conservative side of politics – but they nonetheless provide more visibility for the columnists and their views, and potentially play into their trolling tactics. By the latter I mean the attempts by these columnists to deliberately instigate outrage, tactics which Phillips has similarly drawn attention to (2018). Yet, unlike conspiracy theorists on YouTube, or far-right meme-makers on Internet image boards, which form the bulk of what Phillips examines, these columnists have ongoing, paid positions at major Australian news outlets, and thus there is perhaps less risk when amplifying such already-prominent individuals.

All the elements discussed in this section – the foregrounding of the personal and identity, a positionality that eschewed “balance”, and a calling out of problematic behaviour from conservative actors – were present in social news coverage of the

2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Indeed, it was these qualities that distinguished social news coverage from that of legacy outlets. Furthermore, the survey demonstrated how a “balance” that included a diversity of “opinion” from

216 all sides could be used to provide a platform for problematic voices and play into political strategies.

6.5 Positionality in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey

As evident from the BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv articles already examined in the previous chapters, social news outlets tended to not just break with objectivity when it came to the 2017 postal survey, but also foreground the personal. An example of this is a Pedestrian.tv article titled “SSM Shitshow Sees

Big Spike In Calls To LGBTIQ Phone Counselling Services” (Shaw, 12 September

2017). In the article, the author Rebecca Shaw reports on the 25% increase in calls to Victorian LGBTIQ counselling service Switchboard. Like other social news articles, Shaw does not simply report this factual information, leaving the meaning

– that the survey has been harmful to Australian LGBTIQ people – as connotation.

Instead, she positions herself within the story: discussing how even “adult, happy, well-adjusted queer people” have seen “their mental health suffer”, she then writes that “I am one of [those people], and I am someone who has never had mental health concerns, and who has an incredible support network of family and friends, and access to a loving community”. She writes that “I am one of the people best prepared to take on this battle, and even I have found it wearing me down”. There is added affect here, which helps to engage the reader, but the story is also made more meaningful through such inclusion of personal experience: this inclusion helps transform, as Masciarotte argued in the context of Oprah, LGBTIQ people from a “subject” position to one that has a voice, and thus not an unfortunate statistic.

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Another Pedestrian.tv article, also by Shaw, similarly foregrounded the personal and LGBTIQ identity. Titled “An Open Letter To Malcolm Turnbull From A Very

Angry Lesbian”, it is written as a direct address to the then-Prime Minister, expressing “anger” at “the fact” that “you” (being Turnbull) “have been unable, or unwilling, to stand up to your party in order to do the right thing” (Shaw, 23 August

2017). Turnbull’s recent response to reports about LGBTIQ people experiencing increased mental health concerns due to the survey – that they should “believe in themselves” and be “hugged” – was attacked by Shaw. In particular, she returned to the role of identity in experiencing, and thereby being able to recognise, harm:

“your response”, Shaw writes, “is the response of a straight, white, rich, middle- aged man who has obviously never faced a day of discrimination in his life.” Shaw is especially critical of Turnbull’s response to a report about abusive and homophobic posters appearing in the Melbourne CBD: “you replied that they are part of a democratic debate… you doubled down on your claim that ‘both sides’ of the debate need to be respectful”. Following this, Shaw condemns the debate: like the Pedestrian.tv article on Hack’s interview with a neo-Nazi, Shaw argues that this is not a “debate” with equal sides. Both of these articles by Shaw made use of pop-culture GIFs as affective gestures: in this article, a GIF of the main character from the 2004 film Shaun of the Dead shouting “get fucked!” was used to sign-off the “open letter”.

An earlier Pedestrian.tv article authored by Shaw was of a similar nature. Titled

“How It Feels To Have The Country Decide If Your Relationship Is Worthy”,

Shaw relates the fatiguing experience of being “forced to account for ourselves, to prove ourselves, to have to explain why the debate should end” (9 August 2017).

This “overwhelming feeling of exhaustion” was emphasised through a GIF of a

218 character from the early-2000s cult comedy television show, Arrested

Development, throwing his bag down and slowly collapsing onto the floor. The frustration of seeing “a bunch of mostly straight white men go into a room to discuss TF [the fuck] they should do about same-sex marriage” was expressed by

Shaw in a manner that once again related the feeling of being a “subject”.

A Junkee article titled “Vote ‘Yes!” For Marriage Equality: An Appeal From A

Closeted Gay Teen” (Anonymous, 18 August 2017) was similar in content and arguments to the Pedestrian.tv articles authored by Shaw. Criticising the postal survey as “the entire fucking country playing a shitty game of football with my human rights”, the anonymous author of the Junkee piece suggests ways for straight people to support the LGBTIQ people around them. Another Junkee article, from editor Rob Stott, titled “The Liberal Party Is Not Worthy Of Marriage Equality” criticised the postal survey, calling it a harmful “joke”, and notes that a free vote in

Parliament – if the governing Liberal-National coalition would allow it – would pass same-sex marriage legislation (8 August 2017). In the Stott article, there were also some personal elements – Stott talks about gay bars being “our safe spaces”.

Another Junkee article by Stott, titled “Old Mate Here Reckons Loving Gay

Couples Are Just Like Good Friends”, reported on comments from a Catholic

Archbishop – who was being interviewed on an ABC morning news programme – who compared love between a same-sex couple as similar to that between siblings or friends, distinct “from the kind of love that we call marriage” (26 September

2017). Stott writes that “for at least the third time in this campaign I’m forced to point out…that we fuck” – a line that is both humorous, but also telling of the exhausting experience of a postal survey in which his identity was the subject of

“debate”. Sarcastic and dry humour about the postal survey process was an

219 underlying element of the article: Stott prefaces the report by sardonically suggesting that the reader “wrap yourself in the warm embrace of the respectful debate and get this one into you”. Stott concludes the article by stating that “we shouldn’t have to keep explaining to everyone that same-sex love is valid and real as any other love”, Stott writes, “but that’s what happens when the government orders a national vote on the rights of a minority”.

While BuzzFeed Oz News, in contrast to Pedestrian.tv and Junkee, largely followed the dispassionate style of reporting, some articles criticised the pretence of a peaceful postal survey process. For instance, a BuzzFeed Oz article listed the “65

Times The Same Sex Marriage Debate Was Definitely Not Disrespectful” (Sainty

& Taylor, 10 November, 2017). The prefacing of this list was a quote from

Malcolm Turnbull, which declared that Australians were able, “and have demonstrated”, that “they can have a respectful discussion”: the list of notable instances of abuse and hate speech that followed, the overwhelming majority from

“No”-aligned individuals and groups, was a dry comment on and rejection of

Turnbull’s claim.

This criticism of the survey and the foregrounding of the personal by social news was not just a departure from journalistic norms around objectivity, but also a deliberate rejection of LGBTIQ people being treated as the objects of, rather than participants in, the debate – the latter a defining characteristic of a postal survey debating the human rights of a minority group. It was this textual quality that made social news content more personable and captivating, by being deliberately affective. But it also was a political strategy, one that avoided playing into the harmful stalling tactics of a government that was divided in its support of the issue.

In this sense, social news outlets were speaking truth to power – that supposedly

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defining quality of any journalism worthy of that label. This was in contrast to the

major legacy outlets – the ABC, The Age, and The Daily Telegraph – which all

followed norms around objectivity and balance, albeit in service of different

editorial agendas.

Legacy No. of No. of opinion “Yes” “No” Not stated outlet articles articles

The Age 198 75 43 5 27

The Daily 176 76 16 33 27 Telegraph

ABC 231 4 2 0 2

Table 2: Articles and article types during survey

The ABC, as the country’s major publicly-funded news outlet – and one that has

regularly suffered from accusations of bias by conservative governments and News

Corp – was particularly cautious during the postal survey when it came to issues of

objectivity. According to leaked emails that were circulated prior to the survey

period, the ABC’s director of editorial policy, Mark Maley, had stressed the

importance of remaining neutral, as “advocating for one side or the other will make

it difficult for the ABC to be as impartial” (Power, 23 October 2017). Maley also

requested that ABC journalists use the neutral term “same-sex marriage” rather

than the more political “marriage equality”. ABC journalists challenged these

requests, with one ABC employee writing that the ABC ran the risk of “giving

undue weight to the opinions of bigots”. Despite this, when it came to their articles

during the survey, the ABC followed neutrality: the term “same-sex marriage” was

always used in the 231 articles I collected, and within these articles there was a

noticeable attempt by the ABC to feature relatively equal quotations from “both

221 sides” of the issue. The reader was also frequently addressed as a bystander to the campaign, with the two sides and their supporters often being framed as clashing in a political sphere in which the reader was not a participant. The reader, in this representation, had to be informed and then had to choose. The ABC’s presumed reader was much different from that addressed in the social news outlets: in Junkee and Pedestrian.tv in particular, the reader was presumed to already have a position but needed to be encouraged to act, and be informed about how to effectively do so. Out of the 231 ABC articles I collected, there were also only 4 “opinion” pieces:

2 of which supported the “Yes” vote, while the other two were commentary on and analyses of the political situation (especially the leadership of then-Prime Minister

Malcolm Turnbull) and did not indicate with side they would be supporting. 7 of the 231 ABC articles I collected were interactive content, such as maps of the electorate which allowed users to break down polling or voting results region-by- region, and seat-by-seat. This content was more inviting towards the news reader, addressing them more explicitly as a participant in a news sense-making practices: a different kind of address than that contained in the other ABC articles. In the case of the ABC’s television panel shows, for their part they largely performed balance

– notably, Q&A’s 23 October 2017 special on same-sex marriage featured an even number of “Yes” and “No” advocates (2 on each side).

Fairfax Media’s Melbourne-based The Age also followed objectivity, with statements of opinion only appearing in “Opinion” or “Analysis” columns. The bulk of The Age’s 198 articles during the 11 August-17 November 2017 period were dispassionate, in the “reverse-pyramid” style (articles written with information appearing in descending order of deemed importance). Of the 75 articles which explicitly stated opinion, there were only 5 “No” articles. On the

222 other hand, 43 of opinion articles supported the “Yes” vote. The remaining 27 articles in this category were mostly pieces that analysed formal politics, in terms of the political strategies of the Liberal-National government as well as opinions on then-Prime Minister Turnbull’s leadership (or usually, lack thereof). These articles did not contain an opinion on the marriage equality question itself. Indeed, a distinguishing quality of The Age articles over social news articles – especially those from Junkee and Pedestrian.tv – was this emphasis on parliamentary politics and political strategy, rather than the more everyday experience of the survey from a LGBTIQ perspective. The personal here, outside of the most explicit “Yes” and

“No” opinion pieces – which devoted considerable space to personal voting declarations – was absent. As indicated somewhat by the overwhelming amount of

“Yes” opinion pieces compared to “No” ones, of the 6 editorials collected in the

198-article sample, 3 supported the “Yes” side, the others commented on issues to do with the postal survey but did not state or declare support for either side.

News Corp’s Sydney-based The Daily Telegraph also followed the division between dispassionate reporting, explicit opinion, and editorials. In The Daily

Telegraph’s case, though, there were significantly more “No” opinion articles than in The Age. 76 articles out of a sample of 176 were “opinion”, 33 of which were

“No”-siding articles. Not all these opinion articles strongly advocated for the “No” side, however: 29 of these articles instead cast doubt on the “Yes” case by raising concerns about such things as “freedom of speech” rather than explicitly advocating for the “No” case. “Freedom of speech” in particular was a major concern for The Daily Telegraph columnists within the sample, with Andrew Bolt,

Miranda Devine, Mark Latham and others regularly writing about this issue. The

“hearing both sides” nature of the postal survey seemed to give opportunity for

223 these conservative columnists to air their mostly intolerant views of various

LGBTIQ identities and family structures – all the while casting progressive criticism of the postal survey process as evidence of left-wing intolerance, in the sense that the “left” was attempting to silence debate. In this way, “balance” was used strategically by The Daily Telegraph. In terms of the other opinion pieces, 16 of the 76 articles supported the “Yes” vote, while 27 had an unclear position – usually because the focus in these latter articles was on issues of political strategy and political leadership. For the 8 editorials that The Daily Telegraph ran during the sample period, 2 declared support for “Yes” side (the others were unclear as to which side they supported). Yet even then the editorials tended to criticise the

“Yes” side and what The Daily Telegraph described as the “shockingly divisive approach of its less thoughtful campaigners” (22 September 2017).

In these ways, “balance” was used strategically by those outlets that otherwise appeared to abide by norms around “objectivity”: for the ABC, balance and objectivity was a way to demonstrate to conservative critics that the public service outlet was indeed “impartial”; for columnists in The Daily Telegraph, it was used as a way to attack and accuse the “Yes” side and progressive politics more generally of intolerance, seemingly as part of a broader cultural-political conflict between conservatives and progressives in Australia. It was for this reason that

Junkee criticised conservatives as being “The Real Threat To Free Speech”, as an article title put it (29 September 2017). The article followed an attempt by conservative columnists, radio hosts, and politicians to prevent a pro-marriage equality song from being played at the rugby grand final game. Junkee and

Pedestrian.tv’s rejection of balance and the need to be “impartial”, was, in this

224 sense, a particular political strategy amongst the many performed by different news outlets during the survey period.

6.6 Conclusion

The personal plays a major role in social news-writing and the business models of

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. The social news logic of personalisation, thus, functions not just as a way of appealing to target audiences – aided, in this goal, by the personalising logics and algorithms of Facebook and

Twitter – but also as an innovative way of doing news and journalism, in opposition to dominant norms and practices. As seen in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, claims of objectivity do not absolve news outlets of bias: instead, they can be used to conceal underlying editorial agendas and broader political strategies. In these ways, positionality contains positive potential for, on the one hand, journalists and news writers seeking to challenge problematic norms around “balance” and objectivity, and on the other for scholars wishing to understand how the form and content of news is transforming in relation to cultural and political practices on social media platforms. Positionality is also useful for researchers wishing to describe those emerging journalistic styles that are neither “biased” (since their politics are overt) nor “objective”, but instead are transparently positioned within the media ecology and within political conflict. At the same time, positionality is also a captivating style of news-writing which, hopefully, can boost those attention and interaction metrics that outlets are increasingly dependent on.

In the concluding chapter of this thesis, I summarise this thesis’ contribution to knowledge, by synthesising the findings and conceptual work performed throughout this and the previous chapters. I then discuss an issue latent in the above

225 chapters: that being the possible consequences of a fragmented news ecology populated by outlets explicitly targeted towards narrowly-defined audiences, assisted here by algorithmic processes that personalise the news experience. Lastly, as BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv grow and become absorbed by larger media companies, I conclude with some thoughts on whether social news has now become big business. I also give some further attention to the question of whether right-leaning, conservative, and far-right outlets could be “social news”, if they operated in certain ways. All these issues, I argue, provide opportunities for further scholarly research.

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Chapter 7: Conclusion

7.1 Summary of contribution

I began this thesis with BuzzFeed Oz’s scoop on former Labor Party leader Mark

Latham’s trolling practices. I argued that existing journalism studies categories and approaches were not fully equipped to understand the news and journalistic transformations evident in that article, and nor was there an appropriate label to call the kind of news that BuzzFeed Oz produced. For BuzzFeed Oz, I noted, was not idiosyncratic but rather shared characteristics with two other Australian outlets:

Junkee and Pedestrian.tv. I wanted to know why these outlets operated the why they did, why they became successful, and what they can tell us about how news and journalism are transforming in relation to social media platforms. Furthermore,

I wanted to know what the growth of these outlets meant for the future of journalism, in terms of the latter’s traditional societal function of informing audiences and scrutinising power.

In addressing these questions, I argued that BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv should be seen as forming part of an emerging genre of news, a genre which I termed social news. This term is by itself the first major contribution of this thesis, since as I noted there currently lacks a label for these kinds of outlets. To answer the where, how, why, and “so what?” questions, I went about proposing social news logics. By “logics”, I mean the organisational principles and regimes of value which govern the selection, production, and communication of news content. In this way, I unpacked the technological, cultural, and economic forces underpinning and driving social news, and detailed the outlets’ operational practices and news

227 values. From here, the journalistic potential of social news was evaluated. These logics form the second major contribution of this thesis.

I termed three distinctive but inter-weaving logics: namely, “engagement”,

“sociability”, and “personalisation”. In Chapter 4, I argued that BuzzFeed Oz,

Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv are guided a social news logic of “engagement” which seeks, on the one hand, to maximise audience attention and interaction metrics for commercial purposes and, on the other, to boost civic participation through a style of news-writing that explained issues and talked with the reader and viewer, rather than just present “facts”. I found that this kind of news-writing is a departure from a dominant form of dispassionate, reverse-pyramid style news that places the onus on the reader to be informed of the “facts”. Both of these purposes – commercial and civic – are not mutually exclusive, I found, and actually could work together.

At the same time, while they do not troll for engagement metrics like how the legacy outlets ABC News and News.com.au did, the social news outlets also operate in a fashion which targeted a specific audience (young progressive people) at the expense of another (older, conservative people). In this sense, I argued, social news outlets need to be understood as operating through what Phillips & Milner have called “constitutive humour” (2017).

In Chapter 5, I argued that the social news outlets are organised around a social news logic of “sociability”. “Sociability” referred to the creative fashion in which

BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv seek to take advantage of the connective affordances and participatory cultures of Facebook and Twitter, in order to boost engagement (of both commercial and civic kinds). My close analysis of self- representational material (“About” webpages and staff interviews) found that the social news outlets boasted of their shareability. Through close readings of social

228 news content, I found that the outlets respond to a need to be “shareable” – that is, to have their content spread across platforms and the broader Internet – by being sociable. In other words, BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv attempt to make their content fun and pleasurable to share by incorporating entertaining vernacular elements into their news-writing. I found that these vernacular elements

– which include GIFs, memes, emoji, and Internet slang – demonstrate the suitability of social news outlets to the kinds of socialising that characterise the everyday experience of Facebook and Twitter. In these ways, I argued,

“shareability” should not be viewed as a quality of individual news stories, but rather as something that emerges from textual attributes. Furthermore, I found that often these vernacular elements are explicitly affective: thus, I argued, social news outlets can be understood through Papacharissi’s concepts of “affective news” and

“affective publics”, in the sense that social news content helps readers feel their way into the news, and invites users to share these feelings (such as joy, or outrage) amongst their peers.

Lastly, in Chapter 6 I proposed the social news logic of “personalisation”, as a way of thinking about how social news outlets operate in relation to the personalising logics of social media platforms, and bear textual elements that emphasise the personal. Firstly, I argued that personalisation is a news business model for social media, in that audience micro-targeting becomes increasingly viable economically when platforms allow outlets to promote themselves directly to those micro- audiences. In this way, news is personalised by platforms which encourages users to “create a profile” and “follow their interests”, and which harvest user data to sell it to outlets seeking audiences. I argued that personalisation also operates in other ways. Specifically, as I found in the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey case

229 study, the personal and the personable are prominent textual elements in social news content. As found in Chapter 4 on the logic of engagement, social news writers tend to talk to and with their reader, as if in an amicable conversation between two people. Thus, in the case study and in other news events, writers from

BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv break from norms around

“objectivity” by making use of personal voice, providing perspective, and by inserting themselves into the stories and issues they are reporting on. I proposed the term “positionality” to describe this kind of non-objective news-writing: a necessary intervention into debates around “objectivity” and its status as a marker of quality journalism. The term, I argued, captures the ways that social news writers both position themselves within stories, but also position themselves against other perspectives. Moreover, I argued that this kind of explicit perspective taking and this use of personal voice can be grounded within user cultures which emphasise informality and within platforms which are navigated and experienced through the user “profile”.

An important challenge for researchers, I argued in Chapter 1, has been to distinguish the emerging born-digital outlets that engage in quality journalism from those – like the US-based far-right outlet Brietbart – that distribute propaganda and disinformation. Yet, as found throughout this thesis, traditional journalistic norms, characterised by “objectivity” and dispassionate reportage, are often of limited help in this task, since they tend to privilege process and format over intent and social function (Harrington, 2008). While the emerging outlets that I investigated in this thesis would likely fail some of the traditional tests for “quality” journalism (such as maintaining a clear demarcation between “facts” and “opinion”, as found in

Chapter 6), I found they nonetheless operate largely according to a recognisably

230 journalistic ethos: that is, they actively investigate, accurately report, and analytically comment on current events and public issues. In turn, journalism researchers need to continue to reconceptualise what “good” journalism is understood to be. Some of the emergent characteristics of social news identified in this thesis – such as how the outlets I studied challenge problematics norms around

“balance”, and playfully engage in an entertaining multitude of vernaculars and stylistic modes – should also be considered useful experiments or even necessary antidotes to the perceived failings of mainstream journalism in recent. While, as I explored in Chapter 2, these characteristics have antecedents in earlier news formats, the social news genre, I found, constitutes a development of these earlier trends in relation to a transformed media ecology.

In the next two sections, I examine the broader news context, and the role and influence of some of the phenomena identified in this study, in more detail. Firstly,

I briefly discuss the role of personalising social media logics and narrow news targeting in potentially creating fragmented news publics. Secondly, I discuss the future of “objectivity” in news, and offer what I think may be some alternative, more useful, journalistic values. Thirdly, I attend to the question of whether social news is now big business: as BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv now form part of much larger media corporations, and other Australian media companies have come to establish their own social news-like outlets. Lastly, I discuss research questions that have emerged from this thesis, such as whether my social news framework could be applicable outside of the Anglo-Western context, as well as returning to the question of right-leaning, conservative, and far-right

“social news”.

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7.2 Fragmented news publics?

This thesis confronted widespread concerns around personalisation in social media and social news with respect to audience fragmentation, and its consequences for society, including democratic processes. These concerns regarding the fragmentation of publics on platforms have already received considerable scholarly attention. As explored in Chapter 1, such personalising phenomena have led to claims regarding the emergence of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” on platforms, the former describing algorithmic operations that automatically reinforce existing viewpoints (Pariser, 2011), the latter user-selected and personalised Internet spaces, shut off to opposing perspectives and politics

(Jacobsen et al, 2016). In this study, I have not been able to verify such claims, although Axel Bruns’ (2017) examination of the Australian Twittersphere has shed doubt on the validity of the “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” theses. Bruns found that, outside of “hardcore partisan communities”, the Australian Twittersphere in

2016 was often highly interconnected, with information flowing across the boundaries of political ideology. It is also unclear from my findings whether the audiences of BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv read those outlets exclusively. While these outlets may be tailored to and personalised for a young, socially progressive demographic, these marketing and algorithmic strategies do not necessarily determine news consumption. There thus remain questions, beyond the scope of this thesis, as to the extent to which news audiences are “fragmented” on platforms.

Still, the explicit appeal of social news outlets to specific demographics, in tandem with the personalising affordances and business models of social media platforms, does suggest that platforms are providing opportunities for more fragmented and

232 even polarised news ecologies. As social news outlets’ constitutive humour nature also indicates, this division – even polarisation – between distinctive political groups (young progressives vs. older conservatives) is also a key characteristic of social news content, and a defining appeal. To return to claims made by Junkee co- founder Tim Duggan, these outlets began with the intention of promoting themselves to a specific demographic, to demonstrate that they – unlike other outlets – “get” that demographic. Furthermore, the kind of conflict-driven content that emphasises and exploits division between news media actors, such as that which Junkee and Pedestrian.tv produce in response to the outrageous activity of

News Corp’s various columnists, also could be seen as potentially unhealthy for

Australia’s news ecology. There is a back-and-forth trolling element here, each provoking the other, while at the same time social news outlets threaten to make more visible the harmful actions and messaging of malicious – but savvy – far- right media identities. There is thus a danger here when outrageous and hateful activities become attention-grabbing and monetisable “content” in politicised social media spaces, and when media criticism takes the form of call-outs performed for already-established in-groups.

Yet, as my examination of the 2017 postal survey indicates, print media had already long appealed to different political demographics. Moreover, as discussed in

Chapter 2, although niche magazines and newspapers have an extensive history, the concentrated power of media companies like News Corp in Australia has also long had negative effects for reportage and public “debate”, at least in terms of a diversity of critical and relevant voices in news media, not to mention the misuse of this media power as well. As documented in Chapter 2, News Corp has been accused of demanding exclusive “drops” (information) from parties and

233 governments in return for favourable coverage. Emerging actors such as BuzzFeed

Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv, born from and succeeding due to the personalising logics of social media platforms, can help challenge such media power, and provide crucial and necessary perspectives from identities that have long been marginalised in Australia’s media ecology. The regular commentary on race in Australian news media by former Junkee editor Osman Faruqi provides an example of such necessary interventions, particularly in a media industry long dominated by whiteness. “Fragmentation”, here, can be viewed inversely as a positive and much-needed diversity. Of course, these necessary challenges to established media power can only be effective provided that these new actors remain ethical and critical in their reportage, commentary, and analysis – and not exploit conflict for monetisable engagement metrics.

7.3 Future of “objectivity” in news

The above discussion regarding the potential fragmentation and polarisation of news, aided by social media platforms, relates to another significant concern of this thesis: objectivity, and its future in news. In many respects, this thesis has engaged in an extensive critique of the journalistic principle of “objectivity” – drawing on a volume of extant scholarship which has already questioned the value in, and the possibility of, a dispassionate, factual, “view from nowhere” perspective in newsgathering and news-writing. “Positionality” was advanced in the previous chapters not just as a useful way of conceptualising the kind of journalism that social news performs, but also as a potentially positive practice: in so far as it critiqued the idea that there can be a “view from nowhere”, and that – at least in

BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv’s case – positionality emphasised identities typically marginalised in “objective” news. Additionally, positionality, by

234 foregrounding identity and the personal, I argued, could also help better relate readers to the news, by encouraging empathy (seen, for example, in social news coverage of the experience of LGBTIQ people during the 2017 postal survey).

At the same time, as was briefly discussed in Chapter 2 and will be returned in the below section on emerging research questions, positionality could also be applied to far-right outlets based around reactionary identities, such as “men” and

“conservatives”, and which position themselves against “mainstream media”. If scholars and observers are to critique – even hopefully abandon – “objectivity”, how do we continue to evaluate news coverage? Furthermore, how do we continue to ensure and fight for “quality” and “truthfulness” in journalism?

As a way of potentially answering these questions, maybe it is best to turn towards a slightly different set of values. “Accuracy” instead of “objectivity”, and

“argumentation” rather than “opinion”: placing value in not so much whether the writer and their perspective is present or not, but instead on the validity of their reports and their claims. Where “facts” remain – as The Guardian moto goes –

“sacred”, but without the presumption that they can presented to the reader dispassionately in a disembodied fashion, as if “reality” can simply be transmitted to readers. Judging on “accuracy” and “argumentation” can better also counter the excuses from problematic outlets (such as Fox News and The Daily Telegraph) that their frequently controversial and incendiary political pundits and commentary pieces are just “opinions” that have a right to be voiced. De-emphasising the value of “opinion”, and promoting accurate “argumentation” – albeit, still from differing perspectives – could be a useful strategy, in this regard. And as part of this, knowledge is foregrounded: not just academic expertise, but also the knowledge that comes from experience (returning, here, to positionality). “Truthfulness”, thus,

235 is not abandoned – maybe just a journalism that denies the role of experiential knowledge in uncovering truth(s), and which excuses deliberate falsehoods as merely a necessary and “balanced” viewpoint.

In the next section, I continue the forward-looking perspective of this chapter, seeking to map the futures of social news – this time, in terms of the future growth of the genre, and the viability – and ethics of – native advertising, the business model favoured by BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv.

7.4 Futures of social news

As my research was coming to an end in early 2019, there were a number of significant developments in social news. On the one hand, it was becoming increasingly apparent that for Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv the descriptor “emerging” was no longer entirely accurate. Each had begun with a disruptive, start-up ethos –

“changing the publishing game”, as the Pedestrian.tv “About” webpage put it – and the promotional material and key figures from these outlets continue to emphasise this entrepreneurial image and ethos. However, Junkee now forms part of a larger media company – and in the case of Pedestrian.tv, one of Australia’s largest media corporations. On the other hand, while BuzzFeed had expanded globally during the 2010s, by July 2019 the company is facing an uncertain future.

As discussed in Chapter 2, BuzzFeed, by the mid-2010s what began as a viral “lab” had become a global company, with news outlets based in Brazil, France, Germany,

Japan, India, Mexico, and other countries. By the late 2010s, the US BuzzFeed

News had already won many prestigious awards for its journalism (and had been a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, in the international reporting category), and these awards seemed to indicate a growing legitimacy for BuzzFeed amongst

236 established news media actors. Yet there were also signs of trouble: in 2017, the company finally started including banner adverts on its main site, reportedly in an attempt to diversify its revenue streams and be less reliant on boosting native advert content (Dua, 29 August 2017). In 2018, BuzzFeed began to pursue a donations- based revenue model based off reader memberships (Mullin, 27 August 2018).

Finally, in late January 2019 the company made a decision to cut 15% of the staff, citing investor concerns about a lack of profitability (Darcy & Stelter, 24 January

2019). These layoffs also affected the international bureaus, including BuzzFeed

Oz, which looks set to lose a third of its staff in a significant downsizing of its news operations (Meade, 29 January 2019). These layoffs are occurring despite the fact

BuzzFeed continued to grow year by year, with a predicted a record income of

US$300 million in 2018 (Waterson, 25 January 2019).

BuzzFeed’s shock decision to cut 15% of its staff has raised a number of questions regarding the sustainability of the kind of digital media business model that the company seemed to champion. Notably amongst these concerns have been the sustainability of relying on venture capitalist funding, like BuzzFeed did in its initial expansion. One of the major reasons for BuzzFeed’s recent downsizing, as noted above, were that investors were pressuring the company to finally provide returns, based off targets set by these same investors, after a decade of growth.

Other questions pertained to viability of relying on Facebook and Google for audiences and income, considering the large cuts that these companies take from their programmatic advertising services which BuzzFeed and many outlets increasingly rely on (Lee, 24 January 2019). Regular changes to the Facebook algorithm – crucially, a change to the newsfeed in 2018 to value posts from

Facebook friends over those from news outlets – also indicate the serious

237 challenges that come with relying on the major platforms for audiences (Waterson,

25 January 2019). These recent developments in BuzzFeed may have consequences for the future growth of the social news genre.

As detailed in Chapter 2, both Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, on the other hand, have continued to grow. In 2016 Junkee was acquired by the Australian advertising company oOh!media for $11.05 million, and has since become one of Australia’s major youth outlets Although, there remain questions whether Junkee will continue to be popular with its original millennial demographic – especially as this demographic grows older. Punkee, Junkee Media’s younger, Gen-Z (teenagers and those in their early 20s) focused outlet, may become more important to the company over time. In 2015, Pedestrian.tv was partially bought by Nine

Entertainment – the parent company of one of Australia’s highest-rating and longest-running commercial television channels, Channel Nine – for an undisclosed price (Christensen, 31 March 2015). In 2018, Nine Entertainment bought the remaining 40% stake in Pedestrian.tv for a reported $39 million

(Redrup, 2 September 2018). Even later in 2018, Nine Entertainment expanded further after it bought the struggling Fairfax Media company, absorbing the latter’s legacy outlets – such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, long established and respected members of Australia’s news ecology – into its fold. While the future for the former Fairfax outlets within Nine Entertainment remains uncertain,

Pedestrian.tv appears to be playing a bigger role in the broader company (B&T, 11

December 2018). For instance, with Nine’s acquisition of Fairfax also came ownership of Allure Media, which operated the videogame-focused outlet Kotaku, along with the tech outlet Gizmodo, and the lifestyle outlet POPSUGAR. Allure’s outlets have since became absorbed into the “Pedestrian Group”, a sub-group

238 within Nine Entertainment run by Pedestrian.tv co-founders Chris Wirasinha and

Oscar Martin. As a result of this merger, a number of redundancies occurred in what was formerly Allure Media (B&T, 11 December 2018): more of these could follow from the ongoing restructuring under Pedestrian Group.

Alongside the expansion of Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv has been the emergence of social news-like outlets from other major Australian media actors. As briefly discussed in Chapter 2, in 2018 both the ABC and the Ten Network – another major commercial broadcasting company – launched outlets that appeared to look and operate in similar ways to BuzzFeed Oz, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. ABC’s ABC

Life is a youth-oriented lifestyle outlet, which features some of the bright colours and image-heavy format reminiscent of the social news outlets, along with headlines and article writing styles that often explicitly address the reader. Due to these qualities, and because some of ABC Life’s articles are written in the listicle format, the outlet was framed – particularly in News Corp coverage – as a

“BuzzFeed-like” news venture. This kind of representation was so prevalent on

ABC Life’s launch that the ABC editorial director, Alan Sunderland, even came out to reassure the public that this was not the case: that the ABC was not making a

“terrible retreat to populism… on [his] watch” (2018). Sunderland in this statement was performing public value by differentiating the ABC’s news from the “kind of content that does well on commercial sites”, indicating the persisting prejudice against social news content amongst Australia’s legacy outlets. Nonetheless,

Sunderland’s press release did not change the fact that ABC Life appeared to at least be attempting to tap into the appeal of and the audiences for the kind of news content that the social news outlets produced.

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In a similar fashion is 10 daily, a web-based youth-oriented outlet owned and operated by the Ten Network. Like ABC Life, 10 daily features a bright colour scheme with image-heavy content. The “About” webpage for 10 daily also bears similarities to those from Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, in terms of an emphasis on entertaining storytelling that speaks with, rather than at, the reader: “at 10 daily”, the page states, “we laugh with people, not at them” and that “we’re here to make you smile” and “make you think” and “we’re across everything so that you are, too” (About 10 daily, 2018). To further demonstrate the connections between 10 daily and the outlets studied in this thesis, 10 daily also has hired a number of people who previously worked at Pedestrian.tv and BuzzFeed Oz (such as Alex

Bruce-Smith and Mat Whitehead). In addition, according to Liz Baldwin, Ten’s general manager of digital, part of the impetus for 10 daily was the success of

BuzzFeed and Punkee’s (Junkee’s teenage-focused outlet) recaps of The Bachelor, a Ten Network-produced show. 10 daily sought to take back some of that audience by creating its own digital content (Kelly, 14 May 2018).

On the other hand, recent changes to US BuzzFeed News website suggest that the outlet may be attempting to reduce or distance itself from the social news elements examined in this thesis. In mid-2018, the US-based BuzzFeed News moved to a new domain (www.buzzfeednews.com), separate from the main BuzzFeed site. The

US BuzzFeed News site has a mostly black-and-white colour scheme, with the

“LOL”, “wtf”, “omg”, “cute”, etc. banner icons from the main site having been abandoned. The BuzzFeed News logo, too, has been changed to a black-and-white

Times New Roman typeface instead of the bright red blocky logo on the main site.

These design changes seem to reflect a desire to appear more like a legacy outlet.

At least, that is how a Techcrunch report on the changes saw it, although US

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BuzzFeed News editor emphasised in an interview in the article that BuzzFeed News will remain a “general interest organisation” that covers a “full range of topics”

(Ha, 18 July 2018): so that the kind of light-hearted content that BuzzFeed News produced in the past will continue to appear along what Techcrunch calls “serious and highbrow” news. In this interview, Smith maintained that “on the web, [news] conventions are less clear”, justifying the decision to keep varying styles of news by referring to the blurring of topics and tones that characterise a social media newsfeed.

BuzzFeed Oz News, although it has adopted the new logo, still remains on the main

Australian BuzzFeed site – complete with the “LOL” and “wtf” logo banners on the top, and the trending news bar on the left side of the page. It is unclear if it is moving to a new domain any time soon. Nonetheless, these changes suggest that the kinds of condescending and dismissive comments towards BuzzFeed from readers and legacy outlets – such as those from ABC editorial director Alan

Sunderland – have had an effect.

Outside of these new outlets, some recent developments in Australian digital news suggest that individual social news logics may also be influencing the operations of existing legacy outlets. For example, although he credits Junkee with being a first in this regard, as Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan noted many other outlets now do the “explainer”-style of content, which describes particular issues or newsworthy events in an accessible way. ABC News, as an example, produces these

“explainers” on topics such as a proposal in late 2017 to impose a minimum price on alcohol, as a way to reduce binge drinking (Perpitch, 20 September 2017). The explainer, like those featured in Junkee, is written in a question-and-answer format, guiding the reader through basic questions in this particular news story: asking

241 what a “floor price” on alcohol entails, whether other countries have implemented this policy, and what evidence is available to indicate that such a policy would even work. The article, written in this punchy and plain-language fashion, appears written to cut through the “noise” of a 24-hour news cycle to make understandable a public issue that would otherwise by muddled with policy jargon. The ABC also occasionally uses (or, maybe appropriates) platform vernacular within some of its articles, as in an late 2017 “analysis” piece (a label which signals explicit argument) on the divided reaction to the then-latest Star Wars film, The Last Jedi (Marsh, 27

December 2017). In the article, the writer embeds GIFs of Star Wars characters along with tweets reacting to The Last Jedi, and also references memes – the writer states that some of the reactions have “rustled [his] intergalactic jimmies”, a call- back to a popular, if slightly dated, Internet phrase.

Still, the vast majority of ABC News content remains conventional, in the dispassionate, reverse-pyramid, and “objective” style, and the articles that do incorporate elements of Internet and platform vernacular – as demonstrated by the

Star Wars article – tend, at least in my experience, to be rather awkward and not as fluent BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestriasn.tv are in Internet cultures and platform vernaculars. Nonetheless, these examples from the ABC demonstrate the individual influence of some of these social news logics outside of the outlets studied in this thesis.

In many ways, social news genre and its logics has now seemingly grown to become a major component of the Australian news ecology and the corporate news business in this country, despite BuzzFeed’s recent circumstances. If these various ventures from the ABC and the Ten Network are successful, then there may be more social news in the future. This is not necessarily a positive prospect: as

242 indicated by the Allure Media redundancies, the expansion of social news may lead to a displacement of niche news media.

The social news-style reliance on native advertising – the main revenue source for

BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv – could also create new problems for news and journalism, at least in terms of conflict of interest and potentially less critical reporting on corporations, if the latter continue to exist as major native advertising partners for social news. For the turn to native advertising does raise concerns around editorial integrity, journalistic ethics and consumer welfare: as Lili Levi notes, there is the potential for the selection and coverage of news to be “skewed” by interested commercial clients, thus weakening “editorial independence” by

“normalising corporatised news” (2015: 652). BuzzFeed Oz has already raised concern in this regard, after they refrained from reporting on the 2017 industrial action taken against the Australian Streets ice-cream brand, whose owner Unilever is a corporate partner for BuzzFeed. There absence of coverage was notable, considering the high-profile nature of the Streets strikes, and the fact that Unilever had previously been accused of compelling BuzzFeed to delete articles that were unfavourable to the multinational’s various brands (Stack, 19 April 2015).

Furthermore, in the case of Junkee, there is a tension – even contradiction – between the outlet’s youth-focused social justice politics and its reliance on and enthusiasm for corporate partners (Taylor, 2015). For instance, climate change is an obviously extremely concerning issue for young people: and yet, until early

2018, the bank Westpac, which sponsors Junkee Media’s youth advice outlet The

Cusp, remained a major investor in fossil fuels and coal mining projects such as the proposed central Queensland Carmichael Coalmine (Zhou, 6 March 2017).

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Even when outlets clearly label their sponsored content – as BuzzFeed and Junkee do – there is still underlying “trickery” involved (Carlson, 2015: 857): as Edward

Wasserman has argued, native advertising is not just popular amongst corporate clients for being able to generate greater engagement than banner advertising.

Rather, native advertising is also desirable for being able to “appropriate the format of the surrounding publication and harness its credibility to strengthen the authority and persuasiveness of the advertising” (Wasserman, 30 January 2013). To return to the Westpac case, native advertising with Junkee is attractive to the bank due to the possibility of reaching an audience that would otherwise be unreceptive to more traditional media advertising, and because working with the outlet brings the potential of coating the bank with the progressive politics and youthful glamour associated with Junkee.

All these issues raise further questions regarding the future of social news – as both a popular genre and a critical journalistic form. I now turn to these emerging research questions.

7.5 Emerging research questions

While this thesis has performed some much-needed conceptual work regarding an increasingly visible and news and journalistic phenomena, there nonetheless remain a number of possibilities for further research. In the Australian context, the questions posed above about whether social news outlets and social media logics pose potential risks to the quality and health of public discourse, and whether these outlets which frequently transform platform-based political conflict into monetisable news content, need some more attention. Certainly, Axel Bruns’ research on “echo chambers” (or lack thereof) in the 2016 Australian Twittersphere

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(2017) has been a helpful and refreshing step in this regard: but some research into how these news publics form and function on Facebook, where most of the audiences are, is also necessary, although Facebook’s growing API restrictions have made large-scale quantitative research on the platform increasingly difficult.

Whitney Phillips work in Data & Society (2018) on the “oxygen of amplification” and the ethical practices for reporting on extremists and savvy but malicious media manipulators (such as those from the alt-right) has also been very welcome. But more research is needed, particularly in regards to the ethical practices of reporting on figures such as News Corp columnists like Andrew Bolt, Mark Latham, and

Miranda Devine – who, unlike alt-right communities, are already highly visible, at least in terms of their regular columns and their frequent appearances on television.

As asked numerous times in this thesis, has the attention given to these actors – such as from social news outlets – amplified the messaging or emboldened the actions of these figures, whose views frequently border on hate speech? By drawing more attention to these actors, has it made their antagonistic – even reactionary – writing more profitable? This kind of line of inquiry would be especially desirable, considering how “opinion” writing tends to be less costly and resource-intensive for news outlets than, say, investigative journalism. And what is the actual effect of social news media criticism, anyway – does it reach outside the typical audience of these outlets? The ideal BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv audience – young, progressive people – would likely not be fond of or susceptible to the politics and messaging of people like Devine, regardless.

In a similar vein, more research is also needed on the news trolling phenomena I discussed in Chapter 4. That is, how platforms’ emphasis on maximising monetisable attention and interaction metrics can encourage outlets to act in

245 deliberately provocative and divisive ways. These practices become particularly rewarding, as I noted, when conducted in an already politicised social media spaces. Researchers have already noted how Facebook rewards “low-quality content” over “high-quality” journalism, and how “journalism that investigates power… is discriminated against by a system that favours scale and shareability”

(Bell et al, 2017). However, the consequences of these practices on public discourse

– especially since they encourage strong negative feelings, and reward conflict with visibility in platforms’ newsfeeds – deserve further research. In addition, how these news trolling practices can pose risks for healthy everyday social media use, in the sense that they help create negative or exhausting experiences for social media users, deserves scholarly attention.

This research was also focused on Australia, which tends to have a strong relationship to the global Anglosphere and takes many of its cues in news media from the UK and the US. There is thus a need for future studies to research whether the phenomena examined in this thesis has counterparts outside of the Anglosphere and Europe – that is, whether social news is actually a global genre, or just one resulting from the particular practices and vernaculars associated with Western

Internet popular culture. Research on Internet-savvy emerging news outlets in East

Asia would especially be welcome, considering that news in that region is often extensively embedded within instant messaging.

In general, though, more research is needed on the news outlets that are attuned to social media platform vernaculars and the cultural dynamics of the Internet. As evident in Phillips’ work (2017), irreverence and irony, which are important cultural elements of platform vernaculars, are increasingly being weaponised for far-right causes, and conflict within sub-cultures, such as the videogaming

246 community, have turned platforms into battlegrounds for highly toxic culture wars

(Burgess & Matamoros- Fernández, 2016; Massanari, 2015). Research on, and promotion of, the news outlets that are attuned to these sites, and are familiar with the sophisticated but coded vernaculars and strategies deployed by far-right causes, will be increasingly necessary.

In the above regard, research on potential right-leaning, conservative, and far-right

“social news” outlets would be beneficial. As I discussed in Chapter 2, there are a number of right-leaning born-digital outlets that share characteristics with the social news outlets I have analysed in this thesis. I noted, for example, how the misogynistic, men’s rights activist outlet Return of Kings (now on hiatus) also bears qualities like “constitutive humour” and “positionality”, in so far as the outlet tends to foreground a “male” identity which attacks and ridicules both women and

“liberals”. Other far-right born-digital outlets, such as the neo-Nazi site The Daily

Stormer, also bear these characteristics. The Daily Stormer, for example, has previously boasted in leaked documents of its use of ironic platform vernacular, memes, pop-culture references, and a “humorous, snarky style” to attract young readers. In these documents, the neo-Nazi outlet even referenced BuzzFeed as an outlet whose GIF-heavy- style they wished to emulate (Feinberg, 13 December

2017). The use of such “sociable” strategies in born-digital news beyond progressive-leaning outlets, to ones of broad – even extremely bigoted – political persuasions, therefore, deserves considerable scholarly attention.

Nonetheless, this thesis is a step forward towards addressing the above issues and increasing our understanding of the ways in which news and journalism continue to transform in tandem with mediating technologies and popular cultures. As social news becomes more visible in the Australian media ecology, and as monopolising

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platforms influence the operational practices of Australia’s news outlets, it is

increasingly beneficial for researchers to turn towards these developments.

Moreover, the growing significance of sites of platform-based political conflict for

digital news – as sources of both content as well as lucrative attention and

interaction metrics – demands researchers’ attention. At the same time, the work

undertaken in these chapters demonstrates that scholars need to continue to

question – and reconceive – their own notions of “journalism” and “quality” news,

even if just to better understand what and how different forms of information

presentation and storytelling attract audiences. In these ways, researchers can better

recognise both the potentials – and the limitations – of emerging outlets and writers

who attempt to inform, educate, and, relay aspects of human experience that may

otherwise lack visibility.

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