Social News: How Born-Digital Outlets Transformed Journalism 3030917118, 9783030917111

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Social News How Born-Digital Outlets Transformed Journalism Edward Hurcombe

Social News

Edward Hurcombe

Social News How Born-Digital Outlets Transformed Journalism

Edward Hurcombe Digital Media Research Centre Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-91711-1    ISBN 978-3-030-91712-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mum and Dad.

Acknowledgements

This book emerged from my doctoral thesis that was inspired by the proliferation of born-digital “millennial” outlets in my Facebook newsfeed during the mid-2010s. I was also intrigued by the strong and often negative reactions towards those outlets from incumbents, as well as the insufficiency of labels like “clickbait” to describe the phenomenon. If you are also interested in how social media has been transforming news, and are fascinated by experiments in journalism, then this book is for you. Parts of this research have been published in several edited collections as well as in journals such as Journalism. And as with other books with doctoral origins, this academic journey of mine has involved a lot of people. I am in debt to many for their supervision, insights, collegiality, and support. Firstly, I need to thank my doctoral supervisor Jean Burgess, for her invaluable guidance during my PhD candidature. I am immensely grateful for the time and critical thought Jean gave to my work. I would also like to express my deep appreciation for the post-graduate and early career community at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre—you have all been, and continue to be, an amazing source of peer support and friendship. This community includes Ehsan, Silvia, Kelly, Aleesha, Ariadna, Aljosha, Sofya, Rosie, Smith, Hannah, Louisa, Jarrod, Katherine, Gabbi, Katrin, Xiaoting, Claire, along with many others. In addition, thank you to my RMIT colleague James Meese, for your enduring enthusiasm for this project, and for your mentorship. Thanks also to those who provided generous feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript as well as on the original book proposal, including Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, James vii

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Meese, Brendan Keogh, Alice Witt, Axel Bruns, and Roger Hurcombe. This book is better because of you. I am also in debt to Palgrave, for taking this book on. I would also not have been able to start this research journey without the assistance of an Australian Government Research Training Programme Stipend, and a Queensland University of Technology Top-Up Scholarship. Lastly, my manuscript could not have been completed without the support of my family. Thanks Mum, Dad, and Alex for your love. And thanks Alice, for being the best surprise of this research journey. This book was written on the lands of the Turrbal and Yugara people, whose sovereignty over these lands has never been ceded.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Cats, Trolls, and Millennials   1 What’s Newsworthy About Social News?   3 Social News: A Definition   6 A Turbulent Decade in News: Disruption, Crisis, and Opportunity   7 Research Approach  11 Book Structure  13 References  15 2 Lineages 21 Introduction  21 “Professional” Journalism  22 The Discontents of Professional Journalism  26 The Original “fake news”: Innovative Journalism in Late-Night Television  29 Digital Disruptions and Participatory Culture  33 Conclusion  36 References  37 3 Engagement 41 Introduction  41 The “Clickbait” Concern  42 The Drive for “Metrics”  47 ix

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A Logic of Engagement  51 Social News and Constitutive Humour  52 Social News and Civic Engagement  56 Social News Advocacy and Activism  62 Conclusion  65 References  67 4 Sociability 75 Introduction  75 Connectivity and Sharing on Social Media  76 Sociability and Platform Vernacular  80 “Here’s How People Reacted To…”: The Sociability of Social Media Recaps  85 “Share the feeling”: Social News and Affective Sociability  89 The Limits of “togetherness”: Returning to Constitutive Humour/Affect  94 Conclusion  96 References  97 5 Personalisation103 Introduction 103 Platforms and the Personal 104 Ads for You: “native” Advertising and Other Social News “sponcon” 108 We Are You: Mic as Millennial News 112 The Personal and the Personable in Social News Writing 116 Positionality Within Stories and Markets 121 Conclusion 125 References 125 6 Futures133 Introduction 133 Facebook’s Departure from News 134 “Millennial” News After Millennials 136 VC Troubles: BuzzFeed and Mic’s Decline 139 Bought Out: Pedestrian and Junkee Institutionalised 141 The Future of Sociability and Positionality 143 Conclusion 148 References 149

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7 Conclusion157 Millennial Skinny Jeans and TikTok Teens 157 Moving Beyond Constitutive Humour and ‘fetishised laughter’ 159 References 163 Index165

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Cats, Trolls, and Millennials “The Media Startup Getting 20-Years-Olds To Talk About More Than Cat Pictures”: so went the headline of a 2014 Forbes article on the then-­ new outlet Mic. The article’s writer, Abram Brown, was visiting the “newsroom of the future”—the offices Mic (then PolicyMic) was renting in Midtown Manhattan (2014). With vivid descriptions of open-plan, “airy, wood-floored rooms”, filled with Apple Macs and twentysomethings, Brown was evoking what had by 2014 become a recognisable image of digital entrepreneurialism: young, relaxed, sleek, and self-assured. Mic staffers, Brown told us, spent their day “keeping tabs on what’s trending across social networks”, so that they could “boil it all down” to what they believed “earnest” twentysomethings “would enjoy”. Mic’s largest hit that day, Brown recounted somewhat sardonically, was a story headlined “8 Photos You Didn’t See From Obama’s Trip to South Africa”. This story, Brown suggested, reflected the social media of the period: cool and progressive like Obama, with promises of authenticity, and yet lacking in substance due to its apparent obsession with pictures and lists. And the article format itself—the infamous “listicle”—was also emblematic of recent transformations in news, signifying changes in business models, content distribution, audience engagement strategies, generational preferences, and, seemingly, journalistic standards. Brown’s profile piece of Mic was accompanied by other articles offering a similar assessment of digital © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_1

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“millennial” news. In that same year the Financial Times, for example, had warned about a coming “virus” of “cute cat videos” and “funny lists” (Gapper, 2014). News on social media platforms used by young people tended to be “clickbait”, went the narrative. Frivolous content, in other words, that was more concerned with boosting audience interaction metrics than informing readers about “important” things. Yet, despite his scepticism, Brown still noticed something different about Mic. Brown saw that the outlet was producing enough pieces “with both voice and understanding of subject and character” to offer a “glimmer of promise as something other than a baby BuzzFeed”. That is, Mic seemed to promise serious and “real” news stories: such as pieces on US tax reform, drug policy, and racism in mainstream US videogames. Mic, Brown told us, appeared to be gesturing towards a “promised land”—a “middle ground between deeply reported stories and listicles”—for born-­ digital outlets seeking both social media engagement and institutional legitimacy. One more anecdote, this time from Australia. On 14 August 2015, the Twitter account @RealMarkLatham was sending abusive messages to high-profile women. The account claimed to be impersonating Mark Latham, a former, notoriously belligerent, leader of the Australian Labor Party. Misogynistic Twitter accounts adopting the personae of old politicians are not uncommon on the platform, so @RealMarkLatham did not immediately arouse suspicion. A reporter, however, noticed something strange about @RealMarkLatham’s account activity. So, they decided to do some sleuthing. And by digging up some old tweets and checking connections with other Twitter accounts, this reporter deduced that @ RealMarkLatham was not some anonymous imitator after all. Instead, Mark Latham—a man who once ran for Prime Minister of Australia— really was using a “parody” account to fire off insults to high-profile Australian women, specifically those who had criticised him in the past. Soon after being unmasked, Latham quit his columnist job at the respected Australian Financial Review and pivoted to his new career as a far-right media personality. However, this scoop revealing @RealMarkLatham as the real Latham was not the work of a prestigious legacy outlet. Rather, it was BuzzFeed News Australia reporter Mark Di Stefano—just 25 years old when he became the outlet’s first political editor—who broke the story (2015). And the article in which he did so was written in the informal, irreverent, and GIF-heavy style typical of conversations on social media. It was, in

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these ways, a news article reporting on social media produced by an outlet that seemed born from and for social media. Despite this, the article was also not frivolous—something, as indicated by Brown above, which BuzzFeed had been regularly accused of being. This was a serious exposé of an influential political figure, which revealed the prevalence of online trolling beyond underground subcultures, in contrast to how Australian news typically reported on trolls.

What’s Newsworthy About Social News? This content, I argue in this book, has been more than just a “middle ground” between “good” and “bad” journalism. It is not simply a negotiation between frivolity and “real” news. Instead, it is evidence of a wholly distinct news genre. And this genre is not just emblematic of major transformations in the news industry: it has also shown us what “quality” journalism can look like in the twenty-first century. In this book, I explore and evaluate the kind of transformations seen in Mic and BuzzFeed. I study how these outlets, and other similar news sites such as UpWorthy in the US and Junkee and Pedestrian in Australia and Indy100 in the UK, grew over the past decade. I ask: where did these outlets come from, how do they operate, why do they share similar characteristics, and what can they tell us about how news has co-evolved with platforms? And lastly, what does the rise of these outlets mean for journalism? But to answer these questions, we need to think differently about news and journalism. This is because new approaches to studying news and journalism are necessary in this time of “flux” (Deuze & Witschge, 2018, p. 177). This means that in this book I go “beyond journalism” (Deuze & Witschge, 2018), in terms of how it traditionally has 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 conventional news formats. These traditional assumptions about journalism can be obstructive, especially when we are confronted with innovative outlets and journalistic practices that break with these established norms. Such assumptions also tend to be predicated on problematic binaries between, for example, “soft” and “hard” news (Rakow & Kranich, 1991; Lumby, 1997), “objectivity” and “opinion” (Tuchman, 1972), as well as other gendered and racist notions of what counts as “real news” (Fraser, 1990; Owens, 2008; Dixon & Williams,

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2015; Usher, 2021). And considering that scholars previously have largely lacked a term for these outlets, I also provide one: social news. This book offers both a critical historical account of the rise of well-­ known born-digital social news outlets such as BuzzFeed as well as new approaches that can help us understand their operations and evaluate their journalism. In the following chapters, I examine what the success (and failures) of these social news outlets can tell us about how platforms have been changing news, as well as reflect on the ways in which these outlets have encouraged audiences, researchers, and practitioners to reconsider what constitutes “good” journalism in the early decades of the twenty-first century. In the process, this book not only challenges normative beliefs about journalism, but also critiques reductive analytical categories (such as “clickbait”) which continue to shape our discussions about news on social media. In doing so, I hope this book makes an especially valuable and timely contribution. The conceptual framework that I develop and apply in this book is structured around what I call “social news logics”. In developing this new framework, I draw upon on Patricia H. Thornton, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury’s work on “institutional logics” (2012). By “institutional logics”, Thornton et  al. mean the socially constructed symbols, material practices, organising principles, and valuing regimes which structure and govern how news is selected, produced, composed, and communicated. “Logics”, in this sense, are an analytical framework for understanding how and why an organisation operates the way it does. The aim is to locate a self-justifying rationale that helps explain the character and practices of a particular institution. In this way, studying “logics” draws attention not only to the technological, cultural, and economic forces underpinning and driving social news, but also to how these forces shape operational practices, communication formats, and news values. Alongside Thornton et  al., I am also influenced by David Altheide and Robert P. Snow’s (1979) concept of “media logic”, which they define as the process through which information is organised and transmitted through media, with this process becoming naturalised—its organising principles and formats made to seem value-neutral—as it penetrates and alters the behaviours of the institutions and audiences that are dominated by media. Altheide and Snow argued, for instance, that television prioritised news stories with spectacular visuals and conflict, due to the medium’s suitability for visually arresting representation, combined with

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commercial television’s desire for high audience ratings. More recently, José van Dijck and Thomas Poell have proposed “social media logics” as an update of Altheide and Snow’s original concept for the platform ecology (2013). These social media logics inform how I conceptualise social news logics, in so far as the former helpfully explain the dynamics, operations, and political economy of platforms. Unlike Altheide and Snow, however, I am not taking a techno-­ determinist perspective in this book. Social news is a genre born from and for social media, but it is also shaped by other forces. These forces are economic, social, cultural, and political in nature. And over the past decade, social news has also undergone a process of institutionalisation, as social news outlets across the world have become established entities with shared organisational practices and principles. Which is to say, social news outlets have learnt from each other—not just from social media—about how to do news. To analyse this process, I also draw upon theories associated with “new institutionalism”. The latter is a “broad tent” (Napoli, 2014, p. 341; Bannerman & Haggart, 2015) of institutional theory that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, which sought to understand how organisations took shape and behaved. Perspectives within new institutionalism can be as diverse as economic rational-choice theory, which argues that institutional behaviour is driven by “rational” decision-making (e.g., Moe, 1990), to sociological approaches that seek to understand institutions through the socially constructed symbols that inform organisational principles and practices (Berger & Luckman, 1966). For instance, the prominence of “objectivity” as a symbol of journalistic identity can be understood in this sociological sense. There is also debate amongst new institutionalists (Jepperson, 1991) about the degree to which institutions should be conceptualised as formal organisations (such as news media companies) or informal symbols, norms, and practices (e.g., journalism). For the purposes of this book, I take a middle ground in this debate: viewing social news’ institutionalisation as the development of informal symbols and practices (e.g., news writing styles) that, across the 2010s, became formalised into an established genre produced by and identified with a number of established news organisations. At the same time, the business of social news is governed by symbols that define what social news is, how it is “done”, who it is produced by, who it is for, and how it is positions itself against other news genres and news actors.

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Social News: A Definition Now, having outlined how I will analyse social news, it is high time that I provide a definition of it. Here goes: social news is a genre of digital news that is symptomatic of and responsive to a platform ecology, and which operates according to logics of engagement, sociability, and personalisation. A keyword in this definition, therefore, is “genre”. Calling social news a “genre” means that I am not developing a typology. I am not arguing for a definitive list of social news outlets, nor do the outlets studied in this book set defined limits for social news. Rather, they are outlets which most clearly exemplify—and appear emblematic of—the transformations I am interested in, and which best demonstrate both the success and failures of social news in the 2010s. I am using the term “genre” in a broad sense, to refer to texts with certain formal conventions that are produced with particular audiences in mind (Gray, 2006, p. 53; Lomborg, 2014). Genre suggests “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein, 1967): be they stylistic, thematic, or compositional. Genres are thus “elastic” (Lomborg, 2014, p. 16) and “dynamic”. In this respect, legacy news outlets could conceivably be “social news” if they wrote news in certain ways and operated through the kinds of audience engagement strategies that I analyse in this book. The late 2010s even saw established news organisations adopt some of the stylistics associated with what I term social news, for example by including GIFs in articles in an attempt engage young audiences on social media. Yet I wish to maintain a distinction between the “social news” genre—as a textual form—from social news as an “institution”, in the ways discussed above. As I argue, focusing on texts can miss the significance of social news as an established institutionalised news business with formalised values and practices, and what this institutionalisation had to do with the platform economies, cultures, and politics of the past turbulent decade. On the other hand, the decline of some major social news outlets in the later 2010s does not preclude a future for the social news genre—a point I make in the penultimate “Futures” chapter. Another distinction I need to make is between how I am using the term “social news”, and how similar terms have been applied in the past. Previously, some scholars have called content aggregator platforms, such as Newsvine, Digg, and Reddit, “social news sites” (Goode, 2009; Wasike, 2011; Sood et  al., 2012), in reference to how these platforms allowed users to share news content with each other. “Social news” has also been

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used as a way of talking about platform-based news sharing in general (Bright, 2016). In a different respect, the term “social journalism” has previously been used to refer to journalistic practices that are more relational and reflexive than “objective” journalism. Social journalism, in these accounts, puts an emphasis on building relationships and collaborations with their participants and with their audiences (Hermida, 2012; Sweet et al., 2017). Participatory culture, news sharing, and relational journalism are all key components of the social news that this book studies. In this sense, I build upon this previous research. But these earlier terms were somewhat inconsistently applied, and often focused on platforms and practices rather than texts and the outlets producing them. In addition, the outlets I study in this book have even identified themselves as “social news”: for example, BuzzFeed had for years described itself as a “social news and entertainment company” (BuzzFeed, 2015). Indeed, it was BuzzFeed’s self-labelling that partly inspired this book. Lastly, before moving on, I should define “transformations”: a keyword that is closely linked to how I understand social news as a genre. “Transformations” is a keyword for three main reasons. First, it emphasises the “continuous” (Robinson et al., 2019) nature of the changes in news, journalism, and platforms that I study in this book; secondly, it draws attention to changes in both the content and form of news as well as in how journalism is understood normatively; and thirdly, it avoids an evolutionary framework of social news that would pitch the genre as a given outcome of advancing technology and culture (i.e., the “next stage” of news). Lastly, the term suggests pluralism. Social news embodies a variety of transformations. Mic and BuzzFeed, for instance, are not entirely the same in form, content, or business models—even if they are generic examples of social news. In this way, “transformations” serves my aim to provide an overarching account of and a general framework for analysing related, yet varying, phenomena.

A Turbulent Decade in News: Disruption, Crisis, and Opportunity So, what are these disruptions and transformations, exactly? Let me take a moment to sketch the scene for social news, for we live in a time now when the “digital”—and social media in particular—are often seen to be

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the chief menace to journalism and the news business. And social news was, for a while, believed to be a threat to legitimate ways of doing both. Throughout the 2010s, mainstream news and journalism remained in an ongoing cycle of crisis and opportunity as they attempted to adapt to a platform ecology. The decline in print readerships during the late 2000s and early 2010s fundamentally challenged traditional business models for many longstanding outlets, which were largely based around a mixture of subscription, classifieds, and print advertisements. Many outlets turned to digital subscriptions and web banner advertisements, but these have never been as lucrative as previous revenue models, despite some comeback successes for subscriptions during the latter half of the 2010s (Tameez, 2020). Due to this, many outlets experienced cuts and closures throughout the decade. But platforms such as Facebook appeared to present opportunities for old and new outlets in the early 2010s. “Going social” became a popular and exciting trend during this time, promising new audiences and easy clicks (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020), even if the growing market power of the tech giants was beginning to cause serious concerns for media companies (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018). Facebook’s algorithm—the programmed mechanism though which users’ newsfeeds are sorted—even seemed at first a boon for digital news outlets, especially those like UpWorthy and BuzzFeed which were particularly adept at playing to its strengths (Caplan & boyd, 2018). Furthermore, Facebook-led initiatives such as “Instant Articles”—a popular feature developed by Facebook to host content from recognised outlets, with the benefit of reducing load times for users— appeared to indicate the platform’s enthusiasm for news, even if they later raised concerns regarding a growing “platform dependency” (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018). And yet, within this context there emerged a supposed crisis regarding journalism’s professional integrity. As indicated by Brown’s derision of “cat videos”, the growing centrality of real-time audience data on the daily news selection process (Phillips, 2012) was viewed as precipitating an apparent decline in journalism. The belief that news outlets were subsuming themselves to metrics-hungry platform algorithms (Caplan & boyd, 2018) intensified longstanding concerns about audience-centric business models (Turner, 1999). Metrics-driven business models were beginning to be held responsible for phenomena such as “clickbait”: content that is designed to attract attention and clicks through highly emotive, sensational, and/or misleading headlines (Chen et  al., 2015). To observers, “clickbait” was exemplified by outlets such as the US-based UpWorthy.

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UpWorthy achieved major success on Facebook in the early 2010s by producing heart-warming stories bearing emotive headlines that were crafted to grab eyeballs in crowded social media feeds (Caplan & boyd, 2018). BuzzFeed, especially in its early years, was also regularly accused of producing “clickbait”. The bright colours of BuzzFeed’s website, its pop-cultural content, its listicles—as well as its liberal use of internet abbreviations in headlines—were all evidence, to observers such as Brown and Derek Thompson, of a new, “dark viral art” (Thompson, 2013). These concerns regarding social media damaging journalism were linked to other broader societal anxieties that emerged during the 2010s. Because platforms have not just been draining news of revenue—they have also been accused of breaking democracy. The centrality of platforms for news production and circulation raised fears about fragmented audiences, at a time when outlets were beginning to produce content for algorithmically personalised demographics. These concerns manifested into claims made early in the decade about “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” creating siloed social media spaces, because platforms were encouraging users to seek out views that interested them while algorithms worked to “filter” out opposing perspectives (Pariser, 2011; Jacobson et al., 2016). Scholars have since questioned these arguments by pointing to evidence that users are often highly connected and aware of each other (Bruns, 2019)—suggesting polarisation, but not “echo chambers”. And yet events in the second half of the 2010s only deepened anxieties about social media’s damaging effects on democratic stability. Most prominently, the 2016 US Presidential election: during which misinformation and hyperpartisan material on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram appeared to have influenced voters (Benkler et al., 2017). At the same time, the growth of far-right outlets such as the US-based Breitbart and The Daily Wire have seemed to confirm anxieties post-2016 about a more partisan, more polarised, and more click-driven news ecology. In such ways, the emergence of hyperpartisan digital outlets has drawn acute attention to the responsibilities that come with platform power. Bound up with these developments has also been the rise of what some observers have called the “post-truth” era (Suiter, 2016). Here, the power of “facts” has been diminished by falsehoods, conspiracies, and bullshit (as defined by Frankfurt, 2005). Like anxieties around “fragmentation”, the “post-truth” era has been characterised by the formation of hardened ideological battlelines and the resulting breakdown of “consensus” and common factual ground (Suiter, 2016; McIntyre, 2018). This “post-truth”

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characterisation, however, has tended to privilege a centrist worldview that blamed “both sides” for political instability while positing some “objective” reality, where facts exist, that eludes Left and Right partisans. Certainly, social news outlets, in particular Australia’s Junkee and Pedestrian, have often been critics of this kind of journalistic centrism (Hennessy & Story, 2017; Faruqi, 2017). Journalistic legitimacy has also been challenged by other political actors. Most notably, by politicians who elude rigorous questioning from journalists, who speak to distract and disorient rather than to inform, and who actively undermine the authority of journalists in the public eye. These strategies—commonly called “populist”, although there continues to be disagreement about what that label means (Bryant & Moffit, 2019; Sengul, 2019)—have tapped into a longstanding yet recently intensified distrust in the “mainstream” media across the Western world (Ladd, 2010). This distrust tends to frame journalists and legacy news institutions as out of touch “elites” (Hopkin & Rosamund, 2017). Yet, the origins of such distrust are not entirely invalid, as made clear by the numerous scholars who have proposed a similar critique of journalism and legacy news institutions. Catherine Lumby (1997), John Hartley (1999), and others (Hall et  al., 1978; Wilson II & Gutiérrez, 1985; Fraser, 1990), argued decades ago that established news outlets tend to share an elite notion of “news”, predicated on a narrow conception of politics and a problematic binary between “public” and “private” (Fraser, 1990). More recently, scholars have also noted how reporting routines tend to privilege the back-and-forth nature of the formal political process over the concerns and lived experiences of ordinary people (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2017). These critiques are especially pertinent in Australia, where a close relationship between journalists and politicians is institutionalised in the form of the Canberra Press Galley (Chubb et  al., 2018; also cf. the DC “beltway”). This is to say, as with the question of “clickbait” or “real news”, the question about how to “fix journalism” should not be an either/or—that is, either embrace “populist” media or return to “elite” journalism. Rather, what we need are new kinds of journalism, that address these real anxieties. I situate my research on social news within this backdrop. For social news, as I have noted, is a product of and a response to this context. Its emergence and expansion were bound up with, and in many ways, even embodied, the economic, technological, social, political, and journalistic crises that defined the 2010s. For example, Junkee and Pedestrian’s break from “objectivity”, with both outlets favouring an overtly political

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approach with an explicit target audience (that is, young people with progressive politics). Or BuzzFeed’s success with blurring established genre categories of “news” and “entertainment” by having listicles and “serious” news exist on the same webpage or even by making otherwise “legitimate” news articles entertaining. The British social news outlet Indy100, too, began as an attempt at adapting viral and trending logics to produce easily digestible news stories. Again, I am not arguing here that social news is the “next stage” of news, and a solution to journalism’s woes. But in this book, I explore what social news’ emergence, and partial success, in the 2010s had to do with the crises endured by the past turbulent decade, and how social news—not always, but often—embodied possibilities for a new, critical, informative, accessible and entertaining journalism.

Research Approach To develop this book’s ideas and arguments, I perform extensive research into the backgrounds and operations of the chosen social news outlets. I also draw upon many examples of social news content. Choice examples include articles, videos, and social media posts, as well as secondary material like industry literature and extant interviews with key social news people (such as BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti). I also look closely at website features such as logos, taglines, page layouts, and “About” sections as a way of examining, for example, the self-presentation of social news outlets and what these features can tell us about how these outlets position themselves in relation to their audiences. I also examine the techno-cultural context of social news through an analysis of Facebook’s and Twitter’s platform features: by unpacking the relationship between Facebook’s “react” button and Junkee headlines, for instance. I selected the outlets in this book because of their shared characteristics and their similar origins. They are also different enough—in terms of style and business models—to provide evidence of generic variations in social news. Moreover, while limited to the Anglosphere, the international variety of the outlets I have chosen demonstrates the global institutionalisation of social news. These case studies show that, while regional conditions can help explain generic differences, the global adoption of social news makes evident the distinct transnational forces shaping transformations in news and journalistic practice—most notably social media platforms, and their user cultures. And yet, my global selection also demonstrates the

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power of trends. It shows how, while the above-mentioned institutionalisation has been grounded in platforms, it has also in crucial ways been independent of them. Social news has become a “thing”—a genre—which other regional or global actors have adopted, and which audiences have come to recognise and demand. In this sense, I examine the constitution, growth, and institutionalisation of a global “field” (Bourdieu, 1993). Some of my chosen outlets, like BuzzFeed and Junkee, continue be major actors in this field. There are four outlets that serve as major examples in this book. These are the US-based BuzzFeed and Mic, and the Australian Pedestrian and Junkee. These outlets have this status because they most clearly demonstrate the kinds of generic variations I am interested in. They also usefully illustrate the ways in which regional differences helped shaped the fate of social news in the late 2010s. BuzzFeed and Mic, for instance, initially thrived in a larger, more competitive and investor-rich market than Australia. In the US, disruptive and growth-hungry Silicon Valley values powered digital startups that sought to do news differently for a new generation. In the case of BuzzFeed, the outlet did not even begin with news: instead, it started as a lab tracking viral online content, which soon invested in quizzes, listicles, and entertaining social media content. It only ventured into news afterwards, when BuzzFeed hired former Politico journalist Ben Smith, and it was this kind of entrepreneurial pivot that would later define the agile business models and blended content strategies of social news outlets. Both BuzzFeed and Mic have also been led by young, charismatic CEOs who did not have backgrounds in news, and whose public personalities initially reflected the savvy generational appeal and youthful energy of the two outlets. Mic¸ which began as PolicyMic in 2014, has especially leaned on the profile of its two millennial CEOs Chris Altcheck and Jake Horrowitz to produce its brand image of “millennial news” (Bloomgard-Smoke, 2014). In addition, Mic and BuzzFeed originally shared a funding model based around venture capitalist investment (Bloomgard-Smoke, 2014; Salmon, 2014). This early reliance of venture capitalists to fuel speedy growth and scale, though, would eventually have severe consequences for both outlets in the late 2010s. A similar pairing can also be made for Australia’s Junkee and Pedestrian. Both outlets, like BuzzFeed and Mic, had entrepreneurial origins. Junkee began its life in 2000, as a series of music and LGBTIQ websites with a business model based around digital marketing services and ticket selling,

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before moving to news in 2013. Pedestrian, on the other hand, started in 2005  as a pop-cultural bi-monthly DVD “magazine” that reported on youth subcultures—the “pedestrian.tv” news site launched later, in 2008. Still, while Junkee and Pedestrian have millennial founders who occasionally make appearances in the Australian media industry press, these founders have always lacked the more public profiles of their Mic and BuzzFeed counterparts. And crucially, unlike the two US social news outlets, Junkee and Pedestrian did not begin with a heavy reliance on investor funding: instead, they grew in the 2010s through revenue models that included banner advertising, jobs listings, and most importantly, native advertising, the latter a form of brand-sponsored news content. For this reason, as I explain in Chap. 6, these two Australian outlets have had more positive experiences during the past few years than BuzzFeed and Mic. Alongside these major outlets, I also examine others—such as UpWorthy, EliteDaily, and Indy100—which, while maybe not as exemplary as BuzzFeed and the like, still inform and illuminate the “story” of social news that I will be telling in the coming chapters. For instance, Indy100 is a useful example of an established outlet entering the social news market, demonstrating how even legacy media can be “social news” if they operate in certain ways.

Book Structure This core of this book is structured around a discussion of the three institutional logics of social news. I call these logics “engagement”, “sociability”, and “personalisation”. Proceeding and following the analysis of these logics are two chapters that establish and evaluate the lineages and futures of social news, respectively. Each chapter will draw on examples to illustrate the operations of these logics. While I reference and build upon academic theory and research, this book intends to be accessible, and not densely academic. The following chapter, “Lineages”, provides a historical context in which to situate social news. I examine the antecedents of social news in both print and other media—and demonstrate how evaluative questions about social news (“is it journalism?”, “is it real news?”, and so on) have a history in these older news genres. I argue that, when it comes to social news, in many respects we are treading on familiar ground. And yet, scholars need new analytical categories that build upon these earlier unresolved

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arguments, and which respond to the technological, economic, political, and cultural developments of the past two decades. Chapter 3 explores the first institutional logic of social news: engagement. I define engagement as the commercial prerogative of social news outlets to maximise audience attention metrics (clicks, likes, shares, etc.), as well as how these outlets attempt to foster more deeper and “meaningful” kinds of reader engagement, such as political engagement on civic issues. I use the term engagement instead of other terms such as “popularity” (in contrast to van Dijck and Poell (2013)) as I argue “engagement” can better capture these diverse audience strategies, and because content that accumulates interactions on platforms is not always “popular”. Chapter 4, on the social news logic of sociability, examines the creative fashion in which these outlets seek reader engagement, through organising their content around shareability. Social news outlets embody “platform vernaculars” (Gibbs et  al., 2015) and pop-cultural sensibilities in their content: and their fluency in these vernaculars and sensibilities (GIFs, memes, slang, etc.) makes them suitable for everyday socialising on platforms. My use of “sociability” is a way of reframing similar concepts such as “virality” (and even more reductive labels like “clickbait”) by placing emphasis on the interplay between users and texts. This contrasts with these other terms since they largely stress the ways in which texts (and platforms) make people “do” things. I also examine how this fluency in sociable platform vernaculars has been matched by social news’ longstanding literacy in the newsworthiness of social media. In this way, social news reporters were some of the earliest to take what happened online seriously. Personalisation, the topic of Chap. 5, refers to how social news outlets are co-ordinated around the personal, by being for and by “you”. I argue that personalisation is a business strategy, as these outlets deployed micro-­ targeting on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I also analyse Mic’s branding as a “millennial” news: an outlet not just for millennials, but also by millennials. But personalisation is not just about micro-targeting. Social news writers also tend to “personalise” their stories by positioning themselves within the stories they are telling and the issues they are reporting on. I argue that social news, therefore, tends to be not always “objective” or “balanced”, but neither is the genre necessarily biased, as its political perspectives are often explicit rather than concealed. Social news therefore features what I call a “transparent positionality”. Positionality, which I draw from standpoint theory (Hartstock, 1983; Haraway, 1988), is a

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critical concept that helps scholars intervene into the ongoing impasse around “objectivity” as a measure of trustworthiness and quality in news reporting. The book’s penultimate chapter—titled “Futures”—examines the state of social news in the early 2020s. After the social news “boom” of the mid-­2010s, is social news—as a genre, a news institution, and a journalistic practice—here to stay? In responding to this question, I contend that while the institution of social news persists and adapts, the conditions from which it emerged have shifted or even, in some cases, disappeared. Yet, positionality remains a crucial journalistic project. As we enter an increasingly unstable world distrustful of journalistic “elites”, I argue that the need for a self-reflexive journalism that critiques “objectivity” and “balance”, and which strongly relates to people’s lived experiences and supports social justice movements, is more pressing than ever. And lastly, the concluding chapter extends these critical reflections on social news, by examining the relationship between the logics that guided the genre and other, deeply concerning, political developments in recent years. From the vantage point of the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021, this book ends by critically evaluating the ongoing tensions between sociability and positionality, on the one hand, and constitutive humour (Phillips & Milner, 2017) and hyperpartisan politics on the other. But it’s a long way to the Capitol Hill. And anyway, we first need to go back in time, so we can begin the story of social news—a story that is a journey through a turbulent decade marked by immense crisis and transformation. By telling this story, this book provides not just a better understanding of a news genre that was so emblematic of the 2010s, but also new knowledge about what journalism can and should be.

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Gapper, J. (2014, 2 January). You Won’t Believe What Viral Content Does to News. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/05c084ae-­69cc-­11 e3-­89ce-­00144feabdc0. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015). #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media, and Platform Vernacular. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 255–268. Goode, L. (2009). Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy. New Media & Society, 11(8), 1287–1305. Gray, J. (2006). Watching with The Simpsons. Routledge. Hartley, J. (1999). What Is Journalism? The View from Under a Stubbie Cap. Media International Australia, 90(1), 15–33. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law & Order. Palgrave. Hallin, D.  C. (1992). The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism. Journal of Communication, 42(3), 14–25. Hartstock, N. C. M. (1983). The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In S. Harding & M. B. Hintikka (Eds.), Discovering Reality (pp. 283–310). Springer. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hennessy, J., & Story, H. (2017, 15 August). Tom Tilley spoke to a neo-Nazi on ‘Hack’ & people are understandably pissed. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/no-­nazis-­on-­triple-­j-­ok/. Hermida, A. (2012). Social Journalism: Exploring How Social Media Is Shaping Journalism. In E. Siapera & A. Veglis (Eds.), The Handbook of Global Online Journalism (pp. 309–328). John Wiley & Sons. Hopkin, J., & Rosamund, B. (2017). Post-truth Politics, Bullshit and Bad Ideas: ‘Deficit fetishism’ in the UK. New Political Economy, 23(6), 641–655. Jacobson, S., Myung, E., & Johnson, S. L. (2016). Open Media or Echo Chamber: The Use of Links in Audience Discussions on the Facebook Pages of Partisan News Organisations. Information, Communication and Society, 19(7), 875–891. Jepperson, R. L. (1991). Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism. In W.  W. Powell & P.  J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational (pp. 143–163). University of Chicago Press. Ladd, J.  M. (2010). The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting. Political Behavior, 32(4), 567–585. Lomborg, S. (2014). Social Media, Social Genres: Making Sense of the Ordinary. Routledge. Lumby, C. (1997). Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s. Allen & Unwin. McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-Truth. The MIT Press.

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Meese, J., & Hurcombe, E. (2020). Facebook, News Media and Platform Dependency: The Institutional Impacts of News Distribution on Social Platforms. New Media & Society. Published online first: https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444820926472. Moe, T. (1990). Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations, 6, 213–253. Napoli, P. M. (2014). Automated Media: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Algorithmic Media Production and Consumption. Communication Theory, 24, 340–360. Nielsen, R.  K., & Ganter, S.  A. (2018). Dealing with Digital Intermediaries: A Case Study of the Relations Between Publishers and Platforms. New Media & Society, 20(4), 1600–1617. Owens, L. C. (2008). Network News: The Role of Race in Source Selection and Story Topic. Howard Journal of Communications, 19(4), 355–370. Phillips, A. (2012). Sociability, Speed and Quality in the Changing News Environment. Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 669–679. Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity. Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. Penguin. Rakow, L. F., & Kranich, K. (1991). Women as Sign in Television News. Journal of Communication, 41(1), 8–23. Robinson, S., Lewis, S. C., & Carlson, M. (2019). Locating the ‘digital’ in digital journalism Studies: Transformations in Research. Digital Journalism, 7(3), 368–377. Salmon, F. (2014, 11 June). BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long. Matter. https://medium.com/matter/buzzfeeds-­j onah-­p eretti-­g oes-­l ong-­ e98cf13160e7. Sengul, K. (2019). Populism, Democracy, Political Style and Post-truth: Issues for Communication Research. Communication Research and Practice, 5(1), 88–101. Sood, S.  O., Churchill, E.  F., & Antin, J. (2012). Automatic Identification of Personal Insults on Social News Sites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(2), 270–285. Sweet, M., et  al. (2017). Outlining a Model of Social Journalism for Health. Australian Journalism Review, 39(2), 91–106. Tameez, H. (2020). For the First Time, The New York Times’ Digital Subscriptions Generate More Revenue Than Its Print Ones. NiemanLab. https://www. niemanlab.org/2020/11/for-­t he-­f irst-­t ime-­t he-­n ew-­y ork-­t imes-­d igital-­ subscriptions-­generate-­more-­revenue-­than-­its-­print-­ones/. Thompson, D. (2013, 23 February). Ad war: BuzzFeed, the Dish, and the Perils of Sponsored Content. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ archive/2013/02/ad-­war-­buzzfeed-­the-­dish-­and-­the-­perils-­of-­sponsored­content/273406/.

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Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsman’s Notions of Objectivity. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660–679. Turner, G. (1999). Tabloidisation, Journalism and the Possibility of Critique. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(1), 59–76. Usher, N. (2021). News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. Columbia University Press. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14. Wahl-Jorgensen, K., Berry, M., Garcia-Blanco, I., et  al. (2017). Rethinking Balance and Impartiality in Journalism? How the BBC Attempted and Failed to Change the Paradigm. Journalism, 18(7), 781–800. Wasike, B. S. (2011). Framing Social News Sites: An Analysis of the Top Ranked Stories on Reddit and Digg. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 27(1), 57–68. Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell.

CHAPTER 2

Lineages

Introduction Social news has deep roots. While the genre emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the format of social news—its informal and sometimes irreverent style, its personal tone, and its youthful self-­ presentation—has precursors in, for example, 1980s and 90s niche print media as well as the late-night television programmes of the 2000s. Evaluative questions about social news—whether it is “proper journalism”—also have a history in these older news genres. Debates about what should and should not count as journalism did not begin with BuzzFeed: instead, professional journalism has policed its boundaries for decades. In this chapter, I examine how a long history of journalistic innovation and incumbent reaction established the conditions for social news. I begin this chapter with the rise of “professional journalism” in the early twentieth century, by examining how it emerged as a response to the “yellow” journalism popular in the late 1800s. In doing so, I argue that “professional” journalism—the kind of “objective”, “balanced”, and factual journalism that is now synonymous with journalism itself—is a historical construct, not a “natural” development (i.e., not something journalism “just is”). I then look at the challenges professional journalism has faced, from the “new” journalism of the 1960s-1970s, to niche, queer, “tabloid” media in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as late-night “fake news”

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television in the 2000s. I also review contemporary debates about the merits of particular modes and models of these new forms. In particular, I focus on the so-called tabloidisation of news in the 1980s and 90s, as well as related fears during this time about how “entertainment” was supposedly replacing “news”. Entertainment, in these fears, was seen as both a threat to civic-minded journalism as well as a dangerous societal distraction from “serious” news and public debate. These narratives of decline, however, were themselves critiqued by numerous scholars, most notably those from marginalised backgrounds who identified the gendered, racial, and class character of such binaries between “news” and “entertainment”, and “objective” and “emotive” content. In these respects, I approach this history through a “boundary work” framework (Gieryn, 1999) by examining how institutionalised actors attempt to defend themselves and their “field” (Bourdieu, 1993) from new entrants that seek to challenge, expand, and transform that field. At the same time, I argue that niche and other experiments in news themselves underwent a process of institutionalisation. In many ways, then, the experiences of social news outlets like BuzzFeed echo what has come before. In capping off this chapter, I turn to digital disruptions to news and journalism in the 2000s, in the form of “independent” born-digital outlets and a growing “participatory culture”. I argue that these techno-­ cultural transformations, from which social media platforms emerged, precipitated the rise of social news in the following decade.

“Professional” Journalism For a text as global as news, there is a remarkable stability in format and style. News, that is, tends to largely look the same. Whether in print or on television, mainstream news tends to embody conventions that privilege certain modes of address and particular topics: the dispassionate reporter, bulletins, news desks, and politics before sport, for example. Even if outlets are biased, there is still the pretence of objectivity, in so far as the reporters rarely insert themselves or make explicit their views. These qualities are still used as powerful indicators of journalistic legitimacy (Tandoc Jr. & Thomas, 207), despite preferences from social media users for personalised and “authentic” content (Abidin, 2015; Baym, 2015). Yet, this stability can hide the many experiments in news and journalism that have tried—sometimes with success—to do things differently. In this respect, what I will be calling “professional” journalism is not a “natural” way of

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making news, but instead seems that way due to a progressive institutionalisation of practices that have become “legitimate”. Professional journalism can be traced back to the early decades of the twentieth century. While it is difficult to locate an exact origin, it was in the US where the most vocal early adherents of what we now call “journalism” were located (Nerone, 2012). Partly a product of the liberal atmosphere of the Progressive Era (1896-1917), but also emerging from a frustration and embarrassment with a popular, sensational, and rabidly commercial so-called yellow press,1 this new, professionalised journalism defined itself by its principles: most notably, objectivity (Nerone, 2012). It was built as a public-spirited press: as Joseph Pulitzer famously proclaimed in 1904, professional journalists were to be instilled with the values of “community”, not commerce. It was the “public”, not profit, who they would serve (1904). This “public” was itself a peculiar construction, and a departure from a partisan nineteenth century party system. Rather than consisting of camps competing for legislative power, the “public” valorised by journalists such as Pulitzer was predicated on a democratic model that placed the “informed citizen” at its centre (Zuckerman, 2014) and in whom active participation in political debates was assumed. This was a more individualistic democratic model than the nineteenth party system, as the onus was placed on ordinary citizens—who collectively formed “the public”—to be informed and active in the political process. Here, journalists need only—indeed, should only—dispassionately report the “facts”, and the public would decide what to make of them. In this sense, professional journalism also began with rationalist assumptions about public debate (Baym, 2010, p. 12). Yet, even despite these idealistic goals, “objectivity” also had commercial appeal: as Michael Schudson has argued (1978), during this early period objectivity became a marker of accurate and reliable news product within crowded markets (or newsstands). Objectivity, therefore, was not just ethical, but also competitive. These assumptions about the “public”, which I critically examine throughout this book, continue to underpin contemporary forms of professional journalism. Indeed, one major reason why social news is so, well, 1  “Yellow press” is an American term that emerged in the 1890s to describe inexpensive newspapers characterised by sensational and often outright fake content (such as made-up interviews). The “yellow” descriptor came from a popular comic strip, “the Yellow Kid”, which was published by two major sensationalist papers, New York World and New York Journal (PBS, 1999).

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newsworthy, is because it often explicitly challenges these assumptions. Nonetheless, the professional journalism described above reached its high point during what Daniel C. Hallin has called the “high-modern” era of news in the mid-twentieth century (1992). The 1950s-1970s is often looked back on nostalgically, especially in the US, as a “golden age” of news and journalism. Indeed, figures like the television news anchor Walter Cronkite continue to represent the “ideal” newscaster—calm, authoritative, articulate, and trustworthy—while the breaking of the Watergate scandal remains a symbol of the best kind of rigorous, investigative journalism working fearlessly in the public interest. In Australia and the UK, current affairs programmes like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) 4Corners and the BBC’s Panorama both date back to this “golden age” and endure as prestigious examples of this heroic journalism that shines a spotlight (as per the Panorama tagline) on what the public needs to know (Turner, 2005). It was during this “high-­ modern” period, then, that the “fourth estate” was most fully realised as the public-serving institution familiar to us today. Of course, not all news around the world during this period lived up to these high standards— but that this vision of journalism had successfully positioned itself as the standard, demonstrated how widespread the principles, cultures, format conventions, and institutional structures of “professional journalism” had become taken-for-granted. Professional journalism faced its first major challenge in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were concerns about a growing “tabloidisation” of print and television news across the Anglophone world (Turner, 1999; Baym, 2005). Those using the term argued that news was shifting away from “information-based treatments on social issues” in favour of “entertaining stories on lifestyles and celebrities”, as well as a greater emphasis on visual spectacle (Turner, 1999, p. 59). Perhaps the most famous criticism of tabloidisation was made by Neil Postman in the US, who claimed that the public was “amusing themselves to death” because entertainment was killing news (1985). Postman attributed this crisis to the then-dominance of television. Drawing on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (1964), Postman argued that television privileged entertainment and superficiality over a more deliberative mode of communication, to the detriment of public debate. Critics of commercial news also included the respected Watergate journalist Carl Berstein, who denounced television as appealing to the

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“lowest common denominator”, and claimed it was creating an “idiot culture” that was stuffing “ordinary Americans with garbage” such as crime, sex, violence, and “freakshow reporting” (1992). Similar concerns about “tabloidisation” were present in Australia, particularly in regard to the decline of rigorous current affairs programming on commercial television networks (Turner, 1999). Over in the UK, powerful tabloid newspapers also became notorious for hounding celebrities and royals (so much so that the tabloids were blamed for car crash that killed Princess Diana of Wales in 1997 (Samuelson, 2017)). The introduction of cable television also played a considerable role in shifting news and journalism away from the principles of the “high modern” era. 24-hour cable news, with their ability to provide non-stop coverage of disasters, elections, scandals, and wars, changed the tempo of a news cycle that for so long was tied to daily, rather than live, rhythms (Baym, 2010). Cable news also brought new actors, such as the Fox News channel in the US, who positioned themselves against so-called mainstream media and became influential partisan players in news and politics. Moreover, the rise of cable news in the US was accompanied by a deregulation of federal laws that previously mandated news and current affairs programming (Aufderheide, 1999). In his analysis, Geoffrey Baym described this period as being characterised by a “post-modern” paradigm. The binaries which shaped professional journalism—fact versus opinion, public versus private, service versus commercialism, and information versus entertainment—were becoming “deeply obscured” (Jones & Baym, 2010, p. 281). Sometimes, these binaries were simply overturned. For example, the Reagan-era Federal Communications Commission chairman Mark Fowler led a deregulatory approach that recast citizens as “consumers”, and the “public interest” as simply consumer demand (Baym, 2010, p. 13), thereby marking a dramatic shift away from the longstanding “professional journalism” model of public service news. Here, in a marketised logic, people were to be given what they wanted, rather than what they supposedly “needed”. The media landscape and the norms which governed it were being reshaped and transformed by a period marked by greater commercialism and an embrace of “greed”. Deregulation also accelerated media concentration, leading to the large conglomerates overseeing radio, television, films, and news that are familiar to us today.

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The Discontents of Professional Journalism And yet, these narratives of decline often performed a gatekeeping function. Catharine  Lumby, for example, argued that implicit in concerns about “tabloidisation” was a desire to protect traditional—that is, gendered—boundaries between “public” and “private” issues, in terms of what was worthy of public discussion (1997, pp. 117–118). Moreover, Lumby identified that things that were labelled “tabloid”—such as emotive forms of storytelling, personal and romantic relationships, parenting, consumerism, and other “lifestyle” content—were also traditionally categorised as feminine. Therefore, Lumby argued that tabloidisation, rather than existing purely as a threat to journalism, could instead have progressive potential in so far as it blurred “the boundaries between women’s stuff and traditional public policy matters” (1997, pp. 117–118). By legitimising these “feminine” domains—such as domestic life—as newsworthy, journalism could speak to and address private issues of public concern. There was also a common concern that tabloidisation was privileging “soft” stories, meaning the “private” topics mentioned above, at the expense of “hard” news—and yet these “hard” and “soft” categories were gendered as well. Lana F.  Rakow and Kimberlie Kranich, for instance, noted that “hard” news tended to mean “serious, important” stories about men (and often reported by men as well), while “soft” news tended to refer to “human interest [and] lifestyle” stories that were the “purview of women reporters and readers” (1991, p. 11). Here, “hard” news was often combative: it conveyed the kind of rigorous and fearless investigative journalism performed by heroes like the Watergate reporters (Hartley, 1999). Journalism, in this framing, was good when it was rough, and when it stuck to cold, hard facts. In this way, not only did the hard and soft binary show prejudice towards certain topics, it also tended to implicitly discriminate against  a journalistic approach that approached its subjects and its readers in a relational manner. To be clear, those warning of a tabloidisation of news were indeed raising real concerns about commercialisation threatening what should be a public good; but by policing what should and should not be counted as news, they were also often performing institutional boundary work. That is, when confronted with challenges to their institutional and epistemological power, professional journalism reinscribed its borders with narratives about legitimate insiders and illegitimate outsiders (Carlson, 2016).

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Professional journalism’s norms were also built upon problematic assumptions about the so-called public sphere. Nancy Fraser, for example, has famously argued that Habermasian conceptions of the “public sphere” (1962)—which, like “professional journalism”, were predicated on a deliberative and rational democratic process—tended to exclude that which the “masculinist ideology labels ‘private’” (Fraser, 1990, p. 77). Baym, too, has argued that despite the lingering nostalgia for the “high modern” era, its principles “offered a narrow understanding of the kind of issues, identities, voices, and values that could be considered properly political” (2010). And not only was the political domain in the “high modern” conception narrow, and its deliberative assumptions problematic, “professional journalism” also tended to be somewhat paternalist in nature. James M. Carey, for instance, has noted that the “high modern” journalist has tended to speak at and for the (ideal) citizen, and in doing so has denied people’s participation in the news except as an imagined and uniformed audience (1993). The universalist assumptions underpinning professional journalism’s worldview—that the news simply showed how “things were”—partially enabled this paternalist outlook, in so far as it did not easily permit alternative perspectives, or even the possibility of one. Hence, Cronkite’s signature signoff: “that’s the way it is”. Meanwhile, as commercialised as most tabloid media were, by broadening the scope of what was considered newsworthy tabloids also created more spaces for audiences to participate—or at least, to be better represented. Bonner noted, for example, that “lifestyle” programmes such as gardening shows, home renovations programmes, and daytime talk shows actually indicated the positive potential and occasionally demonstrated the ability of “soft” or “tabloid” television to draw upon and open up “ordinary [and] everyday concerns” (2003, p. 32). In this sense, popular programmes like Oprah and Ricki Lake could be seen to be engaging with and giving voice to a “mass subject” that the high modern model largely spoke to and for (Masciarotte, 1991). In doing so the former “mass subject”, in these arguments, was dismantled, providing a space for all kinds of identities, especially marginalised ones (along gender, race, and class lines) to be represented (Masciarotte, 1991, p. 103). However, the tabloidisation debates can overshadow the different kinds of news and journalism that have long existed outside of institutional boundaries. For instance, the extensive history of far-left newspapers in the United States and elsewhere (Hamilton, 2000). These newspapers, such as those printed by socialist and communist parties, were often

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defined by their explicit ideological stance. They situated themselves within class struggle, against defined political and “class” enemies, and reported on events through an explicit and consistent lens (such as a Marxist analysis). In doing so, these far-left newspapers critiqued the notion of a reporter as a dispassionate “observer”. Other experiments in journalism, such as the 1970s “gonzo” journalism made famous by US writer Hunter S.  Thompson, also challenged the above-it-all self-­ positioning that characterises much of legacy news. Gonzo journalism was distinguished by an energetic and participatory first-person narration style, that embraced the feelings and emotions (i.e., the personality and subjectivity) of a journalist in the midst of reporting a story (Caron, 1985). Humour and profanity were also common in this style. The so-called New Journalism, a term for an alternative journalistic style coined by US writer Tom Wolfe, and whose heyday was also in the 1970s, similarly shared the immersive aims and subjective style of gonzo (Wolfe, 1972). These New Journalists believed that “truth” was conveyed better through this personal and experiential style than through cold hard facts. Feeling, therefore, was not an irrelevant and potentially dangerous impediment to the journalist’s job of relaying the truth to audiences: instead, it was essential to this task. The social movements of the 1980s and 1990s also brought new kinds of alternative and niche news genres. For example, in 1980s Australia an underground press of LGBTIQ newspapers and magazines—what Shirleene Robinson has called the “queer press” (2008)—formed part of the fight against homophobia during the HIV/AIDs crisis and provided a space for community and identity formation (Robinson, 2010). And in the 1990s, “zines”—amateur and subcultural comics, pamphlets, and magazines—were celebrated for their “radically democratic and participatory ideal” (Duncombe, 1997). Zines were experimental in format and style, and rather than being produced and distributed through conventional and institutionalised channels, were instead often hand-drawn or photocopied, and were circulated through alternative networks. These networks included small bookshops, mailing lists, live music scenes, as well as the early Web. Sometimes, they were simply distributed through friendship networks, like a print equivalent of word-of-mouth (Harris, 1999). For Stephen Duncombe, the makers of zines, dubbed “zinersters”, privileged “authenticity” and a “DIY” ethic that promoted “mak[ing] your own culture” in response to an era marked by the “rapid centralisation of corporate media” (1997: 7). Zines were also political. Anita Harris argued

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that zines played a significant role in Australian feminist movements during the 1990s, in that they were used as “grassroots, collectivist means to promote women’s rights and agitate and campaign around feminist issues” (1999). In this way, zines formed strong links to subcultural political movements, such as the punk and counter-cultural “riot grrl” movement of the late 1990s (Comstock, 2001). Zines, here, were an important practice for young women in this movement to revise and re-envision established notions of girlhood, womanhood, and feminism (Comstock, 2001, p. 384). In such ways, these alternative, underground, and niche news genres formed what Michael Warner called “counter-publics” (2002) in that they were often a response to being excluded by institutionalised professional journalism. The threads of social news—its positionality, its mixing of genres, and its challenge to professional journalism’s “objectivity”—are clear in the above examples from the previous century. And yet the 2000s again reignited the debate around “entertainment”, this time in regard to whether humour and satire could be reconciled with journalism.

The Original “fake news”: Innovative Journalism in Late-Night Television During the 2000s, late-night satirical television became a significant news source for many Americans. Programmes such as The Colbert Report (2005-2014) and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1999-2015) provided daily comedic commentary on news. These programmes commented on current events as well as how these events were being reported on in mainstream news outlets. They did so by blurring generic boundaries. The Daily Show, for example, was structured like a nightly news programme, with Stewart serving as the anchor. Yet unlike a dry news bulletin that characterises most television news, Stewart delivered individual stories and commentary segments with the comedic sensibilities of a late-night talk show host, complete with audible laughter from a live audience. And like a talk show, celebrity guests were regularly invited on to the set to promote their latest films or books. The Daily Show would even defer to its “correspondents” for satirical news updates, using this gimmick to make fun of, for instance, the absurdities of round-the-clock news coverage of celebrity scandals. The Colbert Report was very similar in format but took a satirical approach, styling itself as a deliberate parody of conservative

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pundits like Bill O’Reilly from Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. Stephen Colbert, the host of The Colbert Report, used this satirical persona to mock the self-seriousness of television pundits as well as what Colbert saw as the growing toxic influence of partisan news media. In these ways, both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report utilised a news and punditry veneer to parody and critique news and current affairs genres. Simultaneously, these programmes also exploited the familiarity of these formats to perform a news function: that is, inform viewers of salient current events and issues. To the incredulity of mainstream news outlets, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report achieved rating success—especially with young people. CNN, for example, reacted somewhat disapprovingly when a 2004 survey from the Pew Research Centre found that almost a quarter of young people went to Jon for their political news (CNN, 2004). The Washington Post had a similar reaction when Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry appeared on The Daily Show midday through his 2004 campaign. When reporter Lisa de Moraes asked why Kerry appeared with Stewart rather on “an actual news show”, Kerry’s campaign representatives argued that they believed that The Daily Show was a great way to reach young voters (2004). And viewership continued to grow into the late-2000s: by 2008, both programmes were receiving domestic audience figures in the millions (Vulture, 2008). In such ways, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report reignited debates about what counts as “real” news and who could be called a “legitimate” journalist. Early on, these debates were characterised by what we have already seen: boundary work, that is, performed on the behalf of “professional” journalists concerned by the fact that young people were getting their news from a cable comedy programme. In 2004, for instance, the US anchor Ted Koppel remarked with concern that more viewers than he was “comfortable with” were getting their news “from the comedy channel” (de Moraes, 2004). And yet more strikingly was the long-running—almost dogged—insistence from Stewart and Colbert that they were not “real news”. In a kind of reverse tabloidisation, Stewart and Colbert increasingly gained recognition in the 2000s as serious forces in news and journalism. For Stewart, George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 was a watershed in this respect. That year, New York newspaper Newsday named Stewart the most important newscaster in the country (Baym, 2010, p. 103), The Daily Show won a Peabody Award, and the US TV Critics Association nominated the programme one of the best newscasts in the

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country (TCA, 2004). And following the debut of The Colbert Report in 2005, the show and Colbert as host also gained critical acclaim for skewering the news and partisan punditry, as well as institutional recognition. The Report won two Peabody awards for its “masterful mix of punditry [and] parody” (Peabody, 2007) and for “taking television comedy into the real world of American electioneering” (Peabody, 2011). Towards the end of its run, the Report even grew in popularity with the Obama administration (famously, the former President guest-hosted the show in its final month). But, both shows insisted until the end that they were simply comedians and entertainers doing “fake news”. These enduring assertions from Stewart and Colbert sparked academic interest, once again, in the boundaries between “news”, “journalism”, and “entertainment”—and whether these boundaries are actually even reflective of how audiences engage with politics and public affairs in the first place. Baym, for example, argued that rather than being just “comedians”, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were instead working within the traditions of professional journalism. The shows’ criticisms of cable news punditry, of spectacle driven-programming, and of mainstream news’ tendency to privilege a two-party framing of politics over a more complex presentation of the issues, all appealed to a facts-based vision of public-­ interest journalism that contemporary news had apparently strayed from. That is, Stewart and Colbert appealed to a “high-modern” ethic against what Baym called the “postmodern” turn in news. For this reason, Baym argued that Stewart and Colbert represented a then-emerging “neo-­ modern” ethos, one that re-asserted the “high-modern ideals of public information and democratic accountability” yet communicated through the “style” of postmodernism (2010, p. 20). In their critique of “truthiness” and spin, Stewart and Colbert strongly advocated for a “return” to reason as the foundation for public discourse. Baym believed that, while the methods of late-night “fake news” may diverge sharply from Cronkite’s nightly news, the popularity of their neo-modern approach had the potential to “reinvigorate” broadcast journalism (Jones & Baym, 2010, p. 281). Stewart and Colbert were also known for their satirical and even often vulgar, take on the news. But rather than being impediments to their journalism, this sometimes-crude style was integral to their appeal. These hosts were successful at engaging diverse audiences precisely because they reflected everyday—that is, often emotional and profanity-filled—political discussion, in lieu of the much more formal and distanced language that dominates professional journalism and traditional news formats (Jones,

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2010, p. 44). Baym called this blurring of boundaries between news, parody, and late-night entertainment a kind of “discursive integration” (2005). At the same time, this “integrated” style provoked Baym and others to re-­evaluate those artificial boundaries altogether, by again noting how such boundaries failed to reflect how everyday people participated in public life. What resulted was a turn towards “entertainment” as a site of journalistic potential. For example, rather than entertainment being something that journalism is opposed to, Baym argued that Stewart and Colbert were instead producing “news that entertains”—an emerging genre that amused, but also stimulated critical thought (Baym, 2005, p. 273). In this sense, “entertainment” is “fun” and frequently funny, yet it also provides something interesting to consider (Baym, 2005, p. 274)—it can entertain a thought. “Entertainment” therefore is not simply about distraction, as Postman would have it. People were not “amusing themselves to death” by watching too much Colbert Report. Instead, entertainment can be intellectually stimulating, or at the least very engaging. By recognising this, we could reframe news-watching as simply being a civic “duty” or “responsibility”—as it has been conceived in the “informed citizen” model of professional journalism—to something that is both overtly pleasurable and democratically beneficial. Hence, for Baym and others (Jones & Baym, 2010), programmes like The Daily Show demonstrated that civic-­ minded news could be combined with innovative entertainment, thereby enriching—rather than harming—journalism. While entertaining news had been experimented with before, it was the popular and critical success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report that really sparked a decisive “cultural shift in what [was] acceptable as news” (Mourão et al., 2016, p. 215) across the Anglophone world. And yet, as both shows’ increasingly close relationship with the Obama administration demonstrated, the “fake news” genre which Stewart and Colbert popularised also grew to become an established mainstay in the global Anglophone news ecology. That is, it underwent a process of institutionalisation: it became a recognisable genre with stabilised conventions, norms, demographics, and audience expectations; and an established player within the news industry, with distinct yet normalised relationships with politicians and major media organisations. Indicative of this has been the emergence beyond the US of programmes like The Daily Show. For example, shows such as The Weekly with Charlie Pickering (2015-) and (the short-lived) Tonightly with Tom Ballard (2017-2018), produced by

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Australia’s public broadcaster, both share much with the original “fake news”. Now, before we move on to social news, we must backtrack somewhat. Because alongside the growth of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were other key developments in news media such as the growth of the internet and crucially, what became known as “participatory culture”. Within these developments, we can locate the digitally disruptive lineages of social news.

Digital Disruptions and Participatory Culture By the late 1990s and early 2000s, most major news outlets in the Anglophone world were on the Web. Their websites, however, remained basic, and mostly consisted of repurposed material from their newspapers or television channels (Boczkowski, 2004; Turner, 2005, pp. 139–140). Digital innovation was instead happening elsewhere. This innovation tended to embody an alternative or anti-establishment ethos, grounded in the networking technologies and liberating ideals of the early Web. For example, in Australia a number of alternative online news outlets were established in the early 2000s. Most prominent in this regard is Crikey, which launched in 2000 as a subscription-based news site. For much of its history, Crikey has positioned itself as an “independent and critical voice” within Australia’s highly concentrated media environment. In its early years, Crikey targeted what it framed as a popular frustration with commercial mainstream news media—although it did so through appeals to “journalistic attitude”. Big mainstream news media was “wimpy” and beholden to political influence and advertising money, whereas Crikey—so it claimed—used the internet and subscription dollars so it could be accountable only to its readers (Turner, 2005, p. 143). In these ways, Crikey did not discard the principles of professional journalism (independence, truth, and a kind of masculine antagonism towards institutional power) but instead more fully realised them through the affordances of the internet. Or at least, that is what Crikey would have their readers believe. The Web, then, brought promises of both independence and media diversity—and this would become a theme for social news. And outside of Australia, there are other outlets like Crikey, for example Media Lens in the UK (founded in 2001) and the US-based Democracy Now! (launched first as a radio and TV programme in 1996). While these UK and US outlets have politics further to the left than Crikey, they have

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similarly positioned themselves as reader-supported alternatives to corporate media: their apparent trustworthiness contrasted against a mainstream media tainted by advertising dollars and government influence. Beyond general news, the Web also brought with it opportunities for new kinds of niche, queer, and interest-based news sites, from which Junkee (originally a music and LGBTIQ+ news site) and Pedestrian (first a pop-culture digital “magazine”) made their start. Yet, digital disruptions in the 2000s went beyond alternative media. Broader techno-cultural transformations also had a massive impact on news. Most importantly was the emergence of what was later labelled “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006). The Web became more accessible to those without coding or programming skills thanks to easy-to-use interactive features (such as posts and comments on news sites), collaborative digital spaces (such as webforums), and self-publishing platforms (for example YouTube and other video sharing sites). As a result, the Internet appeared to be unleashing participatory—even democratic—possibilities. Axel Bruns, for instance, noted how websites such as the US-based Indymedia, which enabled users to upload and comment on news published elsewhere, were creating new participatory spaces which had the potential to challenge the “gatekeepers” of news by sharing stories which were relevant to users, rather than what nightly news and newspapers deemed most important (2005). Due to this, Bruns claimed that these websites and the “gatewatching” practices of their users could upend media power (2005). Blogs were another digital genre that achieved renown during the 2000s. Short for “web logs” and often hosted on early social networking platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger, blogs tended to foreground the personal and were frequently written by non-journalists. Nor were they even always writing “news”. Indeed, many blogs and bloggers documented the everyday (Blood, 2002). Yet a few bloggers, such as Salam Pax, became famous—in no small way due to journalistic and scholarly recognition—for their on-the-ground reporting which often countered mainstream news, particularly during the Iraq War (Redden, 2003). Other bloggers, such as the conservative British-American writer Andrew Sullivan, also gained notoriety as popular commentators on news and current affairs by combining the personalising affordances and introspective conventions of the blogging genre with the kind of punditry common to newspaper columns and cable news (Singer, 2006; Sullivan, 2009). In addition, the commenting cultures that formed through the interactive functions of the major blogging platforms became leading examples of

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what would later be ordinary features of news websites and social media posts. In these ways, blogging precipitated what would become common elements of platforms: such as the privileging of personal voice (and opinion), user comments manifesting as “engagement”, and liveness. The latter would later be fundamental to news engagement on social media after the microblogging platform Twitter grew in popularity in the 2010s. Some social news identities even have roots in blogs. For example, The Huffington Post—which began as a news aggregator and blogging platform—was co-founded by BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Alongside and bound-up with blogging was the arrival of so-called citizen journalists. Like with blogs, this “new” journalism emerged from “participatory culture” and the widespread adoption of mobile technologies such as camera phones (Gillmor, 2006; Goode, 2009). The term “citizen journalism” covered a range of practices and media artefacts: from people uploading video content to YouTube, to popular blogs and the live-tweeting of news events (Wall, 2015, p. 789). Generally, however it was used to describe user-led disruptions to mainstream (typically corporate) news media (Allan, 2007). In such ways citizen journalism, like with blogging, tended to be framed as a challenge to the boundary work performed by professional journalists—that, outside of these institutions and through a more personal relationship with events (and therefore the “truth”), these “citizens” could more accurately relay the “facts”. For citizen journalists, it was their proximity to the news and their amateur status that were markers of trust. It was still journalism, but it was not “professional”. Indeed, it could have a better claim to journalistic ideals precisely because it was breaking from institutional and professional notions of legitimacy. This kind of discursive positioning would also become a major element of social news, as discussed in Chap. 5. Some of these amateur practices, such as live video and live tweets, have also now become normalised elements in news. Often, as we will see in Chap. 3, these amateur practices serve as important “content” for social news articles—indicating the “hybrid” (Chadwick, 2013) character of our current news media. Many blogs did not outlive the 2000s, their heyday having now long passed. While there were many early proponents of “participatory culture”, we have since seen how the turn towards platforms and user generated content has resulted in a much more oligarchic, partisan, and conflict-fuelled internet experience than that envisioned in the mid-2000s. But, as I demonstrate over the next few chapters, both the participatory practices of “gatewatching” and the personalised newswriting style

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popularised by blogging would become foundational elements of social news. Mundane and everyday forms of “participatory culture”—such as the creation and sharing of memes and other pop-cultural artefacts, such as GIFs—would also become synonymous with social news’ journalism. In such ways, we will see how social news is both a product of and a response to platform-based “digital disruption” as well as our sociable and participatory internet.

Conclusion The history of journalism is a story of innovation, institutionalisation, and boundary work. In this chapter, I provided an overview of this history, from the beginnings of professional journalism to the citizen journalists of the participatory Web. In doing so, I have demonstrated that rather than being the “natural” state of journalism—that is, just the way journalism is done—professional journalism is instead a historical construct. It is a product of a certain time that gained institutional legitimacy and power, which it then wielded against challenges to its power. As I have stressed in this chapter, when I say that professional journalism is a construct, I do not mean to diminish its merits: striving for accuracy and independence and speaking truth to power remain crucial for democracies, especially during our current era of misinformation and rising authoritarianism. Challenges to professional journalism’s authority have not been always positive, either, as evidenced by the commercialism emerging out of 1980s media deregulation in the US. Yet, by challenging and transforming the boundaries of journalism, new actors and new formats have been able to make news that is engaging and relatable—and, perhaps most importantly, that can tell more stories about and for marginalised audiences. Due to this long history of innovation, social news is not a fundamental break form what came before. In many ways, when examining social news, we are treading on familiar ground, and participating in long-running debates around the role of objectivity, entertainment, emotion, and commercialism in news. At the same time, the journey towards institutionalisation undertaken by many examples examined in this chapter, such as late-night “fake news” and professional journalism itself, sketch a trajectory that social news would also follow. Still, social news has not simply repeated these previous experiments in news. Social news has been informed and shaped by and shares a history

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with what we have seen in this chapter. And yet it has emerged as a distinctively new genre from a new digital context. And now that I have sketched the historical backdrop of social news, it is time I turn directly to it. Through a critical examination of our selected outlets, in the next three chapters I unpack the institutional logics guiding social news. I link these institutional logics to the user cultures as well as the technological biases and business models of platforms, in the process framing social news as a response to our social media ecology. I begin with the social news logic of “engagement”. Here, I examine how audience participation is a foundational principle of social news: from maximising clicks and comments to experimenting with more relational kinds of digital journalism.

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CHAPTER 3

Engagement

Introduction Within a platform economy, there are new currencies for visibility and success. The rise of “platforms” in the late 2000s and their increasingly central role in news distribution and consumption have put an immense emphasis on maximising audience attention and interaction metrics. Several emerging and born-digital outlets excelled in this new platform economy by maximising clicks, shares, and comments to achieve algorithmic visibility. “Engagement” therefore became a major goal and a key operating principle for these outlets, which include among them both the early innovators (such as Upworthy) as well as the defining outlets (e.g., BuzzFeed) of the social news genre. In this chapter, I introduce the first institutional logic of social news: engagement. I explain in detail how this logic functions by critically evaluating social news texts, such as videos, images, articles, Facebook posts, as well as second-hand interviews with key figures from BuzzFeed, Junkee, Pedestrian, Indy100, Mic and other outlets. I use the term “engagement” rather than “popularity” to capture how engagement reflects a multitude of feelings, sentiments, and reactions (as reflected in Facebook’s “reaction” buttons) that, when transformed into metrics, boost the visibility of content on platforms. Beyond metrics, engagement can also reflect the ways in which journalism can relate to or seek input from readers (Sweet et al., 2017). Engagement, therefore, has different dimensions, such as an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_3

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“emotional” dimension as well as a “spatiotemporal” one (Steensen et al., 2020). There is also “civic” engagement, a way of doing journalism that stirs people into political action, or at least helps them engage with social issues in a more substantive fashion than clicks and likes (Konieczna & Robinson, 2013). Social news outlets, I argue in this chapter, attempt to engage readers in these multiple ways. I first examine social news in the context of what Steensen et al. have called the “techno-behavioural” dimension of engagement (2020), that is, the maximisation of metrics. I then provide examples of social news audience engagement strategies in the “civic” and in the more emotional and relational sense (Sweet et al., 2017). From here, I investigate the tensions between commercial and techno-behavioural engagement strategies and those that are more “civic” and relational in nature. I find that, rather than being mutually exclusive, civic strategies can actually complement commercial goals.

The “Clickbait” Concern The rising popularity of digital networking technologies in the late 2000s and early 2010s demanded new ways of reaching audiences. During this period, social media were still relatively new, but their userbase was steadily growing beyond the mostly young early adopters that first jumped onto these platforms. While social networking sites such as Myspace had been popular with teenagers and college students throughout the 2000s, the newsfeeds of Facebook and Twitter were more conducive to, well, news: not just personal updates, but actual news articles. Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds were modelled on public (or semi-public) forums in ways that Myspace, with its focus on profile-to-profile communication and social status (“top friends”) was not (boyd, 2010). The early hype around Facebook and Twitter as sites for political activism, as evidenced by their popularity with the 2008 Obama campaign (Wooley et  al., 2010) and their role in the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East (Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011), also led to the sense that these two emerging platforms were spaces for “public” activity, which included news. By the early 2010s many major news outlets in the Anglophone world had Facebook and Twitter accounts. Twitter, especially, became popular with journalists—as discussed in Chap. 2, Twitter’s public micro-blogging format and its liveness attracted a high number of journalists, activists, and politicians who then steadily embraced the platform. So much so, that the

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platform gradually grew to reflect and support this userbase: for example, by embedding “trending” topics and hashtags as key elements of Twitter’s architecture and branding (Burgess & Baym, 2020). Yet it was Facebook, with its larger and more diverse userbase, where digital outlets sought audience attention for news. And in the early 2010s it was a small number of highly visible born-digital outlets that were most successful at gaining such attention. Outlets such as the US-based EliteDaily and UpWorthy (both launched in 2012) became famous during this period for their ability to accumulate large volumes of likes and shares, to the point where articles and posts from these outlets—shared into user newsfeeds—became an almost ubiquitous part of the Facebook experience (Meyer, 2013). They achieved this visibility, as Caplan and boyd put it, by “subsum[ing] their organisational practices to the logics of Facebook’s algorithms” (2018, p. 5). Headlines were written loudly, with Every First Letter Capitalised (which would soon become a generic signifier for social news), and with a “curiosity gap” intended to elicit attention and encourage click-throughs in crowded Facebook newsfeeds. The “gap” here referred to the strategic omission of key story content from the headline. As a 2012 UpWorthy presentation titled “How To Make That One Thing Go Viral” put it: “too vague, and I don’t want to click… [yet] too specific, and I don’t need to click” (2012). UpWorthy often combined this curiosity gap with stories that were about social justice issues, or which tugged on emotional heartstrings. An especially successful example of the former was an UpWorthy post titled “BOOM, ROASTED: Here’s Why You Don’t Ask A Feminist To Hawk Your Sexist Product”, which linked to a video of talk show host Ellen DeGeneres poking fun at a set of pens marketed at women (Eisenberg, 2013). This post received over 128,000 likes and more than 65,000 shares and was a top performing post for the outlet in 2012 (UpWorthy, 2012). In some ways, this kind of headline borrowed its audience attention strategies from tabloid newspapers: the loud, capitalised, snappy, action-oriented heading (“BOOM, ROASTED”) is reminiscent of The Sun or The New York Post, which similarly attempted to grab potential readers’ eyes, albeit at packed newsstands. Yet, the sub-­heading— which suggests a great story just a click away, rather than an interesting article below a print heading (which you need only divert your eyes downward)—was a hallmark of the curiosity gap innovation, developed for a new platformed environment. Additional examples of this formula  from around this time include UpWorthy articles titled “Who Wants To Cry And Have Their Faith In

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Humanity Restored?” (featuring a headline image of a boy on a football field, circled out with a caption: “THIS KID = AWESOME” (Mordecai, 2012), and “They Told Her No Firm Would Pay Her Equally, So She Started Her Own” (Clark, 2013)). Others include headlines such as “The Things This 4-Year-Old Is Doing Are Cute, The Reason He’s Doing Them Is Heartbreaking” (Narayan, 2013). And so on. Thumbnails (the image featured above a headline when an article URL was shared on social media) were also crucial to curiosity gap strategies, as indicated by the article seeking to restore your faith in humanity. The use of famous people, particularly those associated with progressive politics from the period (e.g., Ellen DeGeneres and Obama) was also common in these thumbnails—indicating the early association of social news with left-leaning politics. Frequently the article content itself was minimal, most of the time it was simply some introductory text and a video or just a few images. Again, there are continuities with tabloids here, especially the emphasis on celebrities and a preference for visuals over text. In these ways, UpWorthy echoed tabloids. Yet, the outlet also reinvented these audience strategies for social media. EliteDaily, on the other hand, established itself as a site for self-help advice and lifestyle content for millennials. But it too utilised the social media engagement strategies we have just seen: for example, in article headlines from 2012 such as, “The Things You Should Never Talk About” (Batista, 2012), “Why Generation-Y Chooses Their Career Paths On The Wrong Factors” (Kaye, 2012), and “The Definition of Greatness” (Elite, 2012). EliteDaily, as its website boldly claimed, positioned itself as the “voice of Generation-Y”, and by pursuing these engagement strategies the outlet found success in directing social media traffic towards its web content (Caplan & boyd, 2018). This did not preclude EliteDaily from also producing content that was critical of social media, however (for instance, in a 2013 article titled “Why You Should Hate Social Media” (Waters, 2013)). EliteDaily articles were also more substantial in content than what UpWorthy offered, often containing the same among of text as in a standard news article. While EliteDaily and UpWorthy are still around, the two outlets passed their peak by the middle of the decade. Other outlets that emerged during this early period have had longer staying power. Most famously in this regard is BuzzFeed, which grew immensely in the early 2010s through using similar audience strategies. Yet whereas UpWorthy was known for its heartwarming, “You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next” (and so on) content, and EliteDaily for its millennial self-help articles, it was the

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“listicle” that BuzzFeed spearheaded to social media success. The listicle, as the name suggests, is an article containing a list—a format that BuzzFeed creatively innovated for social media. Reflecting BuzzFeed’s beginnings as a lab for tracking viral content, BuzzFeed listicles often rank or simply list pop-culture or relatable content according to a specific theme, usually in relation to something “trending” at the time (such as popular television programmes or sports events) or simply content with  reliable relevance for certain audiences (such as, “33 Ways You Know You’re Australian”, Crerar, 2013). These listicles also take advantage of the curiosity gap in so far as listicle headlines never reveal what exactly is on the lists, or what is most highly ranked. Listicles are also crafted to prompt audience discussion (whether in Facebook comments or below-the-line comments on the BuzzFeed site itself) about the list. For instance, the “Ways You Know You’re Australian” headline provoked below-the-line comments from users contributing their own notions and experiences of “being Australian”. The listicles are also opportunities for BuzzFeed and its writers to demonstrate their literacy in internet popular culture, and this was crucial in BuzzFeed’s early days when it sought to stand out amongst other outlets. Media artefacts such as GIFs and memes as well as vernacular such as acronyms (e.g., “lol” and “wtf”) and slang familiar to young internet users are all typically included in BuzzFeed listicles. In this regard, the “Australian” listicle contained multiple GIFs, “Aussie” memes, and references to popular YouTube videos from 2013. And, as evident in the “Australian” listicle, relatability in listicles was established not just through topics, but also through a personal address where “you”, “your”, and “you’re” are common. We will see more of this kind of personalisation in Chap. 5. Lastly, although listicles are strategically nuanced in design they are not expensive to produce. Many of these lists continue to be written by volunteer or freelance workers, an element of BuzzFeed’s business model that would later attract criticism (Benton, 2019). Unsurprisingly, early reactions from journalists to UpWorthy, EliteDaily, and BuzzFeed were mostly negative. The curiosity gap model became known by a more derogatory label—“clickbait”—that insinuated the apparently vacuous and manipulative nature of these outlets. Legacy outlets, such as the Financial Times, described clickbait as a “virus” of “cute cat videos” and “funny lists” (Gapper, 2014). The Atlantic described it as a “dark viral art” (Thompson, 2013), and even Wired—usually an optimist for tech innovation—labelled clickbait “manipulative” and

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“emotional” (Gardiner, 2015). As we have already seen, when Mic began to gain popularity in 2014, its listicles were also met with similar derision (“less complex than confectionary” (Brown, 2014)). These attributes have for a long time been opposed to “real” journalism, as seen in Chap. 2. Tabloidisation concerns about frivolity, “soft” news, and commercialism, as well as suspicions regarding mass appeal and “popular” taste, were revived by “clickbait”. As with television, fears about new technology— what Alice E. Marwick has called “technopanics” (2008)—also informed these concerns around clickbait. For “clickbait” has never solely been about news. The term has instead always articulated something about social media more broadly: that they are sites tainted by the everyday, the mundane, and the inconsequential, and that they are suspicious because they are popular. That these platforms belong to a different sphere than “real news”, so of course frivolous content from BuzzFeed excels there. This prejudice towards everyday social media was so strong during these early years that it influenced Twitter’s development over the course of the 2010s. As Jean Burgess and Nancy Baym note, Twitter purposefully cultivated the many journalists and politicians that took up residence on the platform, and increasingly encoded “events” (through hashtags and trending topics) into its platform architecture in order to build a kind of “public” legitimacy for the platform. This contrasted with its early reputation as a site for tweets about lunch (Burgess & Baym, 2020). Twitter is certainly now a place where “public” things happen, although not necessarily for the better. In these ways, professional journalism’s privileging of “serious” and “public” concerns over “private” and everyday life shaped how “clickbait” became something we should be worried about. As with “tabloidisation”, there were indeed genuine critiques raised by those concerned with clickbait. The commercialism and formulaic nature of UpWorthy-style content that proliferated on platforms during the early 2010s stands out in this regard. These outlets were taking advantage of engagement-hungry platform logics in a time before news content was downgraded by Facebook’s algorithm and when many established news organisations lacked literacy with social media. Of course, news should report on diverse topics, not just those that can go “viral”, and resource-­ intensive investigative journalism (the kind often contrasted to clickbait by critics) needs to be supported. Yet, as would be clear now, denouncements of clickbait were boundary work: a delineation between “real” news and journalism, and the rubbish, silly stuff. As with previous performances of

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boundary work, the clickbait critique was predicated on problematic binaries about what is and is not worthy of public attention, and who should and should not be writing news. Still, beyond the canonical clickbait sites, the drive to maximise platform-­derived metrics was transforming newsrooms. Social media was indeed changing how outlets and journalists operated—and not always in positive ways.

The Drive for “Metrics” Not only did platforms demand new ways of reaching audiences, but they also provided new means of measuring them. As demonstrated by the UpWorthy success story, platform-provided interaction indicators have been progressively used by news outlets as data on audience behaviour. Within newsrooms, these indicators take the form of “metrics”—the real-­ time measure and visualisation of clicks, likes, reacts, retweets, comments, impressions, and so on. While newsrooms have long embedded audience data into the news production process, for example with television ratings and print circulation figures, in the past these numbers were seen mostly as an “approximation”—that is, an incomplete representation of a mass audience (Carlson, 2018, p. 408). Metrics, instead, present themselves as more accurate, granular and, crucially, immediate (i.e., real-time), even if they remain only a representation of user behaviour (Napoli, 2010). Metrics are therefore quite powerful: and in the early 2010s, when there was a sharp uptake of these tools that promise newsworkers the power to monitor, quantify, and (ideally) predict audiences, there were concerns that professional reporters were becoming “increasingly reliant” on metrics as a “supplement” to their news judgement (Anderson, 2011, p. 550). Metrics were not just shaping the distribution of news stories on platforms: they also appeared to be influencing which stories the journalist chose to pursue in the first place (Moyo et al., 2019). The journalists, in these accounts, were being displaced, their traditional gatekeeping role threatened by platforms and by the audience analytics tools provided by these platforms. Again, this perception neglected how audience data has long influenced newsrooms—for example, by privileging stories that are “ratings gold”. In such ways, this perception was partly a product of journalists being confronted by new and unfamiliar technologies. Nonetheless, it still articulated the ways in which metrics were indeed playing a new and

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transformative role that threatened to challenge the power of established news media. For, metrics do not just measure audience behaviour. They also influence such behaviour: most crucially, through algorithms. Algorithms are the rule-driven, problem-solving processes encoded into software through which information is organised and valued (Knuth, 1968, p. 27). On platforms, algorithmic power operates most visibly through newsfeeds and recommendations systems. Newsfeeds, as described above, are the semi-­ public “forums” of Facebook and Twitter (boyd, 2010), where content is “fed” to users—as distinct from the personal “walls” featured on user profiles. As we have seen, these newsfeeds are distinct from the networks of user profiles that characterised earlier social networking sites such as MySpace. However, while some platforms simply present information chronologically within newsfeeds—that is, according to when they were posted—Facebook and other major platforms also organise content by measuring engagement (Caplan & boyd, 2018). Posts that accumulate the most user impressions and interactions are those that tend to rank highest within newsfeeds (and therefore seen first by users). This was especially the case during the early years, before Facebook adjusted the newsfeed algorithm in 2018 to favour posts from friends over pages (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020). Recommendations, too, are algorithmically determined by both engagement as well as personalised systems that predict (and therefore shape) user interest (Schulte, 2016), and we will see this in greater detail in Chap. 5. Therefore, platform algorithms largely operate by prioritising engagement, and engagement can be both measured and predicted by metrics: and platforms’ dual control over content distribution and audience analytics is now a major concern for news companies. To make things worse for news, platform companies have refused to release details about the rules governing algorithms, apart from vague descriptions. Therefore, while platforms appear to be prioritising posts that receive the most likes, comments, and so on, the exact rules governing how algorithms organise newsfeeds have not been disclosed by platforms such as Facebook (Hunter & Samios, 2020). Due to this, when platforms do announce changes to their newsfeed algorithms, news organisations often have had to scramble to reshape their audience and content strategies (Madrigal & Meyer, 2018). To compensate for this lack of transparency, an “algorithmic imaginary”, as Taina Bucher has called it, emerged within newsrooms during the 2010s (2017, 2018). Ideas about how “the algorithm” worked and

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what it liked took shape as newsworkers tried to anticipate what kind of stories would do well on social media. As an Australian newsworker would later put it, “you played to [the algorithm’s] strengths” (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020, p. 6). The former BuzzFeed Australia editor Simon Crerar also previously claimed, “the algorithm… figures out which headline and thumbnail [combination] will work” (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 15). In this sense, the algorithm performed an almost sentient role within the imaginations of newsworkers during this early period. For Bucher (2012), there was a sense that the algorithm loomed over users and newsworkers, threatening them with invisibility, and thereby disciplining them to act in certain ways (Bucher likens this to Michel Foucault’s famous account of the panopticon, albeit in reverse (1977)). Playing to the algorithm’s strengths included real-time testing and experimentation. For instance, Junkee co-­founder Tim Duggan has previously claimed to adhere to an iterative content production process, where different stories, headlines, and post captions are pushed out, and the content that did well (in terms of likes, shares, clicks, etc.) shaped the news selection decisions of the outlet for that day or week (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 12). In such ways, when producing news for social media, successful stories were often used as a guide to the algorithm’s preferences. This can also be seen in the UpWorthy presentation mentioned above. The authors (who are described as UpWorthy’s “viral curators”) do concede that there is a skill to a great headline. But the ways in which they discuss “virality” in the presentation—as a sort of thing that happens through a mix of talent, good timing, and “luck”—suggested a technologically informed process that is partially outside of human hands, even if largely powered by human attention. And yet, while “luck” is crucial for virality (“the only way it’s gonna happen”, according to the slides), the premise of UpWorthy’s presentation was that the outlet knew the secret to social media success: that it could tell you “How To Make That One Thing Go Viral”. Platform literacy—knowing a platform, its algorithmic priorities, and its user cultures—therefore became a currency within newsrooms, and social news outlets early on developed their identity around platform literacy. Accompanying these concerns about journalistic judgement falling prey to metrics and the algorithm have been scholarly accounts of a new and profound platform power. Platforms, in some of these analyses, are said to have an “isomorphic” effect on news organisations, causing them to adopt the priorities and principles of platforms, and restructuring them

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accordingly (Caplan & boyd, 2018). Certainly, the widespread inclusion of metrics and web analytics in newsrooms, along with dedicated social media teams, indicates the extent to which platforms have transformed newswork. At the same time, these accounts of platform dominance recall earlier arguments about how mediating technologies shape those using them—that is, how “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964). And since platforms are not just devices, but instead proprietary technologies owned and operated by some of the world’s most powerful companies, these concerns have only since intensified (Rushe, 2021). This argument about transformative platform power has also been formulated in other ways: for example, that news is becoming dependent on “digital intermediaries” that are transforming the media environment, and that even large news organisations are being forced to adapt (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018); or that Silicon Valley is “reengineering” journalism by “incentivi[sing] the spread of low-quality over high-quality material… [through] a system that favours scale and shareability” (Bell & Owen, 2017). In other words, platforms are believed to be moving beyond simple digital distribution channels: now, they “control what audiences see and who gets paid for their attention, and even what format and type of journalism flourishes” (Bell & Owen, 2017)—a holistic dominance over news. Some social news outlets, at times, have echoed these deterministic perspectives: Pedestrian co-­ founder Chris Wirasinha, for example, once claimed that “content… will be dictated by what those platforms want to achieve” (Edensor, 2016b). These accounts of platform power are persuasive, and they articulate how embedded platforms have become in news selection, production, and distribution. Yet, despite this, deterministic perspectives on platform power can neglect the ways in which users, journalists, and news organisations negotiate with platforms. By centring platforms, we could be erasing the agency of those who use them. For, social news content has not been purely determined by platforms. As indicated by newsworkers from UpWorthy, BuzzFeed and Junkee, judgements—dare I say, journalistic judgements?—have still been made at these outlets about what stories to pursue, how to write them, and which audiences to target, even if these judgements have been responding to platform imperatives to maximise attention and interaction metrics. To provide another example: in a 2017 interview the then-editor of BuzzFeed Australia Crerar describes a “kick-­ arse viral post” as a “weird combination of skill, planning and luck” (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 15):

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“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.”

In this quote, the imperative to accumulate metrics is striking. And yet, Crerar reaffirms the value of professional expertise, training, and (pop) cultural knowledge. Hence, rather than their behaviour being simply determined by platforms, social news outlets have instead operated according to a logic that creatively responds to the need to prioritise user engagement.

A Logic of Engagement As we have seen in the Introduction to this book, the application of a “logics” framework to media and news has a lengthy history. Most famously has been Altheide and Snow’s concept of “media logics” (1979), which argues that the organising principles and valuing regimes of media shape how those media are used, whether by people or organisations. Altheide and Snow were largely examining television “logic”, but van Dijck and Poell have more recently theorised that social media also have particular “logics” (2013). They argue that social media platforms are guided by a logic of “popularity”, whereby Facebook likes, Twitter favourites, and YouTube views measure and shape (through algorithms) the social ranking of content. In this sense, van Dijck and Poell use “logic” in a fashion similar to the “platform power” arguments we have seen above. But van Dijck and Poell also emphasise user agency: that while algorithms “automatically assign” value, users “themselves may also engage in concerted efforts to lift people’s visibility” (2013, p. 7). That is, users and organisations can respond to logics with creativity (by, for instance, orchestrating “trending” hashtags). Logics are therefore the principles through which platforms operate—but they shape, rather than determine, behaviour. To reiterate, the arguments sketched in the previous section do not necessarily preclude human intervention or creativity.  And yet, when it emphasises human agency, the “logics” framework can  better  help  us understand the social media-literate content strategies visible in UpWorthy and BuzzFeed, and other social news outlets. Still, social media success is not always guided by “popularity”. As would be clear to anyone who has spent time on Facebook or Twitter, it is often conflict rather than popularity—or shared dislike rather than agreed likability—that powers visibility on platforms. Facebook’s eventual

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introduction of “reaction” buttons in 2016 was both a recognition of this fact and a means to further reward content that explicitly elicits or targets sad or negative sentiments (in this sense, an attempt to datafy and thereby capture the “emotional dimension” of how people engage with content online (Steensen et al., 2020)). It is therefore the most engaged content— the word “engaged” reflecting a multitude of feelings and sentiments— that is ranked high in the newsfeed hierarchy. In this sense, content which is purposively divisive or inflammatory—and in these ways decisively not “popular”—can be lucrative. Below, we will see how social news outlets have occasionally taken advantage of lucratively controversial content in their attempts to accumulate metrics. So, in these ways, the creative response by social news to platform imperatives can be viewed as an “institutional logic” of engagement (Thornton et  al., 2012). As indicated by UpWorthy boasting about its “viral” stories, the institutional goal to creatively maximise audience attention and interaction metrics is a crucial component of this social news logic. At the same time, social news outlets have also attempted to engage audiences in more meaningful ways, beyond clicks, shares, and so on. And as I have already mentioned, I also use the term “institutional” to draw attention to how these strategies were adopted by a number of social news outlets as each emerged in the early 2010s. I now unpack how this institutional logic of engagement manifests. I start by demonstrating how pursuing engagement is not always popular.

Social News and Constitutive Humour A lot of social news content intends to be popular. The almost relentless positivity of UpWorthy content and the pleasantly apolitical listicles that BuzzFeed produces en masse make this evident. The British social news outlet Indy100 even designed its whole news operation around a popularity mechanism that allows users to upvote stories on the site’s homepage (Independent, 2021). However, viewing engagement through the lens of “popularity” neglects the nuanced ways in which users and organisations pursue audience attention and interaction metrics. And not just how this kind of engagement is pursued, but also how it manifests—in shares, replies, comment sections, likes, reactions, and so on. Anger, outrage, negativity, sadness, schadenfreude are all powerful sentiments that drive how users interact with content on platforms. It is unsurprising, then, that

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organisations seeking algorithmic visibility would attempt to provoke such sentiments. Due to their explicit branding as youthful and progressive outlets, Junkee and Pedestrian have been especially invested in these kinds of provocative audience strategies. These strategies frequently involve news topics that are politically sensitive. A good example of Junkee’s activity in this regard is its regular articles on pop-culture. Pop-culture in the 2010s was a highly contested site of online conflict, especially when it came to the representation (or rather lack thereof) of diverse racial, gender, and class identities in music, television, film, and videogames. The reasons for this growing politicisation of pop-culture have been varied. It is partly a product of progressive social movements demanding better representation on screen (Smith et al., 2017; Navar-Gill & Stanfill, 2018), although opportunistic and reactionary actors have also played a major role in confecting and profiting off outrage about, for instance, so-called political correctness (cf., Lewis, 2018). The result has been that political content about pop-culture, from both sides of politics, has become very lucrative metrics-­ wise. And during the 2010s, political pop-culture became Junkee’s signature content. Headlines from Junkee provide an indication of how the outlet has pursued engagement through political pop-culture, by using similar strategies to those developed first by UpWorthy and BuzzFeed. For example, the outlet has produced political articles on blockbuster cinema (e.g., with headlines such as “Guardians of the Galaxy Director Slams Tradition of Shitty, Sexist Merchandise” (Stubbins, 2015b)). It has also regularly written emotive political articles about television shows (such as “Why We Give Our Favourite TV Shows A Free Pass Even When We Probably Shouldn’t” (Stubbins, 2015a), and “Terrible Manbabies Think [Game of Thrones’] Arya Stark Doesn’t Deserve To Be The Hero” (Lenton, 2019)). Music, as well, has received the same political treatment. Headlines here include, “Aussie Musician Brendan MacClean Calls Out Discrimination Against LGBT Artists In Powerful Facebook Post” (Hawkins, 2016), and “Omar Musa’s Explosive New Music Video Is A Scorching Takedown of Racism in Australia” (Faruqi, 2017c). In such ways, Junkee has dived into contentious pop-culture, with headlines that at times appear to both seek and capitalise on that contention. These audience engagement strategies were not limited to the headlines, though. Often, Junkee took advantage of platform features, as well.

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A close examination of Junkee Facebook posts reveals this. For example, an article posted to the Junkee Facebook page in March 2018 proclaimed that the film Annihilation (2018) was “Proof That Women-Led Sci-Fi Is Better”. The post was captioned with “Do we really need another ‘man saves world, man gets girl’ plot line?” (Junkee, 2018b). The article itself was a critique of masculine norms in the sic-fi genre—such as “the hero’s journey”—and argued that the then-recent women-led Annihilation challenged these norms and presented new possibilities for feminist sci-fi cinema. Yet, the provocative headline and post caption appeared to be baiting those who were antagonistic towards feminism. And this bait, if it was indeed bait, worked: as numerous male users (self-identified as such in their Facebook bios) filled the comment section with complaints. Male users complaining in the comment section of a Facebook post about feminism is not rare, of course (on Twitter there is even a term for this phenomenon—“reply guys” (Adam, 2017)). But unlike many other news outlets on Facebook, the Junkee page actively responded to these comments—and did so in a political way. Two of the four top comments (as sorted by Facebook’s “relevance” sorting algorithm) were, at the time of writing, from Junkee itself. One of them was a GIF of the US singer and feminist pop icon Beyoncé (captioned with “Who run the world? Girls”), the other a GIF of male dancers captioned with “All the dudes suddenly slipping into our comment sections right rn [right now]”. There were antagonistic replies to these GIFs, to which Junkee responded with further GIFs (one which read, sarcastically, “Thank you so much to our unbelievable fans!”). Junkee also ironically referenced internet trolling in these GIFs, in the form of a visual quote of Admiral Ackbar (the fish-­ like alien commander from the original Star Wars trilogy) shouting his famous catchphrase “It’s a trap!”. This Ackbar GIF, a long-standing meme, was made in response to a male user accusing Junkee of “baiting” people into reading their article. Later that same month, Junkee made a similar Facebook post headlined “This Art Isn’t For You: Why White Men Need To Stay In Their Lane” (2018a). The post caption proclaimed, “we don’t need to hear straight, white male opinions on everything” (2018a). The article was about how music and art criticism need more diversity, and how cis white men need to make room for more voices in these spaces. Unsurprisingly, though, antagonistic responses from white men filled the comment section. And as with the previous post, Junkee responded to these comments with pop-­ culture GIFs, thereby further fanning the flames: for example, a GIF of

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cartoon paratroopers, with the text “IT’S RAINING MEN” laid over it, captioned with “Our comment section rn”. In another instance, Junkee posted a comment which offered men some “advice”: a GIF from popular teen comedy Mean Girls (2004) featuring Regina George, clique queen, yelling, “SHUT! UP!”. Both of these Junkee comments rose to the top of the comment section (as organised by Facebook’s “relevance” algorithm), due to the large amounts of “Haha” and “Angry” reactions they received. Below, some comments showered Junkee with praise: “FUCKING PREACH IT JUNKEE [hands clapping emoji]” wrote one user. Male-­ identifying users, meanwhile, continued to complain below about “snowflakes” and “identity politics”. Other social news outlets have also engaged in similar content strategies. Pedestrian has run stories with headlines that target these sites of cultural-political conflict. For instance, in a 2017 article about social media rallying behind a local progressive bookstore (Adams, 2017), titled “Brisbane Bookstore Harassed By MRA [Men’s Rights Activists] Gronks Nears 5,000 5 Star Reviews” (“gronk” is derogatory Australian slang for a dim-witted man), and in a piece about sexism on Australian morning television titled “‘Weekend Sunrise’: Middle-Aged Men Shout About Feminism, Solve Nothing” (Duncan, 2017). And outside Australia, many of Mic’s articles can also be situated within these content strategies. For example, such articles include “Halloween 2016 is all about saying f*ck you to gender” (Rodriquez, 2016)—a piece reporting on the emancipatory possibilities of gender play—and “Angry gamers aren’t happy the ‘Battlefield V’ trailer features a female soldier” (Mulkerin, 2018). The latter article reported, with snark, on how a promo image for the latest World War II battle arena game sent a “pang of insecurity and anger through gaming’s most conservative social circles”. These articles, when posted to Facebook, provoked conflict in the comment section, and consequently, suggest a strategy that seeks to leverage such conflict. Pedestrian‘s article about the Brisbane bookshop and its run-in with MRAs, for instance, sparked a heated debate about the existence of so-called reverse sexism (an unfounded claim that men are unfairly targeted by feminists). These posts demonstrate the nuances of audience “engagement” on participatory platforms when attention and interaction metrics reward algorithmic visibility. As we have seen with the tabloidisation scare in Chap. 2, sensational and polarising news content is by no means new. Yet, such content acquires new dimensions when users have opportunities to directly respond to the outlet and one another, and when conflict and

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controversy from those users (“engagement”) are crucial currency in platform attention economies. In the above posts, Junkee, Pedestrian, and Mic demonstrated a strong familiarity with contemporary cultural, social, and political sites of conflict—and played them for engagement. This is not to diminish the quality of their content. The articles we saw above were written accessibly and argued persuasively. Nor do we want to perform boundary work that would delegitimise Junkee and others because they lack “objectivity”. Rather, it simply appeared as though there was a knowingness to their content. It seemed like their participation in platform-based conflict had more than just political motivations. As foreshadowed by Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan  earlier in this chapter, these headlines were written to generate attention. And the audience strategy for acquiring such attention was a kind of identity performance, grounded in a literacy with internet vernaculars (Gibbs et  al., 2015), as well as a keen understanding of how Facebook can both provoke and capture affect. This strategy is reminiscent of what Phillips and Milner have called “constitutive humour” (2017), a type of humour that is generative and magnetic amongst like-minded users (e.g., “FUCKING PREACH IT JUNKEE”), but also inherently exclusive in so far as it targets a distinct out-group. As made clear above, Junkee’s constitutive humour is another example of social news creatively responding to platform imperatives. Here, Junkee and others have been guided by but not subsumed by algorithmic logics. And while there were obvious inflammatory qualities to social news’ constitutive humour, this strategy has not always been problematic. As we see in subsequent chapters, constitutive humour—and its associated components, sociability and positionality—can also function in positive ways for news and journalism on social media. Other kinds of democratically positive social news engagement strategies can also be identified when we look beyond metrics and algorithms.

Social News and Civic Engagement It would be simplistic to limit our analysis of “audience engagement” to a simple technical process of counting and maxismising attention. As we know, engagement can be an emotive process through which texts elicit affective responses or arouse emotional investment from their audiences (Steensen et al., 2020). Shedding tears in the cinema, or angrily commenting below an article about feminist science fiction, are examples of emotional engagement. But beyond pure affect, news can also engage audiences in other ways: for example, as political actors: as people capable of not just

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participating in elections, but also changing the world (or simply making it marginally better). This kind of “civic” engagement guided the principles of early “professional” journalism, even if Progressive Era journalists were more interested in equipping citizens for public debate than informing and inspiring political action. Social news outlets have both continued this tradition of “good citizen” journalism (Schudson, 1998), and departed from it in ways befitting of the cultural, political, and technological contexts from which those outlets emerged. Once again, the Australian Junkee provides a useful example. On 18 March 2018, its Facebook page posted a video titled “Junk Explained: What the Hell is Dividend Imputation?” (Junkee, 2018c). Captioned with “Here’s how rich [baby] boomers are using an extremely sneaky scheme to steal your money”, the 2-minute video features then-Junkee writer Osman Faruqi talking about tax credits and why they are “actually cooked”. As made clear by this use of Australian slang (“cooked” means something that is almost absurdly unjust), Faruqi’s language in the video is characterised by identity markers associated with millennial youth culture such as irony and self-deprecating humour. Faruqi begins the video with a confession: “Okay, so [then-Opposition Leader] Bill Shorten has released a new economic policy this week… but chances are if you’re a normal person, and you don’t hate your life, you probably aren’t paying any attention because it’s extremely boring”. But despite how dull tax can be, Faruqi stresses that Labor leader Shorten’s proposed policy is “really bloody important” because the tax scheme it intends to reform has long made it easy “for rich old people to take our [Millennial] money”. The rest of the video is a detailed, though concise, explainer on the intricacies of an Australian tax refund scheme called “franking credits”. The scheme, essentially, allows shareholders to receive tax refunds from the government on their dividends—and due to this, the scheme became controversial for disproportionately benefiting wealthy retirees who already pay no tax. As is clear, the kinds of constitutive humour we have seen before were present in this video, from the identity markers (self-­ deprecating humour) to the generational us versus them framing (millennials versus boomers). And again, these conflict-centred framing devices were reciprocated in the comments, with some users supporting Junkee’s stance (“that’s the truth!”) while others accused the outlet of spreading “offensive, divisive and completely unhelpful bullshit”. Yet, the Junkee video on dividend imputation evidently did more than just seek conflict-driven engagement metrics. The video seemingly

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intended to arouse affective and intellectual investment from users who were also implicitly framed as voters (and therefore citizens). Faruqi’s attempt to explain a complex issue through informal, ironic, and irreverent language was not only an entertaining take on an otherwise “boring” topic, but also, through Faruqi’s simple but not simplistic explanation, worked to leave the young audience better informed and better equipped to participate in civic life. The federal election the following year would make abolishing “franking credits” a key Labor Party policy, and Junkee and other social news outlets continued to report on the issue through the same kinds of entertaining and informative outrage.1 Such “explainers” have regularly featured in Junkee. As with the franking credits video, these explainers tend to target under-reported, complicated, or on-the-surface “boring” issues. For example, a 2015 piece on an Australian court ruling on internet piracy (Watson, 2015); an explainer on the reasoning behind Australia’s unusually long 2016 federal election (McKinnon, 2016); and a 2017 article explaining a rise in New Zealanders being detained and deported by the Australian government (Faruqi, 2017a). Some ostensibly less serious phenomena also received the “Junk Explained” treatment, such as esoteric Twitter memes (Lenton, 2018). All of Junkee’s explainers are written in the informal, conversational, and irreverent style featured in the tax scheme video. Junkee has claimed that their explainers were born from a noisy news and media ecology that was disorienting young people. In his interview with journalism researchers Andrea Carson and Denis Muller, co-founder Duggan stated that: “The traditional silos of where you get your news from were fragmenting [in the early 2010s]. No one was sitting down at 8:30pm to watch a show on [Australian commercial broadcaster] 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 [the] pop-culture space. And Junkee was meant to be for pop-culture junkies. It was meant to alleviate FONK—the Fear Of Not Knowing. So, we did things like explainers; things that are now pretty com1  A Pedestrian article from 2019, for example, was headlined “What The Fuck Are Franking Credits? What Is Going On?”, with a thumbnail image of an elderly white man captioned with “god I froth [i.e., salivate] on me franking credits” (Hennessy, 2019). https://www. pedestrian.tv/money/franking-credits-explainer/

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monplace. We were one of the first people to start doing explainers in Australia. We call them 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, p. 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 ecology characterised by fragmentation and information saturation. While explainers have now become fairly common, social news outlets, in Duggan’s account at least, led this “changing of the guard”. Moreover, this innovation, again according to Duggan, occurred in the realm of pop-culture reporting, with the goal of keeping young people up to date with developments (as well conflicts and controversies) in music, film, television, and celebrity culture. In such ways, this journalistic innovation recalls how other entertainment-driven news genres (e.g., late-­ night television) have also played significant roles in developing new audience engagement practices. Even in the likely case that Duggan was overstating Junkee’s innovativeness, it remains significant that this ability to reach and educate audiences is the self-image that the outlet’s co-­ founders wish to project. Later, Duggan would again emphasise this brand-image of Junkee producing engaging and sophisticated content in contrast to the kinds of “clickbait” often lamented by observers of online news (Dickinson, 2018), when he stated that he wanted to “de-stupidify” the internet, and “treat the audience like they had brains”. Neil Ackland, Junkee’s other co-founder and its current CEO, has  made similar comments, stating in a separate, earlier interview that he wanted the outlet to counter what he felt was pop-culture “being dumbed down” in the news (Robin, 2014). In these interviews, treating their readers with intelligence while also satisfying their curiosity is identified as (or at least branded as) a key Junkee audience-engagement strategy. In Chap. 4, we will discuss in greater detail the significance of Junkee’s attentiveness to “FONK”—that is, of playing to readers’ fears about not knowing as much as their friends. As Duggan indicated, BuzzFeed runs explainers, too. These explainers have come in different styles. Some have been, as is typical for BuzzFeed, written in a listicle format: such as an explainer on the frequently harsh restrictions that many young renters face in Australia (titled: “Here Are 11 Things That Are Harder For Renters To Get Away With”, (Ryan, 2018)). The listicle format here being utilised to, rather than “dumb down” an issue, instead succinctly summarise it, with added dark humour: the high

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number of things renters “can’t get away with” working to illustrate the power imbalance between tenants and landlords in Australia. Another BuzzFeed Australia article, 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 (Sainty, 2018). As the title indicates, the article is written in a chatty and personable fashion, like Junkee’s franking credits video: “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 cafe/shop/call centre…[then] you, also like me, probably ended up with multiple super accounts”. The article’s author, reporter Lane Sainty, then explains how other young people are at a risk of losing money in these accounts if the government closes them. Through this chatty tone, Sainty admits to the dry quality of financial policy—and in doing so, rather than putting the onus on young people to keep up with this news (as in the Progressive Era journalism model), Sainty instead works to make this news more accessible and relevant. This conversational style, moreover, attempts to assist readers through the news: headline elements, such as “I Know This Sounds Boring”, and the frequent use of “Here” (“Here Are”, “Here’s Why”, etc.) are not only designed to capture attention, but also guide readers’ attention to the crux of a story, and to help them understand important news in a crowded information ecology. Mic also produced this kind of explainer content throughout the 2010s. Article headlines were again written in that same conversational style— although the articles themselves tended to lack these chatty elements. And as with the other social news outlets, Mic’s explainers covered political topics, such as activism (“LGBT Activists Are Dumping Coca-Cola Onto Streets in Protest. Here’s Why” (Cosman, 2014)) economic policy (“Here Are the Surprising Lessons Cuba’s Economy Can Teach the U.S.” (Horowitz, 2016)), as well as pop-culture (“Can Justin Bieber Actually Be Deported From The U.S.? Here’s What Comes Next For The Pop-Star” (McKay, 2014)), and health (“Can ‘Double-Dipping’ Food Spread Disease? Here’s Why We Should All Be Grossed Out” (Lewis, 2016)). The wide breadth of topics covered by Mic’s explainers indicates that while Mic attempted to cater to readers overwhelmed by news, explainers were not a “dumbing-down” of journalism: on the contrary, explainers on topics such as Cuban economic policy and Israeli politics (Bronis, 2014) suggest that Mic, from an early stage, was targeting curious and politically engaged young readers who were eager to participate in public discussion.

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At the same time, that these political explainer articles were produced alongside and without clear demarcation from pop-culture and lifestylecentred explainer content demonstrates a content and audience strategy that does not exclude or discriminate against traditionally “soft” topics: instead, Mic recognised that audiences can be keen for both economic policy analyses as well as articles on where to find Strawberry Shortcake Oreos (Swartz, 2016). British social news outlet Indy100 has written similar kinds of political explainer articles. For example, a 2015 listicle (and one of the outlet’s most read stories of that year) titled “7 laws the Lib Dems stopped the Tories from passing” explains the ramifications of the then-new Conservative majority UK government through examining what the Conservatives couldn’t legislate under their old partnership with the Liberal Democrats (Stewart, 2015). Indy100 tells its presumed progressive audience that the Conservative government is now free to “push through a radical Tory agenda”, which, presciently, includes a referendum on EU membership (Wright, 2015). Indy100 continues to produce this blend of explainers and listicles, many recently on the topic of the Trump presidency: headlines include “Here are 55 of the worst things Trump has done during his presidency” (McLean & Evans, 2021) and “9 Trump allies who’ve been arrested, indicted, or jailed, since he became president” (Taylor, 2020), with the listicle format serving here to demonstrate the sheer breadth of damage and corruption under Trump. Yet, these social news explainers have not been entirely altruistic. As Duggan made clear, there are branding opportunities involved with being a useful explainer. It is unsurprising, then, that “explainers” have now become an established sub-genre of news article, beyond social news. The eye-catching “Here’s How/Here’s Why” (etc.) headline, therefore, is not just an explanatory mode of address that aids in unpacking the news for a reader lost in a deluge of coverage—it is also, as we have seen, a tool optimised to grab attention in a platform ecology crowded with content. Junkee co-founder Ackland has been explicit in this respect when he previously described his job as a “game” of “thumb-stopping” (Edensor, 2016a). This optimisation for fast-scrolling social feeds is especially evident in some of the Mic articles cited above. For example, the article on Cuban economy, despite its catchy headline suggesting a list of “lessons” in the style of BuzzFeed or UpWorthy, instead had a remarkably different tone, being mostly an anecdotal account of the reporter’s trip to Cuba. The article still explained the differences between the  Cuban and the

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US health and eduction systems, but because of this tonal shift there was a disconnect between the headline and the article’s content. In these ways, then, even while social news outlets engaged their readers in a “civic” fashion—that is, attempted to make the news more accessible and tried to better equip them for public participation—there remained commercial goals. That is, in the above examples, “civic” and “commercial” engagement did not exist in a binary, but were instead blurred—or indeed, civic engagement was the commercial strategy. Schudson previously described two competing models of journalism, “trustee” and “market” (2003), and yet for social news outlets, the audience strategy was often in between these two poles. Social news outlets’ civic content has not been limited to explainers, however. They have done more than simply equip readers to better engage with public discussion. Occasionally, and in a radical break from the norms of professional journalism, their content has tried to encourage readers into political action—even if such calls-to-actions have operated within the bounds of the branding and commercial logics described above.

Social News Advocacy and Activism In professional journalism’s worldview, there is limited room for political action. As we have seen in Chap. 2, the “objectivity” that professional journalism is committed to not only entails that journalists (by definition) are ethically forbidden from taking a “side”, but also presumes a democracy that is best served (and enacted) through informed debate. This is, as Schudson put it, the “good citizen” model of liberal democracy (1998), based around people who have done their civic duty by keeping up with the news, so that they can make informed decisions at the ballot box. If journalists break from objectivity, and openly advocate for a particular cause, as the early professional journalists believed, public life is threatened with a return to an era of rabid partisanship. Due to this, professional journalists (and “mainstream” news in general) have long had a tense, sometimes even hostile, relationship with political action outside of an idealised, deliberative public sphere. Raymond Williams, for example, had previously noted how the television news studio, with its calming anchor and its arranged panels of experts, served to contrast against news snippets of rallies and demonstrations: it was a juxtaposition of the “reasoned” and “the apparently unreasoned”, a “contrast between serious informed

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responses and emotional simplifying responses” (1974, p. 53). Strikes and other kinds of direct-action politics are still often represented, through the “objective” lens, as visually arresting and curious events happening “out there”, performed by pre-set types (the protester, the activist, the unionist) that are, by nature, distinct from the detached journalist and the ordinary news consumer. In other words, professional journalism tends to report from and to the position of an observer, not a participant. Social news has broken sharply from this normative worldview. Social news outlets in the 2010s occasionally went beyond just explaining the news to openly call for more active political participation. This was most striking in Junkee’s and Pedestrian’s coverage of the 2017 Australian same-­ sex marriage postal survey. The postal survey was one of the most controversial Australian political events of the 2010s. It was commissioned by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National government to gauge nationwide support for marriage equality. A parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage rights was to follow the postal survey (presuming a successful “Yes” vote), although members of the government were not bound by the results of the survey. The survey itself was a result of internal conflict within the government. Marriage equality was a prominent issue and it had long-standing public support: but while there were some strong advocates within the government, many conservative Liberal-National members of parliament (MPs) opposed it and refused to legislate same-sex marriage outright (Bourke, 2017). A non-binding postal survey which gave “No” advocates a protracted three months to campaign was the compromise solution. The vast majority of Australian outlets took an objective and “balanced” approach to covering the survey: refraining (outside of editorials) from taking a “side” and providing platforms for both “Yes” and “No” advocates in opinion columns and television panel programmes. Junkee and Pedestrian, as well as BuzzFeed to a lesser extent, did not follow this trend: instead, their support for the “Yes” vote was largely explicit. For Junkee and Pedestrian, this advocacy manifested in outright activism. This activism was in line with their progressive politics, but it was also an outcome of the peculiar circumstances of the survey. There were concerns from the “Yes” campaign that young people may not be familiar with physical mail and would be less likely to have kept their address details updated with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), due to young people moving between residences more often than older demographics. Junkee and Pedestrian, with youth being their key demographic, attempted

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to assist the “Yes” campaign by encouraging young people to, firstly, enrol to vote, and secondly, to update their address details if they needed to. And to make matters even more complicated, there was a tight deadline: the postal survey was announced on 8 August 2018, and the enrolment and update deadline fell on the 24 August. Attempts at engaging young people into political action took different forms. Junkee and its teen outlet Punkee provided links to the AEC website in Facebook posts, directing followers to “enrol and update”. Other Junkee posts sought to convey and capitalise on a sense of momentum to the “Yes” campaign, by embedding tweets from the AEC announcing high enrolment transactions and telling readers to “get it done” (Junkee, 2017). Both Junkee and Pedestrian also produced articles informing readers of the how the survey worked, to remind them of the tight enrolment deadline. These were often written in that same informal and conversational style, as with an article from Pedestrian titled “Folks, You’ve Got 14 Days To Enrol For The Postal Vote Next Month”. “Do it. Right now. Put your lunch down and check [your enrolment]… I’ve made it easy for you, all you have to do is click right here” writes the author, guiding the reader to the AEC enrolment link (Fry, 2017). Another Junkee article, titled “People Are Flooding The Electoral Commission To Update Their Details For The Postal Plebiscite” (Faruqi, 2017b), 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 had explainer elements, with the writer detailing how young people are “particularly vulnerable” since they “tend to move around a lot more than older Australians”. BuzzFeed, too, produced similar articles, such as one released on 24 August titled: “Guys, It’s Actually The Last Day You Can Enrol For The Same-Sex Marriage Survey” (Sainty, 2017). In such ways, Junkee and Pedestrian engaged in “advocacy journalism”: their reporters found it “no longer sufficient to report the news as mere facts”, and instead got “their audience to act” (Charles, 2013, p. 387). These articles tried to “jolt” (Charles, 2013, p. 387) their readers into enrolling, and thereby enact social change. Other methods were also employed by Junkee and Pedestrian to boost enrolment rates: for example, their social media banners and profile images were changed to a rainbow flag with the word “YES”. Also notable was their hashtag activism. As is now a common campaigning strategy on platforms, Junkee and Pedestrian (alongside other Australian born-digital outlets) took

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advantage of Twitter’s participatory and trending logics in an attempt to boost the visibility of their enrolment activism in the last few hours before the AEC deadline. The chosen hashtag was the suitably succinct “#EnrolAndUpdate”. And alongside this hashtag both outlets also “went dark”, temporarily removing advertising from their websites and devoting their official social media accounts to posting links to the AEC as well as other information about the survey (Stott, 2017). Other posts included rainbow-coloured GIFs displaying the word “Enrol”, flowing mesmerizingly against a psychedelic backdrop. While other social news outlets such as Mic, Indy100, and BuzzFeed have consistently made their progressive editorial line overt (indeed, it became their brand identity), Junkee and Pedestrian are distinct amongst the social news outlets examined in this book when it comes to outright political campaigning. Still, it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of Junkee and Pedestrian’s hashtag activism. While #EnrolAndUpdate attracted hundreds of tweets, this was still a small volume compared to other pro-marriage equality hashtags during the lead up to the 24 August deadline (Hurcombe, 2019). And even then, there is the question of whether the young people being targeted were even on Twitter—a platform which features a far smaller and older userbase than say, Instagram— let alone saw the hashtag. Still, that these social news outlets chose to perform hashtag activism is revealing in important ways: not just because these outlets were encouraging their audience into political action in stark violation of norms around impartiality, but also because social media was the go-to site to do such political work. It revealed a strong familiarity with the affordances through which political action is taken on platforms, as well as a literacy in the colourful GIFs and memes that typify how politics is communicated on those platforms. This “literacy” in platform-based communicative modes and aesthetics—that is, in platform cultures—will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4.

Conclusion The 2010s began with yet another round of lamentations about the state of news. The proliferation of digital news content on Facebook and the success of new born-digital outlets on that platform raised familiar concerns about sensationalist, low-quality, and “dumbed-down” news drowning out journalism. At the same time, a deterministic “dependency”

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narrative emerged regarding news and platforms, placing news at the mercy of the economic and technological logics of social media. UpWorthy and BuzzFeed were seen as the future of news—much to the alarm of journalists—because Facebook was making them the future. These lamentations and this deterministic narrative tended to overlook the creative ways in which outlets such as BuzzFeed reached and engaged audiences. There was significant attention paid to how “virality” and metrics were dominant concerns within newsrooms—but less serious consideration of the strategies through which metrics were maximised. And in many cases, these outlets were simply dismissed from the outset, as they were viewed through the same problematic normative assumptions which energised the tabloidisation concern in the 1980s and 1990s. In this chapter, I argued that social news outlets have indeed been guided by a logic of engagement. Maximising audience interaction and attention metrics have been key to their business models—for this was necessary for visibility, and therefore success, on platforms, particularly during the early-to-mid 2010s. And yet, viewing social news and their rapid success in the 2010s solely through the lens of “clickbait” is insufficient. Social news does not “dupe” people, as the clickbait label insinuates, even if headlines provoke and exploit a “curiosity gap”. Instead, social news outlets have creatively employed topics and platform vernacular in its stated mission to grab the eyeballs and the thumbs of young users scrolling through their social media feeds. Audience engagement goals, too, have gone beyond simply maximising metrics. The Junkee, BuzzFeed, and Mic explainers have demonstrated innovative ways of reaching and informing young audiences of “civic” concerns (such as financial policy), and Junkee and Pedestrian’s activism during the 2017 Australian same-sex marriage postal survey showed how social news outlets also work to engage their audiences in political action. Of course, social news outlets’ civic and advocacy journalism has not been divorced from business interests, as the former also functions as a commercial news brand. Such a blurring of strategy only further indicates how unhelpful the modernist binary between commercial and civic news is as an analytical tool. In Chap. 4, what I have been calling the “creativity” of social news engagement strategies is unpacked in detail. What did a “creative” audience strategy look like in a platform ecology powered by participatory culture, where news content existed alongside other kinds of everyday socialising? Well, it looked like being sociable.

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Burgess, J., & Baym, N. K. (2020). Twitter: A Biography. NYU Press. Caplan, R., & boyd, d. (2018). Isomorphism Through Algorithms: Institutional Dependencies in the Case of Facebook. Big Data & Society, 5(1), 1–12. Carlson, M. (2018). Confronting Measurable Journalism. Digital Journalism, 6(4), 406–417. Carson, A., & Muller, D. (2017). The Future Newsroom. http://arts.unimelb.edu. au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/2517726/20913_FNReport_Sept2017_ Web-­Final.pdf. Charles, M. (2013). News, Documentary and Advocacy Journalism. In K. Fowler-­ Watt & S.  Allan (Eds.), Journalism: New Challenges (pp.  384–392). CJR: Centre for Journalism and Communication Research, Bournemouth University. Clark, M. (2013, 18 September). They Told Her No Firm Would Pay Her Equally. So She Started Her Own. UpWorthy. https://www.upworthy.com/ they-­told-­her-­no-­firm-­would-­pay-­her-­equally-­so-­she-­started-­her-­own-­2. Cosman, B. (2014, 28 January). LGBT Activists Are Dumping Coca-Cola onto Streets in Protest. Here’s Why. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/80307/ lgbt-­activists-­are-­dumping-­coca-­cola-­onto-­streets-­in-­protest-­here-­s-­why. Crerar, S. (2013, 22 November). 33 Ways You Know You’re Australian. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/simoncrerar/you-­know-­you-­are-australian-­when. Dickinson, E. (2018, 13 November). How Australia’s Junkee Media Is Growing Up—and Down—with Its Changing Readership. Splice. https://www. thesplicenewsroom.com/junkee-­media/. Duncan, A. (2017, 29 July). ‘Weekend Sunrise’: Middle-aged Men Shout About Feminism, Solve Nothing. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/ weekend-­sunrise-­middle-­aged-­men-­shout-­about-­feminism-­solve-­nothing/. Edensor, H. (2016a, 10 March). Banner Ads Are Dying and Native Is the Future: Junkee Media CEO. B&T. https://www.bandt.com.au/banner-­ads-­are­dying-­and-­native-­is-­the-­future-­junkee-­media-­ceo/. Edensor, H. (2016b, 17 October). Audiences Are Still Loyal to Brands That Consistently Deliver: Pedestrian.tv co-founder. B&T. http://www.bandt. com.au/media/modern-­a udiences-­s till-­l oyal-­b rands-­c onsistently-­d eliver-­ pedestrian-­tv-­co-­founder. Eisenberg, R. (2013, 14 November). Boom Roasted: Here’s Why You Don’t Ask a Feminist to Hawk Your Sexist Product. UpWorthy. https://www.upworthy.com/boom-­r oasted-­heres-­why-­you-­dont-­ask-­a-­feminist-­to-­hawk-­your-­ sexist-­product. Elite. (2012, 11 March). The Definition of Greatness. EliteDaily. https://web. archive.org/web/20120311043539/http://elitedaily.com/elite/2012/ definition-­greatness/. Eltantawy, N., & Wiest, J.  B. (2011). The Arab Spring | Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilisation Theory. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1207–1224.

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Faruqi, O. (2017a, 10 January). Junk Explained: Why Is Australia Locking Up Record Numbers of New Zealanders? Junkee. https://junkee.com/australia-­ locking-­record-­numbers-­new-­zealanders-­immigration-­detention/93267. Faruqi, O. (2017b, 11 August). People Are Flooding the Electoral Commission to Update Their Details for the Postal Plebiscite. Junkee. https://junkee.com/ update-­enrolment-­postal-­plebiscite/117585. Faruqi, O. (2017c, 28 November). Omar Musa’s Explosive New Music Video Is a Scorching Takedown of Racism in Australia.Junkee. https://junkee.com/ omar-­musa-­assimilate-­video/136641. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books. Fry, C. (2017, 10 August). Folks, You’ve Got 14 Days to Enrol for the SSM Postal Vote Next Month. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/folks-youve-­ got-­14-­days-­to-­enrol-­for-­the-­ssm-­postal-­vote-­next-­month/. Gapper, J. (2014, 2 January). You Won’t Believe What Viral Content Does to News. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/05c084ae-­69cc-­11e3-­89 ce-­00144feabdc0. Gardiner, B. (2015, 18 December). You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2015/12/ psychology-­of-­clickbait/. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015). #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media, and Platform Vernacular. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 255–268. Hawkins, H. (2016, 6 February). Aussie Musician Brendan Maclean Calls Out Discrimination Against LGBT Artists in Powerful Facebook Post. Junkee. Retrieved from: https://junkee.com/aussie-­musician-­brendan-­maclean-­calls-­ out-­discrimination-­against-­lgbt-­artists-­in-­powerful-­facebook-­post-­2/73106. Hennessy, J. (2019, 8 February). What the Fuck Are Franking Credits? What Is Going On? Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/money/franking-­credits-­ explainer/. Horowitz, J. (2016, 29 March). Here Are the Surprising Lessons Cuba’s Economy Can Teach the U.S. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/139026/here-­are-­ the-­surprising-­lessons-­cuba-­s-­economy-­can-­teach-­the-­u-­s. Hunter, F. & Samios, Z. (2020, 31 July). Google and Facebook Face Fines and Algorithm Transparency Under New Code. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/google-­and-­facebook-­face-­fines-­ and-­algorithm-­transparency-­under-­new-­code-­20200731-­p55h7o.html. Hurcombe, E. (2019). The Logics of Social News: How BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian Are Making News More Engaging, Sociable, and Personal. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Independent. (2021). About Indy100.com. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/about-­i ndy100-­c oma6879446.html.

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Junkee. (2017, 10 August). Enrol. Update Your Address. Get It Done. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/junkeedotcom/posts/1394453780667082. Junkee. (2018a, 15 March). We Don’t Need to Hear Straight, White Male Opinions on Everything. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/junkeedotcom/posts/1627553020690489. Junkee. (2018b, 18 March). Do We Really Need Another ‘Man Saves World, Man Gets Girl’ Plot Line? Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/junkeedotcom/ posts/1631931863585938. Junkee. (2018c, 18 March). Here’s How Rich Boomers Are Using an Extremely Sneaky Scheme to Steal Your Money. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ junkeedotcom/videos/1628812370564554. Kaye, M. (2012, 22 August). Why Generation-Y Chooses Their Career Paths on the Wrong Factors. EliteDaily. https://www.elitedaily.com/money/entrepreneurship/kids-­choose-­career-­paths-­wrong-­factors-­2. Knuth, D. (1968). The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley. Konieczna, M., & Robinson, S. (2013). Emerging News Non-profits: A Case Study for Rebuilding Community Trust? Journalism, 15(8), 968–986. Lenton, P. (2018, 3 September). Junk explained: What exactly is a ‘hot couch guy’? Junkee. https://junkee.com/hot-­couch-­guy/173922. Lenton, P. (2019, 30 April). Terrible manbabies think Arya Stark doesn’t deserve to be the hero. Junkee. https://junkee.com/arya-­stark-­mary-­sue-­game-­of-­ thrones/203474. Lewis, P. (2016, 25 March). Can ‘double-dipping’ food spread disease? Here’s why we should all be grossed out. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/138877/ can-­d ouble-­d ipping-­f ood-­s pread-­d isease-­h ere-­s -­w hy-­w e-should-­a ll-­b e-­ grossed-­out. Lewis, R. (2018). Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube. Data & Society. https://datasociety.net/wp-­content/uploads/ 2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf. Madrigal, A. C. & Meyer, R. (2018, 19 October). How Facebook’s chaotic push into video cost hundreds of journalists their jobs. The Atlantic. https://www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/facebook-­d riven-­v ideo­push-­may-­have-­cost-­483-­journalists-­their-­jobs/573403/. Marwick, A.  E. (2008). To catch a predator? The MySpace moral panic. First Monday, 13(6), 1. McKay, T. (2014, 30 January). Can Justin Bieber actually be deported from the U.S.? Here’s what comes next for the pop star. Mic. https://www.mic.com/ articles/80555/can-­justin-­bieber-­actually-­be-­deported-­from-­the-u-­s-­here-­s-­ what-­comes-­next-­for-­the-­pop-­star. McKinnon, A. (2016, 20 April). Junk explained: Why are we having a 75-day election campaign, dear god, why. Junkee. https://junkee.com/a-­list-­of-­things-­ australia-­could-­do-­instead-­of-­having-­a-­three-­month-­election-­campaign/75043.

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McLean, M. L., & Evans, G. (2021, 12 January). Here are 55 of the worst things Trump has done during his presidency. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/ news/donald-­trump-­bad-­things-­list-­b1785865. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw Hill. Meese, J., & Hurcombe, E. (2020). Facebook, news media and platform dependency: The institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms. New Media & Society. Published online first: https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1461444820926472. Meyer, R. (2013, 9 December). Why are UpWorthy headlines suddenly everywhere? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/whyare-­upworthy-­headlines-­suddenly-­everywhere/282048/. Mordecai, A. (2012, 30 May). Who wants to cry and have their faith in humanity restored? UpWorthy. https://www.upworthy.com/who-­wants-­to-­cry-­and-have-­ their-­faith-­in-­humanity-­restored. Moyo, D., Mare, A., & Matsilele, T. (2019). Analytics-driven Journalism? Editorial Metrics and the Reconfiguration of Online News Production Practices in African Newsrooms. Digital Journalism, 7(4), 490–506. Mulkerin, T. (2018, 25 May). Angry gamers aren’t happy the ‘Battlefield V’ trailer features a female soldier. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/189524/angry-­ gamers-­arent-­happy-­the-­battlefield-­v-­trailer-­features-­a-­female-­solider. Napoli, P. M. (2010). Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Columbia University Press. Narayan, R. (2013, 27 September). The things this 4-year-old is doing are cute. The reason he’s doing them is heartbreaking. UpWorthy. https://www.upworthy.com/the-­things-­this-­4-­year-­old-­is-­doing-­are-­cute-­the-­reason-­hes-doing-­ them-­is-­heartbreaking-­5. Navar-Gill, A., & Stanfill, M. (2018). ‘We Shouldn’t Have to Trend to Make You Listen’: Queer Hashtag Campaigns as Production Interventions. Journal of Film and Video, 70(3-4), 85–100. Nielsen, R.  K., & Ganter, S.  A. (2018). Dealing with Digital Intermediaries: A Case Study of the Relations Between Publishers and Platforms. New Media & Society, 20(4), 1600–1617. Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity. Robin, M. (2014, 26 March). Move over, BuzzFeed: How Junkee is making its own way (and making money) online. Crikey. https://www.crikey.com. au/2014/03/26/move-­over-­buzzfeed-­how-­junkee-­is-­making-­its-­own-­way-­ and-­making-­money-­online/. Rodriguez, M. (2016, 25 October). Halloween 2016 is All About Saying F*ck You to Gender. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/157480/halloween2016-is-all-about-saying-f-ck-you-to-gender.

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Rushe, D. (2021, 1 August). Big tech’s big week raises fears of ‘Blade Runner future’ of mega-company rule. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2021/aug/01/big-­techs-­big-­week-­blade-­r unner-­future-­ amazon-­google-­apple-­microsoft. Ryan, H. (2018, 19 October). Here’s are 11 things that are harder for renters to get away with. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahryan/here-­are-­11-­ things-­its-­much-­harder-­to-­do-­if-­you-­rent. Sainty, L. (2017, 24 August). Guys, it’s actually the last day you can enrol for the same-sex marriage survey. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/lanesainty/ last-­chance. Sainty, L. (2018, 8 May). I know this sounds boring but the budget superannuation changes will probably affect you. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ lanesainty/i-­know-­this-­sounds-­boring-­but-­the-­budget-­superannuation. Schudson, M. (1998). The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. Martin Kessler Books. Schudson, M. (2003). The Sociology of News. Norton. Schulte, S.  R. (2016). Personalization. In B.  Peters (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture (pp.  242–252). Princeton University Press. Smith, S. L., Choueiti, M., & Pieper, K. (2017). Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007-2016. USC Annenberg. https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/ Dr_Stacy_L_Smith-­Inequality_in_900_Popular_Films.pdf. Steensen, S., Ferrer-Conill, R., & Peters, C. (2020). (Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News. Journalism Studies, 21(12), 1662–1680. Stewart, E. (2015, 26 December). The twelve most read stories of 2015. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/discover/the-­1 2-­m ost-­r ead-stories-­o f-­2 0157286701. Stott, R. (2017, 23 August). Why we’re going dark. Junkee. https://junkee.com/ marriage-­survey-­bkackout/119743. Stubbins, S. (2015a, 16 January). Why we give our favourite TV shows a free pass even when we probably shouldn’t. Junkee. https://junkee.com/why-­we-­give-­ our-­favourite-­tv-­shows-­a-­free-­pass-­even-­when-­we-­probably-­shouldnt/48940. Stubbins, S. (2015b, 5 December). Guardians of the Galaxy director slams tradition of shitty, sexist merchandise. Junkee. https://junkee.com/guardians-­of-­ the-­galaxy-­director-­hates-­the-­lack-­of-­female-­character-­merchandise/70473. Swartz, A. (2016, 24 March). Strawberry shortcake Oreos are now a real thing— here’s ow to get them. Mic. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ strawberry-­shortcake-­oreos-­now-­real-­235000646.html. Sweet, M., et  al. (2017). Outlining a Model of Social Journalism for Health. Australian Journalism Review, 39(2), 91–106.

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Taylor, J. (2020, 3 November). 9 Trump allies who’ve been arrested, indicted, or jailed since he became president. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/offbeat/trump-­staffers-­jailed-­indicted-­michael-­cohen-­steve-­bannon-­9723818. Thompson, D. (2013, 14 November). Upworthy: I thought this website was crazy, but what happened next changed everything. The Atlantic. https:// www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/upworthy-­i -­t hought-­ this-­w ebsite-­w as-­c razy-­b ut-­w hat-­h appened-­n ext-­c hanged-­e ver ything/ 281472/. Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process. Oxford University Press. UpWorthy. (2012, 3 December). How to make that one thing go viral. Slideshare. https://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/how-­to-­make-­that-­one-thing-­go-­ viral-­just-­kidding/27. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14. Waters, P. (2013, 5 April). Why you should hate social media. EliteDaily. https:// web.archive.org/web/20130407120502/http://elitedaily.com/elite/2013/ hate-­social-­media/. Watson, M. (2015, 10 April). Junk explained: What you need to know about the ‘Dallas Buyers Club’/iiNet piracy ruling. Junkee. https://junkee.com/ junk-­explained-­are-­you-­going-­to-­jail-­over-­a-­matthew-­mcconaughey-­film-­or-­ what/54663. Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge. Wooley, J. K., Limperos, A. M., & Oliver, M. B. (2010). The 2008 Presidential Election, 2.0: A Content Analysis of User-generated Political Facebook Groups. Mass Communication and Society, 13(5), 631–652. Wright, O. (2015, 9 May). 7 laws the Lib Dems stopped the Tories from passing. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/news/7-­laws-­the-­lib-­dems-­stopped-­the-­ tories-­from-­passing-­7266716.

CHAPTER 4

Sociability

Introduction Social news outlets were distinguished early on by their humorous and often conversational style, along with what appeared to be a literacy in the pop-culture-infused vernaculars of the internet. Both of these elements seemed suitable to everyday social media. In this chapter, I theorise these aspects of social news. I demonstrate how social news outlets in the 2010s were guided by a logic of sociability. Drawing here on the writings of Georg Simmel, I define sociability as the “feeling for” and the “satisfaction in” the “very fact one is associated with others” (1971, p. 128). Sociability, therefore, is a kind of “togetherness, a union of others” (1971, p. 128). Social news outlets have attempted to appeal to and harness this sense of “togetherness”. In doing so, social news outlets have been early innovators in building successful audience strategies based around socialising— or more accurately, socialising facilitated through news content, that is grounded within the connective logics of platforms. I begin this chapter by coming back to José van Dijck and Thomas Poell and their concept of “social media logics” (2013). I use what they have called the social media logic of “connectivity” as an entry point into examining how the “boundaries between human connections and commercially and technologically steered activities… are increasingly obfuscated” on platforms (van Dijck & Poell, 2013, p. 9). A social media phenomenon which captures this obfuscation is “sharing”, and I frame social news as a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_4

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commercial genre that sought shareability through sociability. I argue that social news sparked the “impulse to sociability”—that is, the impulse to connect and share—through particular textual characteristics, such as a humorous, GIF and meme-heavy conversational style, as well as an affective sensibility. These elements suited the everyday sharing practices on platforms because they reflected the vernaculars of those platforms. I conclude the chapter by qualifying social news’ potential for “togetherness” by returning to the concept of “constitutive humour” (Phillips & Milner, 2017). I argue that the vernacular and humour of social news have often been built off an implicit “us” that excludes an equally implicit “them”.

Connectivity and Sharing on Social Media Van Dijck and Poell describe platforms as having a “Janus-face quality” (2013, p. 9), referring here to the two-faced Roman god. They argue that the “connectivity” of platforms is an especially strong demonstration of the double-sided nature of social media logic because platforms not only enable connections between users, but also engineer them for commercial purposes. For example, algorithmically determined friend and page recommendations on Facebook not only help connect users to others but also allow users to build social networks (and therefore profiling data) for Facebook’s advertising partners. In this context, the emergence of “sharing” as a popular social practice and commercial audience strategy during the early 2010s is demonstrative. “Sharing” has since become a ubiquitous term, having been popularised by platforms through both their features (e.g., Facebook’s “share” button) as well as their marketing. Twitter’s mission statement since 2014, for instance, has been to “give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly” (Twitter, 2021), while Instagram in 2018 described itself as “a community… who capture and share the world’s moments” (Instagram, 2018). The Facebook homepage, meanwhile, has long proclaimed that the platform “helps you connect and share with the people in your life” (Facebook, 2021). YouTube’s About page has also stated for years that “the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories” (YouTube, 2021). “Sharing” has also become popular outside of the major social media platforms: the car-­ hailing application Uber and the short-term rental platform Airbnb, for example, have both described themselves as forming part of a “sharing economy” (John, 2017, p. 69).

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However, despite all this commercial branding, sharing does actually acutely capture this “double-sided nature” of connectivity. “Sharing” is symptomatic of the commercial logics of platforms, but it also exemplifies the kinds of participatory potential that emerges from platform affordances. It is a marketing term that hides the commercial interests behind encouraging users to “share” themselves (as well as their labour) (Fleming et  al., 2019). And  yet it also meaningfully articulates the kinds of pro-­ social possibilities that platforms can offer, from hashtag activism to cooking groups on Facebook. We will see this with social news. For social news, being a commercial news genre that is both symptomatic of and responsive to the logics and user cultures of platforms, embodies these contradictory qualities. Social news outlets both promote and exploit sharing, and yet have also demonstrated a creative answer to the connective imperatives on platforms, with positive implications for journalism. In the past, social news outlets have made numerous references to sharing when differentiating their content from older, legacy news outlets. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti regularly promoted his outlet’s expertise in sharing, by claiming that BuzzFeed has a great understanding of “what people share and why people share” (Salmon, 2014). Former BuzzFeed Oz News editor Simon Crerar also emphasised sharing as a distinctively BuzzFeed area of expertise, by claiming that BuzzFeed’s “understanding of how content shares” was what made his outlet attractive to readers and advertisers (Carson & Muller, 2017, p.  45). Junkee co-founder Neil Ackland has previously boasted that the outlet has done “a lot” of research “looking at the psychology of why people share content” (Doyle, 2015). In the case of Pedestrian, while the outlet has not explicitly used the word “sharing” in its promotional material, the outlet has previously boasted of its “unique understanding of content, culture and media”: suggesting insider knowledge about the platform ecologies where sharing flourishes (Pedestrian, 2016). And in the US, UpWorthy from the beginning defined its brand identity around producing content that is “shareable” and “clickable” (2012b). In the above contexts, sharing had multiple meanings. Most clearly, the term referenced the platform-based technological affordances that enabled the replication and distribution of content, such as articles and videos, amongst users. Yet “sharing” became a popular term with social news for reasons that go beyond mere technical description—for the word is one with almost purely positive connotations.

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While originating with a functional meaning—the equal partition of a concrete thing, such as land—sharing has long since come to broadly signify notions of giving and selflessness (John, 2017). “Sharing” can also have intimate connotations, such as the revelation of feeling, or other acts of personal transparency. In this regard, as Nicholas John has argued, those using the word “seek to harness more than just its technical meaning of certain aspects of computer-mediated communication” (2017, p. 61). The mystifying, even cynical, appropriation of the term by platforms became controversial during the 2010s, as some commentators denounced the emergence of the so-called sharing economy (exemplified by freelancer apps Taskrabbit and Airtasker) as simply an extension of neoliberalism into “previously protected areas of our lives” (Slee, 2017). Due to this, “sharing”—at least how the term was deployed by platforms and smaller tech start-ups—was called by some observers as a “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing”, and not really sharing, but a rather instead an exploitative “pseudo-­ sharing” (Belk, 2014). Social news outlets, too, had similar commercial incentives for their promotion of “sharing”, both for branding reasons and for their need to keep the business of audience engagement running. There was a feeling, therefore, during the 2010s, that the internet had shifted away from a culture of user-led user  generated content to one dominated by “sharing”. That is, from a participatory culture characterised by the mutual creation and circulation of content to a commodified distribution of products and labour through digital networks. 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. Yet it is precisely because both platforms and social news outlets have depended on users giving something voluntarily to others, that there is a necessity for platforms and outlets to create sociable environments and content that can facilitate this giving. “Sociable” here is usefully understood through Simmel (1971). Simmel was intrigued by the motives of “association”. He argued that rather than “association” being always driven by practical motivations, people instead had a latent “impulse to sociability” which only later called forth “objective [that is, ulterior] content”. For Simmel, then, sociability was a “play-form of association” (1971, p. 128). But what exactly sparks this desire to playfully associate with others on social media? For the “impulse” to connect and share on platforms is not only an outcome of platform features, as not all content is shared, and

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some content spreads more than others do. Moreover, when Peretti boasted of BuzzFeed’s expertise in sharing, or when Upworthy promoted their tips for making “shareable” content “go viral”, they were speaking about texts, not just platform features. In other words, social news outlets—unlike “boring” legacy outlets—were claiming that their content could cater to the sociable impulse. Before we move on, I need to make clear that my emphasis on “sociability” differs in key respects from earlier scholarship on news sharing. In previous arguments, some topics, and some subjects, just had shareable potential while others did not. “Shareability” was therefore framed as an emerging news value within the platform ecology (Phillips, 2012; Welbers et al., 2016; Harcup & O’Neill, 2017): that is, an inherent quality within a story that reporters were able to identify. This framing can help us understand social news’ shareability to a certain extent, as there have been many examples of social news articles that appear to capitalising on sensational and otherwise unique or alarming stories. For instance, headlines from Pedestrian like “We Are Deeply Saddened By The Great South Australian Avocado Heist Of 2014” (Ash, 2017) and “Can You Help Actor Dean Norris Find ‘Sex Gifs’” (McLeay, 2018) are examples of sensational shareability. And as we have seen in the previous chapter, the kinds of heart-warming videos and listicles that made UpWorthy and BuzzFeed famous in the early 2010s exploited an affective impulse sparked by stories. Yet similar to our issues with the “clickbait” label, focusing solely on “shareable” stories also implicitly re-treads older notions about “tabloid” news values. And precisely because of this re-treading, by emphasising stories rather than texts, this news value-centric shareability framework can only be of limited help when trying to understand social news’ success. Putting emphasis on “stories” alone fails to capture the contexts in which stories are shared, and the ways in which stories are packaged for sharing. For social news outlets, it was never just about individual stories. Peretti’s complaints about New York Times being “boring” (Salmon, 2014), Junkee’s proclaimed intention to create content that will make their readers seem “knowledgeable or funny”, Pedestrian’s “unique understanding of content, culture and media”, and Mic’s talk of “substantive news” that “spark[s] interesting conversations” (2014) all suggested a desire to attract and retain audiences through a brand of humour, “culture”, and intelligence, within a then-new media ecology.

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And as shown throughout this book, social news outlets have written about a range of news topics. They have regularly reported on so-called hard news topics (such as the economy, politics, and social issues). In the case of BuzzFeed, the outlet even had reporters based at the White House and the Australian parliamentary Press Gallery (Robin, 2015). In these ways, social news’ shareability has always been more than simply a set of news values—rather, it has been a brand based around sociable texts. And what distinguishes social news as a sociable and therefore shareable news genre has been the content that both reflects and speaks to internet culture.

Sociability and Platform Vernacular In order to locate social news’ sociability, it is important to talk about silly internet stuff. Memes, acronyms, and other forms of expressive pop-­ culture—what Martin Gibbs and colleagues have called “platform vernacular” (2015)—drive social news. But platform vernacular is more than just online frivolity. It is an aesthetic sensibility, a grammar of communication, and a set of social conventions that help users make meaning in their everyday socialising on platforms. It also emerges from their “ongoing interactions” with platforms (Gibbs et  al., 2015, p.  257). Along with memes and self-expressive acronyms (e.g., BuzzFeed’s use of “omg” on its home page banner), social news outlets since the early 2010s have also embraced other elements of internet culture such as snark, informal address, playful irreverence, and self-deprecating humour. GIFs, those looped visual artefacts typically deployed to convey affect, have also often been included within articles. As will be examined below, this use of platform vernacular forms part of a social news audience strategy that seeks to spark and reflect conversations on social media. An example of the looping effect of a rolling GIF can be seen in a 2015 article from British outlet Indy100, titled “Hannity defends corporal punishment by smashing his belt on a desk” (Bartlett, 2014). The article is about Fox News host Sean Hannity, a shock jock commentator on the right-wing US cable network, expressing his disagreement with the suspension of a footballer accused of hitting his 4-year-old child. Hannity, while believing that the footballer “had gone too far” (the footballer had hit his child with a tree branch), nonetheless felt that a potential suspension was over the top, because Hannity claimed that he himself had benefited from corporal punishment. The article then wryly recounts how

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“America’s voice of reason” unclipped his belt and began “manically thrashing it” against his desk “on live national television”. Three GIFs follow: the first, showing Hannity unclipping and then stretching his belt to the other panellists (like a violent father would to his cowering child), and the next two, depicting Hannity proceeding to smash the belt against his desk, his face shifting from calm to frenzied aggression. The GIFs do more than a static photo or a single video, here. They communicated Hannity’s manic energy, and the looping “bang, bang” of the belt hitting the desk— while the other panellists awkwardly look on—added an almost hypnotising rhythm to the article, capturing, arguably, the resonating impact of the bizarre television moment more than text or a single video could do alone. In such ways, the GIFs replicated and remixed the spectacle by repeating it over and over, endlessly, and in doing so, accentuated the absurdity of the television moment. Such ridiculous television, of course, would have also likely been the topic of conversations on social media—and Indy100 would have produced this article in order to capitalise on such conversations. A 2018 Pedestrian article also demonstrated this kind of platform vernacular-­infused commentary on news media (Adams, 2018). Titled “Q&A Gives Up, Announces Australia’s Most Cooked Pollies For QLD Special”, the article reported that the flagship panel programme of Australia’s national public broadcaster would be having a Queensland-­ themed episode, inviting some of the country’s most inflammatory politicians—including far-right figures Pauline Hanson and George Christensen—to debate issues facing the state. Q&A, which, as the article tells the reader, “bills itself as the public broadcaster’s premiere forum for challenging ideas and policy positions”, has been previously criticised for its conflict-and-controversy driven programming (Meade, 2019). Rather than being a forum for rigorous public debate, the article told us that Q&A “more closely resembles an ideological Beyblade battle”—referencing the Japanese toyline popular in Australian schoolyards during the early 2000s—“duked out by the nation’s most prominent cookers” (“cooked” being Australian slang for something that is absurdly crazy or unjust). To further draw the analogy between politicians bickering on television and children fighting in a schoolyard, the article included a Beyblade GIF in the text, showing a child-like anime character launching a Beyblade disc from a handheld device. The ironic joy expressed in the headline at the prospect of this spectacle ran throughout the article, with the article telling the reader that Q&A “promises to let it fucking rip” (like one would

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do with a Beyblade). The grim humour, here, seemingly reflected the despair and exhaustion that many felt about Australian politics in the late 2010s, a feeling which many also expressed online (Watercutter, 2020). The headline image, too, was edited for vernacular-based humour: it was a Q&A promotional image featuring headshots of the upcoming panellists, with the lines “o no aunty” (a common affectionate term for the national broadcaster) and “wat is u doin bb?” (“baby”) overlaying the image. Junkee has also participated in this trend of using memetic pop-cultural imagery to report and comment on politics. This stylistic choice has been aided by the internal strife that gripped Australian governments in the 2010s—resulting in a series of almost bi-yearly Prime Ministerial leadership challenges. Such strife was ripe for memetic commentary, as evidenced in a Junkee article titled “The Rest Of The World Are Even More Confused About Our Leadership Chaos Than We Are” (Watson, 2015). The article reported on Malcolm Turnbull’s successful challenge to Tony Abbott for leadership of the governing Liberal Party, which resulted in Turnbull taking the country’s top job (the third such successful federal leadership challenge in five years). And it did so in Junkee’s typically sardonic house-style. The author drew an absurd scene: of Abbott “weeping” in a Parliamentary “broom closet” while Turnbull clinches the leadership, all the while “the nation’s journos” run off “the same manic script we’ve seen play out over the past few years”. To complement this farcical scene, and to illustrate how the international community must be viewing the state of Australian politics, the article deployed memes from the long-running US animated series The Simpsons. For example, the article’s thumbnail image was a shot from an infamous episode that depicted Australia as a backwater country where everybody personally knows the Prime Minister and criminals are punished with a literal booting. The thumbnail featured one of the episode’s most memorable shots: the Australian “Prime Minister” lounging in a pond, floating in an old car tyre and drinking a Fosters beer. The use of this image was ironic, as it played on the international community’s apparent perception of Australian politics and the Australian national character, yet it also satirised what Junkee saw as the actual petty insularity of the federal government, remote from the world and more concerned with personal leadership ambitions than policy. Deeper into the article, there is another Simpsons image from the same episode: this time of the “booting flag”, what Simpsons depicted as the Australian national flag, and which featured a boot and a butt instead

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of the Southern Cross that graces the real flag. The article captions this image by writing “turns out it was Abbott’s arse on the flag all along”—a joking reference to the regular and ritualised “booting” of Prime Ministers during the 2010s. This complicated mixture of memetic pop-cultural references and political commentary came at a time during the mid-2010s when old episodes of The Simpsons were experiencing a boom in popularity for millennial social media users in Australia. Several Simpsons-themed Facebook Pages became popular during these years (such as the left-wing Simpsons Against the Liberals Page), both driven by and fuelling the nostalgia of a generation who had grown up with nightly syndicated reruns of the programme during the 1990s and 2000s (Williams, 2019). In such ways, Junkee was not just targeting millennial sensibilities, but also communicating political commentary through the symbols and in-jokes that helped many make sense of Australia’s increasingly silly politics. Junkee, therefore, was demonstrating a fluency with the multi-layered intertextuality of internet memes (Shifman, 2014). Australia’s ongoing political instability has continued to be meme-­ fodder for Junkee, and the above use of memetic thumbnails has not been an isolated example. For instance, during a 2017–18 constitutional crisis which led to several members of Parliament (MPs) resigning due to their dual-citizen status, Junkee posted an image of a cartoon dog, sitting alone in their living room and drinking tea while their house burns around them. The cartoon anthropomorphic dog proclaims cheerily, while the flames flicker at their feet, that “this is fine”. The article accompanying this image was headlined with similar grim humour: “Lol”, it began, “Scott Morrison [Australia’s new Prime Minister] Might Be About To Lose Yet Another MP” (Cliff, 2018). The dog meme, made famous on Twitter during Trump’s 2016 election campaign (Rogers, 2016), was likely intended to resonate with young social media users growing up in an increasingly unstable (both politically and ecologically) world. Other kinds of platform vernacular similarly function in social news texts as reflections and facilitators of social media sociability. Emoji—cartoon images deployed to affectively express emotion or to denote certain activities—have often featured in social news thumbnails. This can be seen, for instance, in a BuzzFeed Australia article from 2017 titled “If Your NBN Sucks, Telstra Might Give You Compensation” (Taylor, 2017), where an angry face and a dollar sign are plastered on top of an otherwise conventional photo-op of then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull making

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a visit telecommunications site. The National Broadband Network (NBN) is a national telecommunications infrastructure project that has been beset by problems since it was announced in 2007. BuzzFeed’s angry face emoji appeared to be tapping into this ongoing public frustration with the NBN as well as with the figure of Malcolm Turnbull, whose policy shift towards a cheaper but slower NBN had become a source of anger for many young, tech-savvy Australians (Alizadeh, 2017). Junkee also used emoji in this multi-layered fashion: for example, in an article titled “Mojo Juju Has Written A ‘Love Letter’ To Andrew Bolt After His Rant About Her New Album” (Richards, 2018). The article reports on singer-songwriter Mojo Juju’s satirical “love letter” to Australian right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt after the latter went on a rant about the musician’s outspoken anti-­ racist politics. The article’s thumbnail included a picture of Mojo Juju juxtaposed against a smiling Bolt, with a pink love heart emoji nestled between them. The love heart visually communicated Mojo’s “love letter”, but it was also an ironic joke at Bolt’s expense—the insinuation here being that “loving” a person like Bolt would be absurd for the young, progressive audience that Junkee targeted. These examples demonstrate that when social news outlets have emphasised their shareability, they have not simply promoted the supposed viral potential of the things they reported on. Rather, they have indicated how their audience strategy has been embedded within the connective cultures of social media. They  have signified how social news content has been designed to both speak to and reflect the ways in which young audiences communicate and make meaning on platforms. In this sense, by communicating news through the vernaculars of platforms, social news outlets have attempted to tap into the kinds of everyday sociality that social media afford. The use of emoji is particularly striking here, considering their association with instant messaging: demonstrating how the audience strategies of social news outlets have been deeply steeped in everyday platform-­mediated social life. And to further ground social news content within the popular culture of the 2010s, the kind of humorous, witty, and ironic sensibilities displayed in the above examples are also reminiscent of what Tim Highfield has called the “irreverent Internet”, where “engagement with issues, texts, and events takes more jokey forms” (2016). Social news’ literacy in the vernaculars and sensibilities of internet culture, therefore, has been central to their sharingcentric content strategy. The assemblage of memes and GIFs and other internet paraphernalia contained within social news texts can be interpreted as an attempt to achieve shareability through sociability—that is, making

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content that facilitates socialising on social media. The claim by BuzzFeed Australia editor Crerar that a “kick-­arse viral post” requires “an outstanding thumbnail and headline combination” (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 15), in this sense, demonstrates the centrality of platform and cultural literacy to social news’ audience engagement strategies. To reiterate, the strong relationships that social news content has  sought to establish with platform phenomena again indicate how our analysis needs to move beyond frivolity and “clickbait”. For the examples we have seen demonstrate how social news’ audience strategy is highly contextual, in so far as it has been grounded within and responds to specific yet multi-layered pop-cultural sensibilities, as well as a distinct generational feeling.

“Here’s How People Reacted To…”: The Sociability of Social Media Recaps Social news outlets early on also recognised the newsworthiness of things that happened on social media. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have long been a frequent topic of social news articles. Mic, for instance, was an early observer of Twitter, and has been a regular chronicler of hashtags and platform publics as far back as 2012. Mic articles from this year included recaps of that year’s Presidential debate “according to Twitter” (Moreira, 2012a)—featuring a now familiar mixture of humorous, emotive, and thoughtful Twitter reactions to key moments from a TV event— as well lists of popular Twitter “celebrities”, one of which was headed by Obama (Moreira, 2012b). In 2012, Mic was also reporting on pop-­ cultural political conflict on the platform, such as tweets by racist fans of the Hunger Games films (Felton, 2012); this particular article highlighted the prevalence of racism within fandoms on social media. These types of articles continue to be part of Mic’s regular output. And over at BuzzFeed, the outlet has been recapping the “best of” the internet since the early 2010s—from funny YouTube comments (Stopera, 2012) to interesting Twitter conversations (Bryan, 2013), alongside many other articles documenting internet activity. Meanwhile UpWorthy, of course, achieved huge and sudden success in 2012 precisely because it transformed internet phenomena into branded content. Social news was thus an innovator in doing news on social media, in both senses: not only social media-based news distribution, but also turning social media into a news beat. There seemed to be a realisation, going

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back even as far as BuzzFeed’s earlier incarnation as a lab (or “feed”) for tracking internet “buzz”, that the internet was “good content”. There were several reasons why this was the case. Firstly, internet content was not expensive, at least to reproduce. While a literacy in social media and a keen eye for “sharing”—those qualities BuzzFeed, UpWorthy, and Junkee have always emphasised—were required to identify “good content”, the actual process of screenshotting or embedding tweets and other social media artefacts into articles was (and continues to be) much less costly and resource-intensive than, say, sending reporters out into the physical field. A significant portion of these articles, at least for BuzzFeed, were also crowdsourced in the form of “community contributors”—a key aspect of BuzzFeed’s business model that later would attract criticism (Guaglione, 2021). That such articles were typically so inexpensive to produce also led to outlets like BuzzFeed and UpWorthy being labelled “content mills” due to their seemingly endless turnover of lists and quizzes (Saleem, 2013). Secondly, the internet was interesting, fun, and often very funny. Social news outlets identified in user generated content (UGC) a source of entertaining creativity, which platforms and internet forums were full of. They then leveraged—even appropriated—this UGC, including forms of “citizen journalism”, to be branded and reshared in the same participatory spaces in which they were originally found. Still, as the Mic report on racism within social media fandoms indicates, social news did not always simply curate and reproduce such phenomena. They also often treated UGC as seriously newsworthy. That things that happen on the internet are important is not something that many people would need convincing of in our current moment of rampant misinformation and conspiracy-­fuelled real-world violence. But, as indicated by the panics about a “virus” of lists and cat videos (Gapper, 2014), many mainstream outlets in the early 2010s were prejudiced against social media. Still, beyond being funny, interesting, or important, internet content is sociable in other crucial ways. Take, for example, a 2017 “Internet Reacts” article from Junkee about the 2017–2018 constitutional crisis, titled “All The Best Twitter Reactions To A Bunch Of Politicians Getting Booted From Parliament” (Langford, 2017). As with other Junkee articles, there was an abundance of platform vernacular such as Simpsons memes (from that same Australian episode) and pop-culture GIFs as well as internet slang. As the headline suggested, the core of the article was a selection of tweets humorously reacting to politicians being forced to resign from Parliament after being notified of their dual-citizen status. In such ways,

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the article was like other social news reports on the internet: a curated list of funny stuff. And yet, partly due to the political subject matter, the article was doing more than that—or, to put it differently, its content appeared to be relying on more than just humour. For the politicians at the centre of this particular round of resignations were, as the article claimed, “two of Australia’s least faves”: the conservative National Party MP Barnaby Joyce, and Senator Malcolm Roberts from the far-right One Nation party. The article revelled in the “booting” of these politicians loathed by Australian progressives. “The people have taken to Twitter to share their thoughts, feelings and memes”, the article began, “and most of those thoughts/feelings/memes can be pretty simply summed up as ‘fucking stoked’” [“stoked” being slang for pleased] (Langford, 2017). In doing so, the article invited readers to revel in the booting, to join in on the “sacred tradition” of “roasting” [poking fun] “every time Australian politicians do something stupid”, which the article admitted is “most days”. And the punchlines of these curated tweets hinged on the apparent stupidity of these politicians: for instance, one tweet was captioned “Roberts eats his hat” and featured a GIF of a character from the 1998 sports comedy film Baseketball, eating a piece of tinfoil—the joke here being Roberts’ reputation as a promoter of fringe conspiracy theories. Hence, there was a sociable thrust to the article: it was not just funny, but also tapped into a collective catharsis that accompanied these politicians finally experiencing their own comeuppance. The article was, in this way, an invitation to participate in this cathartic moment. A Pedestrian article from the same year also exhibited these elements. Titled “Twitter Reacts To Mike Baird’s Shock Resignation With Shade & Lockout Gags”, it was a report on the “shock” resignation of New South Wales State Premier Mike Baird (Bruce-Smith, 2017a). Like the above Junkee article, the Pedestrian report mostly consisted of a curated list of embedded tweets “having a bloody great time with the gags” (“gags”, here, being an Australian colloquialism for jokes). The embedded tweets were the usual mixture of humour and snark, making light of Baird and his unexpected departure from politics (Baird, like Joyce and Roberts, was a conservative politician). This was the “shade” mentioned in the headline: an internet slang word for veiled criticism. In the U.S., Mic in the 2010s was also producing articles that curated Twitter reactions to political events. Some of these were jokey and cathartic like the Junkee and Pedestrian articles discussed above, while others reported on and engaged with social media publics in more explanatory

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and deliberative ways. For example, a 2015 article titled “Twitter Reacts to Bernie Sanders’ Claims That Climate Change Caused Rise in Terrorism” reported on a moment from a Democratic primary debate, where Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders discussed how climate change could function as a destabilising agent in conflict-ridden regions (Eggert, 2015). Mic reported on what Twitter users “had to say” about Sanders’ citing climate change as the US’ number one national security threat—and, unlike the Junkee and Pedestrian articles, these embedded tweets were not in unanimous agreement. Instead, even conservative responses (such as a tweet from right-wing outlet The Blaze) were included, ridiculing the progressive candidate’s comments: “man that Bernie Sanders is hilarious”, says one tweeter. Meanwhile, half the other tweets in the article “backed up” Sanders’ statement, agreeing with Sanders that “climate change is the catalyst for tensions across the globe”. What happened on Twitter in this instance was presented in a more traditional both-sides format, much like a televised debate, with the views of the audience (here Twitter users) reproduced for Mic’s readers. Mic was not inviting readers to collectively react to a political event in the way others were already doing so online (as Junkee and Pedestrian did), but the outlet was still inviting participation— albeit within a more traditional notion of deliberative debate. “Both sides” were left for the readers to engage with—with the tweets serving as material to help readers make up their own minds on the climate change and terrorism question. In this regard, the Mic article also reveals how the “Twitter reacts” article genre continues older news traditions, in particular the “vox pop”. Like how the vox pop is a packaged selection of curated commentary from “real” people (this realness visualised via the roaming street reporter), the Twitter reacts articles similarly embed and thereby publicise the views of “real” users. The frequent use of the word “people” by social news outlets—that is, “how people reacted”, and so on—is in this sense similar to the discursive strategies deployed by vox  pops, in that it colours news stories with a pseudo-democratic (or populist) coating (Dekavalla, 2012). Yet as we have seen, what social news has been doing with Twitter— and other kinds of embedded UGC—is different. Social news has been operating in a different media ecology to the one television vox pops were initially produced for, and also within a new culture—a participatory one, which social news outlets have been both literate observers of as well as actors in. In the articles we have just seen, social news outlets reported on and participated in “social media rituals” (Burgess et  al., 2019): these

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being the kinds of ritualised conflicts that characterise platformed publics. Ritualised in the sense that they are regular, but also in that they are performative—they are not necessarily “fake”, but they do occur through habitual means (hashtags, trending topics, snark) and with mutually understood roles (defined, typically, by political identity). These mediatised rituals are not unique to social media—legacy news media also acts ritualistically, for example when reporting on political crises (Couldry, 2003)—but social news outlets, from an early stage, took social media rituals seriously as both “good content” (e.g., funny tweets), but also legitimate sites of political participation. And in reporting on such rituals, social news outlets became actors within them: inviting others to participate and to provide their thoughts or their feelings, just like the Twitter users in the articles were doing, so as to share the pleasure of doing something together. It is this content strategy based on affect—operationalized for a media ecology that prioritised sociable sharing—that we now turn to.

“Share the feeling”: Social News and Affective Sociability Through their fluency with the vernaculars and rituals of platform cultures, social news content has both performed and elicited a peculiar kind of affective connectivity. Affect has been theorised in many ways, but I use it here in reference to Aubrey Anable’s definition: the “aspects of emotions, feelings, and bodily engagement that circulate through people and things” (2018, p. xviii). In the case of social news’ affective connectivity, the work of Zizi Papacharissi is especially relevant. Papacharissi argues that feeling is a constitutive element of Twitter publics: it powers users on the platform to connect, communicate, and collaborate (2015). Papacharissi describes these Twitter networks as a “structure of feeling”, drawing here on Raymond Williams’ notion of an emergent social mood (1977). For Williams, structures of feelings emerged through texts. An example Williams gives are the popular novels of nineteenth century writers like Charles Darwin and Emily Bronte, which portrayed poverty and isolation as social failures rather than individual problems (as the dominant “Victorian ideology” would have it). These novels demonstrated how new media afforded new forms of expression, which in sum, could help shift culture (1977, p. 134).

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Papacharissi argues that hashtags, memes, and other visual artefacts compose the “constitutive elements” of a new networked and platform-­ mediated structure of feeling. These visual artefacts serve as “affective gestures” that provide “the basis of how individuals connect and tune into events in the making” (2015, p. 62). Papacharissi identifies a democratic quality in these networks of gestures, in so far as their connective elements “potentially sustain and mediate the feeling of democracy” amongst participants (2015, p.  32). Although Papacharissi was analysing Twitter, many of these constitutive elements can also be seen on Facebook—where the sharing of memes and other visual artefacts perform a similar affective and sociable function, in conjunction with the platform’s connective logic. Facebook also increasingly encoded affect into the platform as the 2010s wore on: most famously, in the 2016 introduction of “react” buttons, but also in 2015 when it introduced GIF “keyboards” into its popular Messenger app. Certainly, social news’ reporting on these affective networks has been coloured with democratic feeling, as the “How People Reacted” (etc.) headlines have demonstrated. These articles have also articulated this distinct cultural shift bound up with new media: they communicated the power of platforms and the participatory internet to make visible an aggregate of vocal (and often young) users, communicating and making sense through a distinct vernacular. The use of visual artefacts, along with the irreverent and outwardly emotional responses like outrage or humour that regularly featured in social news articles and their headlines, have invited feeling. This invitation to feel must be contextualised within a platform ecology built on connectivity: and this is an important distinction from earlier uses of emotion in news, and from news articles that can (and do) elicit targeted emotional responses but remain mostly dispassionate in form (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). While explicitly emotive and playful headlines have, infamously, been a hallmark of tabloids like The Sun for decades, these have been designed for a print ecology based around circulation (not sharing). Emotive front-page headlines have been deployed to boost the sales of newspapers by grabbing attention at news stalls or supermarket stands (McLachlan & Golding, 2000), but the tabloid articles themselves typically remain largely unemotional. The kind of affective elements in social news I am alluding to here were visible early on in UpWorthy. As we have seen in the previous chapter, UpWorthy was one of the first outlets to optimise their content for sharing, and this often meant that UpWorthy incorporated explicit affective appeals

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to entice users to click on and spread the outlet’s content (Caplan & boyd, 2018). UpWorthy’s name itself evoked a technologically facilitated physiological-­affective response to “good content” (i.e., the act of upvoting something you feel is “worthy”). A 2012 UpWorthy presentation outlining the outlet’s content strategy (described as “winning the internet”) emphasised the necessity of exploiting affect in a sharing economy—as according to UpWorthy, the sharing “sweet spot” was somewhere between content that made people “angry” and “happy” (2012a). Attempts to hit such a “sweet spot” was evident in headlines that declared, for instance, that the “The Things This 4-Year-Old Is Doing Are Cute. The Reason He’s Doing Them Is Heartbreaking”—this headline directed users to an UpWorthy video about a Kenyan boy who, facing a low life expectancy due to unsafe drinking water, decided with the help of a charity to check off his “bucket list” (Narayan, 2013b). Viewers are supposed to see the boy’s plight as “heartbreaking” and unjust, but also find his bucket list adventures “cute”—and the charity work inspiring. There lies the sweet spot. Exploiting affect for shareability is also evident in other UpWorthy content from this period. Headlines like “WATCH: Girl Tells Boy She Had HIV.  Boy’s Reaction Had Me On The Edge Of My Seat” (Eisenberg, 2012) and “Try to Watch Their Answers To A Beautiful Question And Not Smile. I Dare You” (Narayan, 2013a), amongst many others, directly provoked readers’ affective reactions. In doing so, the outlet “dared” social media users not to share the feeling. As a separate UpWorthy presentation from 2012 made clear, this was a content strategy centred on packaging largely existing content, found in the internet wilds, for optimised sociability. The presentation outlined this as a two-step method: “Step 1: find epic content”, it declared in the internet slang of the period, and “Step 2: Frame ‘Em” (UpWorthy, 2012b). The latter being an iterative process whereby headlines were workshopped (UpWorthy claimed each headline was re-written 25 times) so as to be “compelling enough” for clicking and sharing. As we have seen from the examples in this chapter, headlines that targeted and pulled on the affective heartstrings of readers have been a key feature of other social news outlets. Yet, while in these early years UpWorthy largely focused on reframing existing internet content, Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed later threaded affective appeals throughout their articles. This was evident in a series of articles about a nation-wide and student-led “climate strike” in 2018. These strikes sought to draw attention to how

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young people would have to suffer the consequences of climate inaction from Australia’s political leaders. One of Pedestrian’s articles on the topic was titled “The Best & Most Savage Signs From Today’s Student Strike For Climate Action” (George-­ Allen, 2018). In the body of the article, the writer explicitly expressed enthusiasm for the student protestors who have “warmed the cockles of everyone else’s hearts”. “Look at those little social activists go!” the writer exclaims, “you exercise your right to protest, you little bloody legends!”. Feeling was upfront here—indeed, the kind of positive and connective feelings of solidarity essential to protests and social movements. There was a sense that the article was part of the broader protest, pushing it along and maintaining not only the anger—“[Prime Minister] Scott Morrison”, the author warned, “we await your resignation”—but also sustaining the positivity that emerges from cautious optimism. The latter worked as a driving force for action: “maybe there is hope for this cocked-up world of ours after all!” In such ways, the article, rather than simply reporting on the protest, presented itself as part of the protest. Hence, it chose the use of a collective “we”, which implicitly included the reader. It was likely that such affirmations of collective unity and togetherness were intended to encourage a sharing of feeling (presumably through sharing the article) so as to sustain the movement—because if such connective feelings of solidarity could be sustained, there “ain’t no way” Australia’s politicians would be “coming back from all this” (George-Allen, 2018). The pictures of protests signs—both angry and witty—that the article included contributed to this connective feeling, by spotlighting the voices of the marchers themselves. Junkee’s article on the strikes also featured these stylistic elements and this affective mode of address. Titled “The School Strike 4 Climate Action Is Going Absolutely Off Because The Next Generation Rules” (Feltscheer, 2018), it reported 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 was abundant with expressive language that conveyed the gravity of the planet’s climate crisis and the intergenerational injustice that young people face. But such language was also deployed to convey the hope that “these legends” were inspiring: “the next generation is coming”, the author writes, “and they’re pissed off. Go get ‘em champs”. The embedded tweets in this Junkee article assisted this affective work: like with Pedestrian

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piece above, many of the tweets were pictures of protest signs, captioned with lines such as “I believe the children are our future” and “this is awesome”. In such ways, the article encouraged readers to feel their way into the news: the significance of the event relayed through affect rather than dispassionate description. The BuzzFeed article on the climate strike also contained these elements. Titled “Please Enjoy These Signs From Students Protesting Climate Change Inaction” (Scott, 2018), the article again put emphasis on the witty signs and placards present at the protest (indicating how traditional physical protest symbols are now being recirculated as reliable content for platform-focused digital outlets). The headline’s directive to “please enjoy” the signs demonstrated that feeling was upfront in the article (as was entertainment) and the headline image, featuring school students holding a sign that declared “KISS MY ‘ACTIVIST’ ASS”, indicated how humour mixed with pride (for both the resilience of the climate movement, as  well as the courageous school students) was a significant driver of this feeling. The article’s headline caption—“The (striking) kids are alright and right”, a play on a song from 1960s rock band The Who— reinforced that sense of pride and hope. Sociability, then, manifests in these articles through affective elements that explicitly emphasise connection and togetherness. The above articles are not outliers, but rather examples of a common approach from Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed to reporting on progressive activism. For instance, when it was announced that the “Yes” vote had won the 2017 Australian same-sex marriage postal survey, these outlets reported on it with a sense of collective joy. A Pedestrian article titled “Final ABS Update Shows Whopping Number of You Legends Voted in SSM Survey” demonstrates the role of affect in inspiring this connective togetherness (Feltscheer, 2017). The article was not just a report on the high turnout in the survey but, more importantly, a celebration of it. Its personal address—“you legends”—intended to make the reader feel good about this result, the assumption being that they were active participants in this victory. This feeling of feeling good was reinforced in the article text, with the writer expressing their personal gratitude to Australia for their “fucken GOOD WORK”—an outburst that worked as a kind of breaking through of feeling, a joy that could not be constrained in this moment of collective celebration. “Australia”, the writer went on, “I LOVE YOU V MUCH WITH ALL OF MY GAY HEART”: in doing so, hailing the country as a feeling community brought together by a victory for love

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and social justice. GIFs were also working in aid: for example, a looping image of Marilyn Monroe waving goodbye with the caption “Bye Bitch!” both celebrated the end of a postal survey process which many deemed harmful,  and concluded the article with a suitably potent  dose of camp affect. Other Australian social news outlets also participated in this moment of national joy. A piece from Junkee, for example, exclaimed “Yes! Yes! Yes! Australia Has Delivered Its Verdict On Marriage Equality”—the “Yes”s in the headline again working as both an announcement of the survey result and a celebration of the “Yes” victory (Faruqi, 2017). And in the case of BuzzFeed, the outlet covered the result in its typical house style: a listicle titled “Australians Reacting To The Same-Sex Marriage ‘Yes’ Vote Might Make You Cry” (Guillaume, 2017). The listicle delivered on its explicit assurances of affect with a selection of joyous imagery, consisting mostly of people in tearful embrace or fist-pumping in celebration. Social news outlets, then, both evoke and directly participate in feeling as a component of their audience and content strategies. Rather than feeling and emotion being outsourced to the reader—elicited but not embodied and expressed by the news text—social news outlets have instead embraced explicit affect, and consistently situated this affect as a shared feeling, or at least, a feeling that needed to be shared. It is, then, a strategy that genuinely reports on collective sentiment—the emotions that guided social movements, for instance, or a distinct national mood—as well as a means to spread content according to the connective imperatives of platforms, responding to (and exploiting) a “structure of feeling” on those platforms. Once again, we can recall van Dijck and Poell’s metaphor of the Janus-face: a double yet mutually serving logic.

The Limits of “togetherness”: Returning to Constitutive Humour/Affect However, the sociable shareability of social news content has defined limits. By rallying around distinct political movements, and by evoking particular identity markers as symbols of togetherness—identifications, that is, of shared sentiments—social news outlets have also implicitly and explicitly demarked the boundaries of these feeling communities. We can return, here, to Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner’s notion of “constitutive humour”, introduced in the previous chapter (2017). Because as

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much as social news has targeted existing online (and offline) communities, it has also sought to bring them into being—to constitute them— through the act of sharing, by sparking the sociable impulse to seek out and take pleasure in association. In other words, by encouraging users to share an article or a “heart-warming” or “tragic” video, social news outlets have not just optimised their content for spreadability—they have also inspired like-minded users to utilise platforms to form networks of shared sentiments around particular issues. Unlike in Phillips and Milner’s definition, humour is not always at the heart of these would-be networks: it could be sadness, joy, or that UpWorthy “sweet spot” between anger and happiness. But regardless, these networks have to be brought into being, or at least targeted for sharing. To different degrees, of course: UpWorthy were more explicit about their desire to create “viral” content, even if they were still tapping into existing interests and sentiments within platformed networks. Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed, on the other hand, have positioned their texts as already participating in these networks, seemingly with the aim of capturing engagement by means of enlarging those networks through sociable sharing. Yet if networks are constituted from something—whether that is issues, identities, or sentiments—then they are also implicitly or explicitly constituted in relation to something else. For social news, this can be a generational us versus them framing that exploits millennial frustrations with “baby boomers” (e.g., Watson, 2016; Bruce-Smith, 2017b; Hennessy, 2017). It can also be a political us versus them framing, as is clear from the climate strike and marriage equality articles seen above. Media diets can be treated with this “for” and “against” framing, too, as with Indy100’s report on Fox News’ Sean Hannity’s news desk dummy-spit, where the humour comes from a pre-existing perception of Fox News as a channel for “crazy” conservatives. And, albeit more vaguely, this us/them framing also powered UpWorthy’s “virality” strategy, whereby feelings (happiness, sadness, anger) evoked by content were also evoked against something else—for instance, the injustices wrought by poverty and discrimination. Even Mic, although it framed issues such as Sanders’ comments about climate change and terrorism as up for debate, explicitly branded itself from launch as an outlet that got millennials, unlike out-of-touch legacy media. In all these ways, the sociability of social news outlets can be qualified. Precisely because social news’ affect has been constitutive, in the sense of trying to bring people together through shared sentiments, the “us” that

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underlie these networks also target, and through such targeting exclude, a “them”. Affect, in this constitutive sense, has a generative function. It does what Phillips and Milner saw humour as doing—helping to build and sustain “social worlds, across degrees of mediation” (2017, p. 96). Affect is also magnetic: it works to attract attention “within the implicit groups” as well as “externally to the group” (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p.  99 [emphasis original]). In the latter case, we can recall from the previous chapter the negative attention that Junkee received from anti-feminist Facebook commenters. By framing social news as operating within a strategy of constitutive humour—or indeed, constitutive affect—I am recognising the limits to the connective and sociable potential of these outlets outside of their targeted demographics. I am also returning to one of my descriptions of social news: this being, outlets whose institutional logics are both symptomatic of and responsive to platforms and their user cultures. In this regard, how social news outlets have embodied “personalisation” within the context of “personalised” social media, is the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion To succeed on social media, social news outlets needed to be engaging— and to be engaging they needed to be shareable. Early on, social news outlets developed an audience strategy based on around the participatory affordances of social media. In particular, they attempted to harness the apparent power of platformed connectivity—that is, not just the sociality of social media, but the ways in which platforms engineered social connections. They did so by emphasising sociability. Sociability here is guided by a single aim: to get people to spread content to others by taking advantage of the impulse to associate with others. And yet, it has manifested in a number of different ways. What has made an article or video sociable is not just the story (i.e., the topic of the news content), but rather other textual qualities which conventional news and journalism lack, or even shun, such as explicit emotional address, profanity and visual humour, slang, and overt political identification. Firstly, social news tends to embody the everyday vernaculars of social media (memes, GIFs, Internet slang, and so on) and in doing so, these outlets have indicated their suitability for the kinds of everyday socialising that many people use platforms for. Secondly, by embracing affect rather than outsourcing

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it to the reader, social news outlets have targeted emerging networks that are powered by collective sentiment (what Papacharissi called “affective publics”, 2015). And thirdly, in doing both of these, social news has been sociably constitutive: it has sought to bring networks into being, or at least capture existing networks, by being generative and magnetic—in other words, by sparking an impulse in users to share and, through sharing, to take pleasure in being together. Unlike professional journalism which tends to hold itself astray from “the public”, social news does not seek to simply report: instead, it frames itself as a participant. And precisely because of this, social news’ sociability—its ability to form communities of “togetherness”—has defined limits. Social news has tended to be constituted around something and against something else, whether that be a generational, cultural, or political other. In the next chapter, I directly address the “personalised” logic of social news. I examine how this institutional logic has, again, been both a symptom and response to platforms and their user cultures. But rather than dooming social news to partisanship and echo chambers, I instead locate something positive. For it is here, in social news’ eschewing of objectivity and its embrace of positionality, that we can uncover more of the genre’s journalistic potential.

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CHAPTER 5

Personalisation

Introduction For a long time, both platforms and born-digital outlets have focused on the “personal”. Social media, in this regard, have always been spaces not just for social connection, but also self-presentation (boyd & Ellison, 2007). Taking cues from sites like MySpace, platforms were from the beginning organised around the “profile”. Born-digital outlets responded to the “profile” by developing audience and content strategies that targeted the personal. Yet these outlets also emerged during a cultural moment shaped by the politics of identity—and where a transforming media ecology appeared to offer opportunities to diversify a news industry historically defined by a narrow range of voices. In the previous chapter, I examined the sociable qualities of social news outlets: their humorous, affective, and constitutive qualities, and their literacy in the vernaculars of platform cultures. But by virtue of this literacy (of speaking to and through a culturally-specific vernacular), and precisely because their constitutive qualities largely tend to rely on an “us” opposed to a “them”, I argued that there have been limits to social news’ sociability. In this chapter, I unpack the technological, economic, and cultural factors which shape the social news logic of personalisation. I first turn to how social news outlets were early exploiters of micro-­ targeting on platforms. I also examine how platforms were seen as sites for young audiences who were neglecting and neglected by conventional © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_5

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news outlets—and therefore, enterprising news start-ups saw platforms as opportunities to exploit a market gap. In particular, Mic and its explicit positioning as “millennial news”, is examined in this context. But personalisation is not just a business strategy—it is also a textual quality of social news. And in this regard, I discuss the ways in which social news outlets have tended to appeal to and foreground the personal. On the one hand, through the frequent use of personal pronouns within article texts, and on the other, through the positioning of social news writers within the stories they are telling and the issues they are reporting on. Due to this, social news has often not been “objective” in that traditional sense, and has tended to not only eschew “balance”, but also—especially in Junkee and Pedestrian’s reporting—criticise the need to be balanced. Yet, and in a radical break from professional journalism’s evaluative criteria, these qualities do not necessarily mean that social news is “biased” or untrustworthy. Instead, they are evidence of a transparent positionality: a distinct kind of journalism that continues to hold significant potential.

Platforms and the Personal The personal profile is a key feature, and indeed, a central locus, for the social networking sites and platforms that emerged from the Web 2.0 “participatory” turn. danah boyd and Nicole Ellison had early on noted that what made social networking sites such as MySpace “unique” was not that they allowed “individuals to meet strangers”, since that has been happening on web-boards since the 1980s. Rather, they were innovative because they enabled “users to articulate and make visible their social networks” (2007, p. 211). Due to this emphasis on personal networks, rather than (pseudo)anonymous networks as with web-boards, it was the “visible profile” that became the “backbone” of these early “SNSs” (boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 211). And during these early years both tech developers and scholars stressed that social networking profiles were not just about personal connection, but also self-presentation: SNSs enabled the ability to make oneself “visible” online, to do what Jenny Sundén described as “typ[ing] oneself into being” (2003, p. 3). The personal picture, the listing of personal interests and professional occupations, the marking of geographical location (where one lived, worked, went to school), and even the display of cultural tastes (in music, film, literature, etc.) were all, from the beginning, key components of the Web 2.0 “profile”.

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For these reasons, the profile marked a shift towards a more “participatory” and user-centred web, as well as an internet increasingly governed by “self-branding” and the performance of self-identity. This is because the profile is a construction: it is a built version of oneself, continuously enacted. And this “self-branding” logic (Duffy & Pooley, 2017) of the early SNSs became more prominent on the internet as those sites morphed into the major platforms we know today, and as the marketability and monetisation of user profiles became a big business in, for example, the influencer industry (Abidin, 2016). Yet even outside of the influencer business, the profile and its central place within platform architecture made “identity performance” of the “networked self” a dominant user experience (Papacharissi, 2013). Platforms grew as places where users continually made decisions about not only what they liked and followed, but also what they would want to be seen to be liking and following. And unlike web-forums and early SNSs, platforms quickly became spaces for business and organisations, not just users. Hence, social media users not only marketise themselves, but they are also marketed to—and this was something social news outlets caught on to early on. As we have seen in previous chapters, UpWorthy was one of the first born-digital outlets to take advantage of Facebook’s participatory affordances for news distribution. And while UpWorthy’s audience strategy had a strong sociable thrust—that is, it relied on users sharing with each other—the kinds of identity performance we have just discussed were also crucial, in so far as UpWorthy depended on users finding a piece of content so resonating (whether in an affective or political sense) that they wanted to share it publicly. There are complex reasons why people share news on social media (Kümpel et al., 2015; Trilling et al., 2017), but it was the personal profile that was the prism through which users first encountered UpWorthy, and the means by which UpWorthy hoped to distribute its content. Moreover, because sharing on platforms is a (semi-)public act— depending, of course, on what platform users are on using—news outlets have also catered to what users would like to be seen sharing. Social news outlets have been explicit about producing content that addresses this double use of the user-profile, that is, something both for you and about you. Pedestrian’s “About” webpage, which claims that the outlet began with a desire to produce content that would “resonate with young Aussies in an entirely new way”, relates to the first sense (2021). BuzzFeed, as discussed in the previous chapter, also has claimed that it understands “why people share” (Salmon, 2014). And in Junkee’s case, its boast about

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knowing the “psychology” of sharing was an esepcially personalised framing of sociability. The outlet has also explicitly claimed that it produces content with that second sense in mind. For instance, Junkee’s press release at its launch proclaimed that the outlet wanted to cater to young people who “share content on social media that makes them look knowledgeable or funny” (Duggan, 2013). Junkee was keenly aware, seemingly, about how identity performance (and young people’s social anxieties) on social media could be taken advantage of, commercially. Unlike the other social news outlets, Indy100 has not really talked about psychology—but its incorporation of participatory elements into its website (through allowing users to rank news content) demonstrates that the outlet is also concerned with personalisation. For example, Indy100’s “About” page still boasts that its “readers are the one with the real power”, for the “article at No.1 [rank] isn’t our top story, it’s your top story”—a clear claim by the outlet that it is for you, and made by you (Independent, 2021). “You”, as Indy100 would have it, are at the centre of the news: “because we are putting you in charge” (Independent, 2021). However, social news has not solely based its seemingly unique insight into “you” on psychology and a literacy in sharing. These outlets have also looked data and have used this personal data for advertising purposes. To return to José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, personal profiles are not just a means by which users connect with and self-present to other. Instead, they are also lucrative tools for “datafication” (2013). By filling out a profile, by users listing what they were interested in, where they lived, and so on, and by users being active on the platform by liking and reacting to content, users are also inputting data that companies are interested in. The commercial underpinnings behind platforms are much more widely known now that social networking sites have grown into multinational data mills that are increasingly threatened with regulation (Ghosh, 2021). But like with other aspects of social media, the commercial possibilities of personal data were something that social news outlets were clued into from an early stage. Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan, for example, previously claimed that his outlet was founded on data, albeit off-platform data. In an interview with Australian journalism scholars Andrea Carson and Denis Muller (2017), Duggan stated that Junkee emerged from “longitudinal” market research of Australian young people’s “fears and most salient issues”. This research—which as of 2017 was still ongoing—was a form of profiling, which informed Junkee’s brand of news “products” (Carson & Muller,

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2017). That Duggan was boasting of this research is telling in and of itself, even if such claims are overstated—for it indicated how being data-savvy has been a self-image that Duggan feels is important to project, and a brand identity that supposedly would make Junkee stick out amongst more established news outlets. In BuzzFeed’s case, former Australian editor Simon Crerar had also been open about the use of social media data in the BuzzFeed newsroom: in this case not profiling data but metrics, telling Carson and Muller that there was “no expectation we’ll cover everything”, and instead their articles tended follow what would “catch fire” on social media (Carson & Muller, 2017, p.  20). In other words, Junkee and BuzzFeed produced news that was “for you” based on who “you” were and what “you” like—or what you were already engaging with on social media. And of course, just as with so many other business now, social media advertising based on profiling data is also a significant aspect of social news’ marketing repertoire. Sponsored posts, for instance, have been a significant component of this social media advertising strategy. These are paid-for posts that appear in the newsfeeds of targeted demographics— and in the 2010s, I regularly received such posts in my Facebook newsfeed from Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed. When inquiring why I was receiving these sponsored posts in my Feed, Facebook gave me rather vague descriptions of my demographic profile. The platform told me that these outlets wanted to “reach people aged 25 to 35” (or “18 and older”, in the case of Junkee) and gestured, again rather vaguely, to my “activity on the Facebook family of apps and services” as well as my “Facebook profile”. Facebook’s information about these sponsored posts indicated another transition undertaken by SNSs as they transformed into “platforms”, and this transition benefited publishers. As Jean  Burgess has argued, in the early 2010s a new “platform paradigm” emerged, one which displaced SNSs 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, p. 282). A transition, that is, from “broadcasting yourself” (the old YouTube slogan) to “following your interests” (Burgess, 2015). Burgess described the new platform paradigm as “a way of organising the burgeoning business of connecting users with their creative content and each other” (2015, p. 282 [emphasis in original]). Social news’ business models can be understood in this context, in so far as users “following their interests” and outlets seeking those users out based on such profiling data formed a dual connective logic. This dual

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logic created the conditions which made it easier for niche outlets with specific demographics—like social news—to thrive. “Personalisation”, then, captures the continuous, looping nature of the operations we have just seen: encouraging users to “follow their interests”, which then informs audience and content strategies based off this data, and which subsequently shapes what users see and engage with, and so on. Personalisation, unlike customisation, refers to the “predictive” capacities of digital technologies. It suggests that content “can be predetermined” for commercial purposes (Schulte, 2016). It is a loop where “about” and “of” me also informs, through a sophisticated use of data, what is created “for” me: a catering for, but also an anticipation of what I “like”. And this anticipation of what “I like” was not just an audience strategy, but also a major revenue model for social news outlets during the 2010s—as evidenced by their enthusiastic embrace of native advertising.

Ads for You: “native” Advertising and Other Social News “sponcon” During the early to mid-2010s, most of the social news outlets discussed in this book, unlike many other digital outlets, did not rely on banner advertising as a revenue source. BuzzFeed famously shunned banner advertising for years, and so did Mic, with co-founder Chris Altchek claiming that banner ads weren’t effective: “What’s the last banner ad you clicked on?”, he remarked in a 2014 interview (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014) And in 2016, as a public demonstration of how little value Junkee placed in banner ads, the outlet pledged to ditch them from its website altogether (Ward, 2016). Pedestrian, similarly, had also long emphasised alternative sources of revenue to clunky and obtrusive banner advertisements. These outlets tended to defend their move away from this traditional form of web revenue by deferring to millennial sensibility: Altchek once remarked, for instance, that “Millennials specifically grew up with [the banner ad] and grew up ignoring it” and therefore they were “completely immune to that type of advertising” (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014). But money had to come from somewhere, and in the early 2010s, there was a new revenue model that was all the rage amongst social news. Rather than crowding out the content that brought audiences to their websites, social news outlets instead monetised that content. This was done through sponsorships dubbed “native advertising”. In the native advertising model,

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brands reached out to social news (or vice versa) for tailored adverts, that were packaged as engaging content to be spread on platforms. This advertising was “native” because while it was commissioned from brands and other commercial partners, it was otherwise produced in-house by the outlet’s writers (Levi, 2015). Sponsorships, of course, have a long history in the media business. Television variety shows and lifestyle magazines, as well as sport broadcasting, for example, have for decades not just partnered with sponsors but have also embedded sponsorships into their content. For sport broadcasting, sponsorships and commercial ad “spots” are now a long-established part of the live broadcast “flow” (Williams, 1974): these regular callouts to commercial partners are a defining characteristic of the sport event as much as the specific match that is being played. Sponsorships—or “sponcon” (Martineau, 2019)—are also now increasingly prevalent in other media industries, such as the influencer and YouTuber industries, as the precarious conditions endemic to those industries and the instability of platform-based ad revenue has precipitated a turn towards commercial partnerships (Abidin, 2016). Yet in the early 2010s, the pivot from social news outlets to native advertising was notable not only because it broke from journalism’s traditional division between editorial and commercial content, but also because its initial success seemed to suggest a solution to an industry struggling for revenue models. BuzzFeed’s rapid expansion in the early-to-mid 2010s demonstrated the potential of native advertising. By 2015, the company was valued at USD 1.5 billion (Kosoff, 2015), with much of its revenue coming from native ads. BuzzFeed’s reach on social media, its brand recognition, and its apparent expertise in sharing (as promoted by Peretti and others) brought the company into lucrative partnerships with corporate clients. For these clients, BuzzFeed made customised lists, quizzes, and videos that were often difficult to distinguish from its non-sponsored content. Junkee, Pedestrian, and Mic, similarly, have all taken advantage of native advertising with great success. Junkee, for example, has previously attributed native advertising with enabling the outlet to grow, as co-founder Tim Duggan claimed in 2014 that without native ads, “we probably wouldn’t be here” (Robin, 2016). And Junkee grew enough to be bought out in 2015 for AUD 11 million by oOh! Media, a billboard company—and that an advertising company, rather than a larger media company, acquired Junkee indicated how highly Junkee’s in-house native advert team’s capabilities was valued in the mid-2010s. Native advertising has also been a

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major aspect of Pedestrian’s branding, with its “About page” continuing to boast about its partnerships with “giants” like McDonalds, Nike, Microsoft, Smirnoff, and others (Pedestrian, 2021). Social news’ native advertising success has been achieved through the kinds of engagement strategies discussed in Chap. 3. Pedestrian, for instance, has claimed that its native advertising team can help clients “create innovative, engaging, and effective campaigns” (Pedestrian, 2016). Like with Mic’s criticism of banner adverts, Pedestrian has also sought to distance itself from conventional advertising by emphasising the creativity of their in-house marketing team—its About page, for example, boasted in 2016 that, at Pedestrian, “we don’t make ads, we create entertainment” (2016). Junkee, similarly, has previously deployed the language of “engagement” when distinguishing its native model from traditional advertising: claiming, in its 2013 mission statement, that there was “way too much advertising noise on the net” and that Junkee’s native advertising model was a way out of this revenue impasse. Junkee declared that this native ad model was a “new way of merging brands and content” so that “everyone wins” (Duggan, 2013), as the “consumer gets genuinely engaging content, and the advertiser gets shareable stories that people actually want to read” (Duggan, 2013). Besides this talk about “engagement”, the rhetoric underlining social news’ native advertising has also emphasised personalised marketing. Mic’s statements about millennials browsing habits and their intolerance of banner adverts were a performance of not only specialist knowledge about “millennials”, but also a promotion of a distinct advertising strategy personalised for this elusive demographic: “We’re trying to redefine how you advertise to this generation”, co-founder Altchek claimed in 2014 (Bilton, 2014). For Pedestrian, its claims about advertising that “people actually want to read” also shared this rhetoric around tailored advertising, and some of Pedestrian’s high-­profile partnerships, such as a 2017 deal with alcohol brand Smirnoff (Schmidt, 2017a), demonstrated how Pedestrian’s native ad model has been designed around knowing and being “for” young people. In the case of the 2017 Smirnoff deal, Pedestrian content sponsored by the alcohol company included articles about Australian music festivals bearing titles such as “An A-Z Of The Nek-Level Festival Punters You’ll Likely Find At Splendour” (Schmidt, 2017b)—indicating the ways in which Pedestrian’s native ad content blended brand marketing with the outlet’s distinctive slang-heavy and youthful vernacular. Other native ad pieces from Pedestrian that shared

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these stylistics included a 2017 article promoting a launch party for a denim brand, titled “Y’All Got Balls Deep/Bent Outta Shape At The Neuw Form Denim Launch” (Price, 2017). The cheeky innuendo here (the launch party featured a ball pit) was clearly trying to ironically appeal to a juvenile sense of humour. Still, precisely because native advertising  is designed to mask itself amongst non-sponsored content—to “convince us ads aren’t ads” (Constine, 2014)—it has  raised questions regarding “transparency” (Thompson, 2013), editorial integrity and journalistic ethics. There were concerns in the 2010s that news coverage could be “skewed” by commercial clients, thereby weakening “editorial independence” and “normalising corporatized news” (Levi, 2015, p. 652). And in this latter regard, there have been controversies that have demonstrated this tension between editorial and commercial content. For instance, Unilever, a consumer goods multinational who has partnered with BuzzFeed, was accused in 2015 of compelling the social news outlet to delete articles that were unfavourable to the multinational’s various brands (Stack, 2015). And in the case of Junkee and Pedestrian, there has been ongoing tension—even a contradiction—between, on the one hand, the youth-focused social justice politics that these outlets profess and, on the other, their reliance on and enthusiasm for corporate partners (Taylor, 2015). To give one example of this, Junkee supports climate activism, as the pro-climate strike articles discussed in the previous chapter demonstrate. And yet, until early 2018, the Australian bank Westpac, then a major investor in fossil fuels and coal mining projects, remained a sponsor of Junkee’s youth advice outlet The Cusp (Zhou, 2017). The “for you” ethos which Junkee pitches to young people therefore slips when a major sponsor for the outlet is investing in an existential threat to those same young people. Conflicts between commercial advertising partners and editorial independence can of course arise even in contexts with more traditional boundaries between the two, such as newspapers (DeLorme & Fedler, 2005). Being reliant on any kind of advertising revenue can present risks to journalistic integrity (Waisbord, 2019). Nonetheless, native advertising has embodied an underlying “trickery”, which has raised legitimate concerns (Carlson, 2015, p. 857). This is because native advertising has not just been popular amongst corporate clients because it seemingly generates more engagement than banner advertising. Rather, it has also been desirable due to its ability to “appropriate the format of the surrounding

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publication”, to thereby “harness [the publication’s] credibility to strengthen the authority and persuasiveness of the advertising” (Wasserman, 2013). To return to the Westpac case, native advertising with Junkee was attractive to the bank because it had the potential of reaching an audience that would have otherwise been unreceptive to traditional advertising. Moreover, it would also bring Westpac the possibility of being coated with the progressive politics and youthful glamour associated with Junkee. The bank could convince young people that it shared their values. Native advertising, though, has not entirely lived up to its hype. Despite the early growth that native advertising fuelled, it did not eradicate traditional banner ads (despite pledges from Junkee). BuzzFeed, famously banner-­free, even pivoted to banner advertising in late 2017, apparently to make up revenue shortfalls (Weissman, 2017). BuzzFeed, at the time, justified this seemingly regressive move by promoting the advances made in “programmatic advertising”, stating that banner adverts were now more “relevant” to readers than previously (Weissman, 2017). There were also deeper structural issues in social news companies that could not solved through native advertising—in particular, the high revenue targets from early investors that eventually led to cuts, downsizing, and restructuring at BuzzFeed and Mic. We examine these problems in more detail in the following chapter. For now, however, I turn to how some social news outlets more directly engaged with personalised discourse than others. Because in the case of Mic, the outlet went beyond speaking “to” and “for” you—instead, it developed an audience strategy that insisted it was you.

We Are You: Mic as Millennial News According to co-founders Chris Altchek and Jake Horrowitz, Mic was not just another tech start-up: it was an experiment in millennial news. In a 2014 interview with Observer, Altchek and Horrowitz claimed lofty ambitions. “Our [founding] goal”, they said, “was to help our generation talk about the issues that really matter” (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014). This use of “our” and “we” became a mark of distinction for Mic—both a business model and a brand. “Our value proposition”, Altchek and Horrowitz declared, “is [that] we understand smart millennials, we can help reach them on a deeper level”. And this apparent understanding came not simply through market research, but through Mic’s claims of representation.

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These claims were especially evident in the 2014 iteration of Mic’s “About” page, which boasted that “Mic’s approach to news is as unique as generation” (Mic, 2014). It went on: We’re founded on a simple idea. Young people deserve a news destination that offers quality coverage tailored to them. Our generation will define the future. We are hungry for news that keeps us informed and helps us make sense of the world.

The kind of “tailoring” mentioned here is reminiscent of BuzzFeed and Junkee’s comments about knowing the “psychology” of young people. But it goes even further: Mic’s knowledge about young people, as the “About” page and Altchek and Horrowitz claimied, came out of being young people. For “Mic’s editors and writers share [the above] attributes with our readers. This sensibility informs everything we do” (Mic, 2014). Certainly, the “About” page’s list of faces—young, fresh-faced, cool, and causal (just like how us millennials see ourselves)—aided this self-­ presentation of Mic being “of” and “for” and “by” millennials. This insider knowledge of millennial sensibilities even apparently included minimising the use of the “m” word (“millennials is a term young people don’t like”, Altchek once said (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014)). And reports from inside the Mic offices (like the one from Forbes which opened this book) corroborated this cool and youthful brand image: open-plan, “wood-floored rooms”, laptops, Apple Macs, and sleek minimalism— truly, the “newsroom of the future” (Brown, 2014). Mic’s output in the early 2010s reflected and reinforced this brand image. The sociable style discussed in the previous chapters—the informal and conversational, Every Headline Word Capitalised style—was designed to be suitable for an audience that spent so much of their time on social media. Editors and writers, apparently, were instructed to choose and craft stories as if they were sharing it with their friends online (Bloomgarden-­ Smoke, 2014). Mic, then, was producing a seemingly more accessible news for an apparently unpretentious generation and did so by blurring generic boundaries between the serious and silly: that “middle ground between deeply reported stories and listicles” that Forbes curiously reported on in 2014. Mic understood, according to this 2014 “About” page which read like a generational statement, that “many media outlets overlook us or assume we only want to read fluff”:

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But we know that young people are inquisitive. We know they believe substantive news can also spark interesting conversations. We know they have a healthy skepticism for conventional wisdom.

Hence, there is a sweet spot between conversational sociability and substance, which explains articles like “15 Striking Photos Reveal What a Victory Against ISIS Looks Like” (Plenke, 2015), bearing headlines suggesting a generic straddling between “serious” stories and conversational listicles. During this early period much of Mic’s content also consisted of “repackage[d]” news (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014), and in such ways indicated how the outlet attempted to “translate” news to their millennial audience, while also saving on costs. And as we have seen, even Mic’s native advertising revenue model was tailored for millennials—because according to a claim by Altchek in 2014, “display advertising just isn’t an effective strategy as we build a media company for this generation” (Bilton, 2014). Mic was not unique amongst social news outlets in its overt targeting of young people. Nor was it distinct in having a largely young newsroom— Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed all had mostly millennial writers and staff during the 2010s (Christensen, 2014; Carson & Muller, 2017). But Mic did stand out in how consistently and earnestly it pitched itself as an outlet for a new generation coming of age in the early 2010s, even if there were clear limits to those representative claims. For example, Altchek and Horrowitz were not “ordinary” millennials. Educated at the Ivy League (Altchek went to Harvard, while Horrowitz attended Stanford) and coming from prestigious jobs (Altchek earlier worked at Goldman Sachs, and Horrowitz at global petition giant Change.org) the two founders, and the outlet they founded, represented a narrow subset of a generation, despite what they said otherwise. It was an aspirational, mobile, entrepreneurial generation—heavy with the disruptive energy that powered start-up culture at the time—that was present in Mic’s millennial brand image. And there were business reasons, seemingly, why this was the case. For, these aspirational millennials were not just a neglected voice needing (self)representation, but also a potentially lucrative gap in the market. In that same Observer interview, Mic’s founder cited “the spending power” of “80 million [US] millennials”, and it was this lucrative market which shied away from legacy news that initially caught the attention of the venture capitalists (VCs) who provided Mic with USD15  million worth of funding in

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2014 (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2014). Indeed, it was this early reliance on VC funding hooked on the promise of millennial news at-scale, that would eventually lead to Mic’s (and BuzzFeed’s) downfall (Willens, 2018a)—as we will see in the next chapter. To reiterate: other social news outlets shared with Mic an emphasis on millennials, and social news could even be conceptualised as a “millennial” genre—in terms of aesthetics, audience, interests, writers, as well as origins. Like Mic, other social news outlets attempted to ride the wave of “millennial” news (Willens, 2018b). Junkee was even explicit about young people being a lucrative market gap: with co-founder Duggan previously claiming that election of conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott served as a “gift” for Junkee, as it became an outlet for young people “really disillusioned by politics” (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 17). Duggan even called Junkee the “voice” of these young people and stressed the need to speak to young audiences “in their language” (Dickinson, 2018). Pedestrian co-founder Chris Wirasinha has similarly claimed that he always wanted his outlet “to be a mirror” for his audience “to see their world reflected back and translated in some way for them” (Redrup, 2018). This included a focus on hiring young writers, for “the youth market is hard if it is a business not run by young people” (Dagger-Nickson & Manning, 2018). EliteDaily also promoted itself as “the voice of Generation-Y” in its early branding, and produced articles explicitly addressing its “millennial” readership (EliteDaily, 2013). Yet Junkee, Pedestrian, and EliteDaily’s “millennial” branding has not been as prominent, consistent, and devoted as Mic’s. There are also strong similarities between Mic’s “news for millennials” branding and the kind of “niche” and identity-based print media we saw in Chap. 2. Micro-targeting, for political or economic reasons, has a long history in news. But the specific context in which Mic emerged—a burgeoning platform ecology, a “disruptive” start-up culture, and a declining legacy news media—shaped the outlet in such a way as to make it distinct from these earlier experiments in news. Mic then, and other social news outlets to a lesser degree, was personalised for millennials: it insisted that it was not just for you, but indeed, it was you. Yet social news’ emphasis on “voice” has been innovative in more than just a business sense. It has also been full of journalistic possibility.

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The Personal and the Personable in Social News Writing Throughout the previous chapters, we have seen how social news outlets have all deployed a style that appears to speak and talk with their audience. In these earlier chapters, I largely framed this style as informal and conversational, and thus engaging and sociable. I argued this style was engaging because it guided readers through the news, and therefore explained (rather than just reported) news events. This was a break from dominant “informed citizen” models of journalism (Zuckerman, 2014), which simply emphasised the “facts” and thereby placed the onus on the readers to inform themselves. And it was sociable by embodying the vernacular of platform user cultures and embedding itself within everyday social media conversations. Yet social news’ tendency to make speech overt, rather than hidden behind objectivity—that is, to make the writer present in the writing—has not only worked to make social news content conversational, but also more personable. As with other such instances of social news informality, Australia’s Pedestrian and Junkee have demonstrated the strongest cases of personability. For example, a 2018 article from Pedestrian titled “Tumblr Has 100% Banned Porn, Meaning There Is No Longer Any Point To Tumblr” (Hennessy, 2018) is written as if from the perspective of an embodied individual. “Look,” the article begins, not unlike a preface to a proclamation of personal 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 finally, the writer continues the confessional structure of personal opinion by saying the three words commonly used to both qualify and foreshadow a personal take: “that being said… I think it’s a very poor business decision for Tumblr to ban porn, which it just did”. This is followed by personal reasoning, along with the irreverent and crude humour characteristic of Pedestrian: “Nobody uses Tumblr except horny freaks now”. And finally, the punchline, framed as a personal address to Tumblr: “You’re alienating your key demographic”. An explanation of the controversial decision to ban pornographic material from Tumblr then follows (such material was removed due to a change in management at Tumblr). In such ways, the article still presents and explains the news—but it does so in style of a personal delivery of that news. The article concludes, fittingly, with a personal musing on the consequences of the ban, delivered

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as if someone was sharing a piece of news with friends: “It will be interesting to see who is left on Tumblr… if the community kicks up a stink about the ban” (Hennessy, 2018). One more example, this time it is from a Junkee piece. Titled “Science Says Dump Him And Get A Dog”, it reports on a study which purportedly demonstrated (through “science”) the benefits of sleeping with dogs, compared to human companions (Feltscheer, 2018). Again, it begins with a personal preamble (a theme here for Australian social news outlets): “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 by some personal observations, as well as a callout to confirm his own experiences: “[as] anyone who’s been the little spoon to a man-shaped big spoon knows, the hellish combination of beard stubble scratching your neck, ear shattering snoring… often lead to a garbage night’s sleep.” The author follows this recount of personal experience with a summary of the study’s findings (“dogs rule and men drool”), and ends with a humorous passing reference to cats (who scored lowered than dogs, in terms of comfort and security, in the study) by jokingly describing them as “fluffy hell beasts”. This ironic framing also characterises the article’s general reporting on the study—“Thank you science!” the writer concludes as if it is somebody (not a disembodied nobody) making an announcement: “We now have proof that dogs are better than men and both are better than cats. Sorry everyone, it’s fact”. In this way, the article also parodies the genre of “scientific” news reports by making overt the sociable (novel, jokey, and conversation-sparking) appeal of science news, and deprioritising (at least in terms of word space) the “scientific” significance of the findings. As these examples demonstrate, Australian social news outlets have tended to package news as a person’s report—that is, news as a situated someone telling you something, instead of an objective account arriving via a dispassionate voice. Such embodied and personable elements can also enhance the sociability of social news content, in so far as they are conversational (like a “friend” telling you news, as Mic desired). Still, these personable qualities have served a function beyond sociability, and this was especially evident in political reporting from social news outlets, where the personal has been deployed to better convey the significance of an issue or event being reported on.

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Another Junkee article from 2018 demonstrates this point. The article, titled “Marvel Is Making An Asian-Led Superhero Movie And I’m Crying” (Yeo, 2018), announces the creation of an Asian superhero film in the massively successful Marvel franchise. Yet it does not simply report this news but, moreover, expresses its personal meaningfulness. After announcing the new Marvel film, the article’s author immediately declares with a significant dose of affect, “I have waited my whole life for this”. And when the author reports that this new film would not only feature an Asian superhero, but also that the studio was “currently considering” Asian and Asian-American directors, the personal affect is dialled up: “I have already astral-projected into the future and bought my ticket”. The article then contextualises the report by providing some backstory to the new film announcement, detailing the fictional biography of the superhero Shang-­ Chi, as well as a bit of history on the presence (or lack thereof) of Asian superheroes in US comics and cinema. “But however it came about”, the author concludes, “I’m not complaining. I want my badarse Asian superheroes. It’s well past time they got here”. In these ways the personal is weaved into the news reporting: the story is relayed personally, so as to help provide the reader with an understanding as to why such a story is newsworthy. At the same time, the article serves a more basic function, as a film announcement. By combining both “opinion” and “news report”, the article blends and blurs generic formats and functions, to better convey to the reader why an Asian-led superhero film is worth reading about. An earlier Junkee article also exemplifies these elements. Titled “It’s Time For More LGBTIQ Families On Australian TV” (Adams, 2016), the piece provides a brief history, through an LGBTIQ lens, of how families have been depicted on Australian television. The article is based off a then-­ recent report into diversity on Australian television by the country’s publicly funded media body, Screen Australia. The report found that while there has indeed been a history of LGBTIQ and LGBTIQ-coded characters in Australian television, many of these characters have not taken centre stage, and when it came to “rainbow families”, the author wrote, “we’ve got a long way to go”. Like with the Junkee article on Asian representation in superhero films, the article emphasises the significance of representation through personal anecdotes. To explain “why this matters”, the author writes  that “representation can help build futures and validate people’s identities”. Indeed, the author recounts that when they first saw a rainbow family in the UK teen drama Skins (2007–2013), it was the first time that

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“I had been able to reconcile my being gay with my vision for the future.” For the author, “this was the first time my sexuality didn’t seem like an immovable roadblock to having a family.” The author then links this to the then-ongoing Australian same-sex marriage campaign: “Try arguing that same-sex marriage will harm children when you see beautiful rainbow families on your screen every night.” The article, therefore, is a report on a report—but like with the other Junkee piece above, the article becomes personal to make the report more newsworthy, by relating its significance for LGBTIQ people like him. Lastly, the article links the report and the author’s personal experiences to another ongoing campaign of immense public relevance (the fight for marriage equality). Rather than detracting from the “facts”, making these links—between news, the personal, and a social movement gaining steam—instead becomes a powerfully informative journalistic exercise. In 2017, during the Australian same-sex marriage postal survey, Pedestrian also used this journalistic device of linking personal experiences to current events. For example, in an article titled “SSM Shitshow Sees Big Spike In Calls To LGBTIQ Phone Counselling Services” (Shaw, 2017b), the author reports on a 25% increase in calls to a LGBTIQ counselling service. But rather than simply repeating factual information—and thereby leaving the meaning, that the survey has been harmful to LGBTIQ people, as connotation—the author instead positions herself in the story. The author writes that even “adult, happy, well-adjusted queer people” have seen “their mental health suffer”—and then identifies herself as an example. “I am one of [those people], the author states, “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”: “I am one of the people best prepared to take on this battle”, and yet “even I have found it wearing me down”. This line is dripping with affect—and in that sense, it engages the reader emotionally. But like with Junkee’s article on queer representation in Australian television, the inclusion of the personal here also enhances the article in a journalistic sense. The story—that the postal survey and the same-sex marriage campaign (and in particular, the visibility of the “No” side) is having a harmful effect on LGBTIQ people’s mental health—is relayed better, because it is made more real. Statistics have been transformed into personal experiences, a number into a voice—and therefore, the reader now knows more about the story, not less. As we have seen in the second chapter, there are

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antecedents in niche outlets and in daytime television programmes such as Oprah for this kind of dismantling of the “mass subject”. These newspapers and programmes similarly provided spaces for marginalised identities across gender, race, and class lines (Masciarotte, 1991). While other issues, as noted above, have featured this style of personable/personal reporting, it was during the Australian same-sex marriage campaign where this style especially became prominent. Articles from Junkee and Pedestrian bearing titles like “How It Feels To Have The Country Decide If Your Relationship Is Worthy” (Shaw, 2017a) and “Vote ‘Yes!’ For Marriage Equality: An Appeal From A Closeted Gay Teen” (Anonymous, 2017), all placed the personal at the centre of their coverage. Other social news outlets besides Junkee and Pedestrian, have also displayed some of these elements. Mic articles from the mid-2010s such as “Here’s How Much You Have to Earn to Be in the 1% in Your State” (Keller, 2015), “No, the Dove ‘Love Your Curls’ Ad Is Not a Feminist Victory” (Zeilinger, 2015), and “This Trash Anti-Hillary Shirt Lets You Use Fashion to Promote Violence Against Women” (Rodriquez, 2016) employ a conversational style by addressing in their headlines and occasionally in their articles a “you”, an implied reader. In doing so, the articles are framed as news that is being received by “you” from someone else. Similarly, Indy100 articles from the same period—such as “This work experience kid discovered a new planet. What have you done at work today?” (McKernan, 2015), “You’ve been using chopsticks wrong for your whole life” (Dor, 2016a) and “Yes, the BBC’s Norman Smith accidentally said c—t live on air” (Rickman, 2015)—also share these elements. Another Indy100 article from 2016 titled “Jeremy Corbyn has just been accused of being a Thatcherite sell out. Yes, really” (Zatat, 2016), even deploys a conservational question-and-answer structure, by asking readers to remember moments from the career of the former UK Labour Party leader as a way of humorously disproving the charge that Corbyn was “neoliberal”. “All pretty left-wing policies you may think”, the author muses after listing policies such as the re-nationalisation of the railways and universal healthcare—but they lament, sometimes “there’s just no pleasing some people”. Still, Junkee and Pedestrian, more than other social news outlets, have embraced this personable style, by crafting it as a distinct brand. Junkee’s opening press release, for example, pledged to “go beyond the headline… [and] keep you up to date with all the major issues, but curated through

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the eyes of your smartest, funniest friend” (Duggan, 2013). Yet that these two outlets more explicitly have drawn upon the personal and utilised personable address for journalistic effect only further highlights the elasticity of the social news genre. This is because a “genre” is not so much a straight typology, but instead a distinct collection of commonalities—or “family resemblances” (Lomborg, 2014, p.  15)—of varying presence, with some examples pushing the “genre” to its limits. Again, I want to emphasise the artificiality of this analytical construct I am calling “social news”: the outlets themselves have not always grouped themselves in this way. I now perform more of this conceptual work, by giving a name to social news’ distinct journalistic contribution.

Positionality Within Stories and Markets As we have seen throughout this book, social news clearly broke with professional journalism’s rules around “objectivity”. The personable elements of these outlets, and their willingness to take sides on certain issues (such as marriage equality and climate change) violates professional principles regarding impartiality and a separation of “opinion” and “reporting”. Of course, opinions and position-taking are a common element in news—but they tend to be cordoned off and are found only in opinion columns, editorials, and panel programmes. Social news’ shunning of these norms is not unprecedented—as seen in Chap. 2, there is a long history of non-­ objective news—but it is nonetheless significant, and this has been made clear by how other outlets and journalists reacted to social news throughout the 2010s. Social news’ openly earnest politics have been often highlighted by other outlets as a justification for scepticism (Brown, 2014). And its internet reporting—which tends to take sides within whatever online controversy is happening that day—has been singled out by other outlets as evidence of social news’ sensationalist “clickbait”, because social news is seen to be fuelling and exploiting internet outrage about social justice issues (Podhoretz, 2017; Meade, 2017). And certainly, as we saw in the previous chapter, there have been merits to these critiques (as well as examples of clear prejudice). But to focus on “objectively” reported “facts” as markers of journalistic quality ignores the decades’ worth of work by scholars and activists who have demystified professional journalism’s epistemic authority. In the 1970s, Gaye Tuchman, for example, described objectivity as a professionally convenient construct: a “strategic ritual” that helps protect journalists

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from the “risks of their trade”, such as libel suits and other occupational hazards (1972). Tuchman argued that conventional elements of news articles, such as balanced quotation and passive voice, work to create the appearance of this detached objectivity. Objectivity, therefore, is not just professional practice and epistemic worldview, but a textual construct. Similarly, Schudson also located the origins of journalistic objectivity as a marketable “product” that distinguished “objective” newspapers from less reliable and trustworthy products on the newsstand (Schudson, 1978, p. 662). In this sense, “objectivity” is not something journalists just “are”, but rather something that they produce through practices recognised as “objective”. Yet the idea that news could even be a distanced, detached, and neutral source of factual information had also been challenged by other twentieth century scholars. Stuart Hall and colleagues were notable in this regard. In their study of the racialised “mugging” moral panic that gripped England in the 1970s, they argued that news media was crucial to the “reproduction of dominant ideologies” (1978, p.  60). For Hall and colleagues, objectivity is, like with Tuchman’s “strategic rituals”, a signifying system that masks ideological commitments. News media’s role in reproducing dominant (and dominating) ideologies is not, for Hall et al., the outcome of a “conspiracy”. It does not stem from the machinations of an unseen cabal. Rather, they argued that it is a “product of a set of structural imperatives [their emphasis]” (1978, p. 59). News media’s reliance on powerful sources, such as politicians and the police, for their daily news production is an example of such “structural subordination” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 59). Later arguments about news media’s role in “manufacturing consent” (Herman & Chomsky, 1988)—here, a result of the close relationship between news media and the corporations that financed them, advertised in them, or owned them—built on this notion of “structural imperatives”. Structural thinking also makes clear the impossibility of “objectivity”. As scholars and activists—especially  those from marginalised backgrounds—have argued extensively, we are always situated within structures (such as race, gender, class, and so on). And these structures shape our lived experiences, and therefore our worldviews. In this context, the disembodied objectivity that professional journalism ascribes to is unachievable. Therefore, transmitting “reality” from a vantage of point of nowhere is a fantasy, for perceptions of reality are always informed by the social circumstances of the embodied individual doing that reporting (Merrill, 1984). As a result, notions of “objectivity” have instead tended

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to privilege certain structural positions. These notions have intertwined with—particularly white—masculine ideals of rationality and calm. Luke Pearson, founder of the born-digital outlet Indigenous X, for instance has argued that “objectivity” is racialised in so far as “Indigeneity is perceived as a form of inherent bias, whereas whiteness brings with it at least the potential to feign objectivity” (2016). Similarly, Kimberlié Crenshaw had earlier noted the ways in which racial and gendered identities are “often treated in mainstream liberal discourse” as carrying “vestiges of bias” that filtered—rather than enriched—perspectives from woman of colour (1991). The ability to have a “disembodied” perspective, therefore, is a privilege afforded to some bodies over others. And in the case of gender, as we have seen in the second chapter, domestic politics, and other so-­ called feminine concerns, have an extensive history of being delegitimised because they have been labelled “private” (or “personal”) matters—and hence not in the “public interest”—or “tabloid”, and therefore sensational and not serious (Lumby, 1997, pp. 117–118). In such ways, social news’ departure from objectivity can be grounded in a long history of “objectivity” being critiqued. Other scholars have also provided the theoretical tools through which to conceptualise what I have been describing throughout this book as social news’ personal and personable style. For the kinds of explicit perspective-taking and personal presence found in social news are evidence of a transparent positionality. By positionality, I mean 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), Indigenous research methods (Moreton-Robinson, 2017), and standpoint theory (Hartsock, 1983; Haraway, 1988). That is, positionality critiques a view-­ from-­nowhere “objectivity” by asserting the already-existing “network of relations” in which knowledge is always simultaneously situated, produced, and shaped (Alcoff, 1988, p. 433). In doing so, positionality relates to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has called “relationality”, which refers to the awareness of the “inter-connectedness” between and among “all living things and the earth”, including their “ancestors and creator beings”, and which “shapes ways of knowing, being, and doing” (2017, pp. 71–72). My use of positionality also owes a debt to Donna Haraway’s work on “situated knowledges” (1983), as well as Crenshaw’s notion of “intersectionality” (1989), in its insistence on embodied knowledge as a

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“source of social empowerment and reconstruction” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242), rather than a flawed partiality. For the explicit perspective taking in social news is not bias. Or at least, bias is not a valuable evaluative criterion through which to judge social news content, as bias connotes slanted or selective news coverage within otherwise “objective” news content (Eveland & Shah, 2003; Hopmann et al., 2012)—not the positioned reporting that social news outlets produce. The explicit positionality of social news should also be distinguished from an editorial stance, such as the contrasting news agendas of the left-­ leaning US cable network MSNBC or a Tory-supporting tabloid like News Corp’s The Sun. In these cases, editorial stance is reflected largely through news framing devices, rather than the kinds embodied reporting and “for you” audience appeals in Junkee and Mic that we have seen above. And social news outlets pursued positionality not just in their reporting, but also within news ecologies. In doing so, these outlets demonstrated the ways in which positionality is both a journalistic style as well as an audience strategy. For example, Mic’s claims about being an outlet for “millennials”—that it gets young people and their news habits, unlike those older, stuffier, and “boring” (as Peretti put it) newspapers—is a kind of positionality in so far as it positions itself within a news market, and against other outlets within this same market. The same can be said for the youth branding of Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed. Social news’ politics also have been a component of this institutional positionality. Social news’ regular criticism of conservative outlets can be informative media criticism. But even when it isn’t, like when it is more mockery than critique, this criticism from social news outlets is still a demonstration to audiences of what these outlets are, and who their readers are. For instance, an Indy100 article from 2016 titled “The Daily Express and Daily Mail are actually angry that foreign-born people have jobs in Britain” thoughtfully critiqued the anti-immigrant rhetoric of right-wing British tabloids, noting how immigrants have been blamed for both being unemployed “scroungers” as well as “taking jobs” (Dor, 2016b). Yet other articles in the same year simply made fun of readers of conservative outlets, like another Indy100 piece that highlighted a Telegraph letter-to-the-editor blaming a minimum wage hike for an increase in golf club membership fees (Dor, 2016c). The headline, “The Telegraph reader seems to have lost all perspective on the world”, was clearly grounded in the kinds of in-­ group/out-group constitutive humour we saw in Chap. 3. This combination of informative media criticism and market positioning has also been

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found in Junkee and Pedestrian, in articles that criticised Australian commercial media’s tendency to platform the far-right (Faruqi, 2017; Hennessy & Story, 2017). Frequent targets of these Australian outlets also have included the many conservative opinion columnists employed by Murdoch-owned newspapers. In this regard, the Junkee piece from the previous chapter that poked fun at the columnist Andrew Bolt and his feud with musician Mojo Juju also works within this same institutional positionality, because it performed a kind of signalling towards social news readers that appealed to and reaffirmed their identity through identifying who they were not.

Conclusion “Personalisation”, therefore, has been a social news logic that appeals to, embodies, and harnesses the personal. It is a textual device and a reporting practice, characterised by a positionality that critiques the need to be, as well the possibility of, being “objective”. But personalisation has also been guided by economic goals. Firstly, by appealing to the personal (being “for you” and “about you”) against perceived others who were not “you” (such as conservative outlets); secondly, by harnessing personal data so as to optimise content strategies (such as with Junkee’s youth surveys), and thirdly, by pursuing native advertising tailored to “you”. Social news has  also flourished in personalised social media ecologies, gaining early success on platforms that encouraged users to “follow their interests” (Burgess, 2015). That a number of outlets by the mid-2010s all participated in these textual strategies and journalistic practices, and all adopted these similar business models, made evident that by this time social news was becoming institutionalised—that is, an established way of doing a particular kind of news and journalism. Yet, by the end of the 2010s, this institution faced a number of crises as the platform ecology shifted, and as the venture-capitalist optimism that fuelled social news’ rise began to collapse. In the next chapter, I bring the story of social news up to the present day and evaluate its future.

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Merrill, J. C. (1984). Journalistic Objectivity Is Not Possible. In E. E. Dennis & J.  C. Merrill (Eds.), Basic Issues in Mass Communication: A Debate (pp. 104–110). Macmillan. Mic. (2014). About Us – Mic. https://web.archive.org/web/20140817210048/ http://mic.com/about#team Moreton-Robinson, A. (2017). Relationality: A Key Presupposition of an Indigenous Social Research Paradigm. In C. Anderson & J. M. O’Brien (Eds.), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (pp. 69–77). Routledge. Papacharissi, Z. (2013). A Networked Self: Identity Performance and Sociability on Social Network Sites. In F. L. F. Lee, L. Leung, J. L. Qiu, & D. S. C. Chu (Eds.), Frontiers in New Media Research (pp. 207–221). Routledge. Pearson, L. (2016, January 6). There Is No Objectivity in Media, Or in Life. IndigenousX. https://indigenousx.com.au/there-­is-­no-­objectivity-­in-­media­or-­in-­life/ Pedestrian. (2016). About Pedestrian.tv. https://web.archive.org/ web/20160318163115/https:/www.pedestrian.tv/about Pedestrian. (2021). About Pedestrian.tv. https://www.pedestrian.tv/about-­ pedestrian-­tv/ Plenke, M. (2015, April 1). 15 Striking Photos Reveal What a Victory Against ISIS Looks Like. Mic. https://web.archive.org/web/20150403125358/http:// mic.com/articles/114306/these-­photos-­show-­what-­it-­looks-­like-­when-­you-­ reclaim-­a-­city-­from-­the-­islamic-­state Podhoretz, J. (2017, January 10). BuzzFeed’s Trump Report Takes ‘fake news’ to a New Level. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2017/01/10/buzzfeeds-­ trump-­report-­takes-­fake-­news-­to-­a-­new-­level/ Price, L. (2017, May 11). Y’all Got Balls Deep / Bent Outta Shape at the Neuw Form Denim Launch. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/ yall-­got-­balls-­deep-­bent-­outta-­shape-­at-­the-­neuw-­form-­denim-­launch/ Redrup, Y. (2018, September 2). How Two Millennials Built Pedestrian into a $100m Business. Australian Financial Review. https://www.afr.com/companies/how-­two-­millennials-­built-­pedestrian-­into-­a-­100m-­business-­20180902-­ h14tto Rickman, D. (2015, May 14). Yes, the BBC’s Norman Smith Accidently Said c—t Live on Air. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/news/yes-­the-­bbc-­s-­ norman-­smith-­accidentally-­said-­ct-­live-­on-­air-­7267421 Robin, M. (2016, July 27). How to Make Money in Online Media: Turn It All into Ads. Crikey. https://www.crikey.com.au/2016/06/27/ooh-­media-­ buys-­junkee-­media-­for-­11m/ Rodriguez, M. (2016, July 31). This Trash Anti-Hillary Shirt Lets You Use Fashion to Promote Violence Against Women. Mic. https://www.mic.com/ ar ticles/150186/this-­t rash-­a nti-­h illar y-­s hir t-­l ets-­y ou-­u se-­f ashion­to-­promote-­violence-­against-­women

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Salmon, F. (2014, June 11). BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long. Matter. https:// medium.com/matter/buzzfeeds-­jonah-­peretti-­goes-­long-­e98cf13160e7 Schmidt, C. (2017a, May 11). Everything You Need to Know About ‘the open project’. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/everything-­you-­need-­ to-­know-­about-­the-­open-­project/ Schmidt, C. (2017b, July 29). An A-Z of the Nek-Level Festival Punters You’ll Likely Find at Splendour. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/music/ an-­a-­z-­of-­the-­nek-­level-­festival-­punters-­youll-­likely-­find-­at-­splendour/ Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. Basic Books. Schulte, S.  R. (2016). Personalization. In B.  Peters (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture (pp.  242–252). Princeton University Press. Shaw, R. (2017a, August 9). How It Feels to Have the Country Decide If Your Relationship Is Worthy. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/ feels-­country-­decide-­relationship-­worthy/ Shaw, R. (2017b, August 23). An Open Letter to Malcolm Turnbull from a Very Angry Lesbian. Pedestrian. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/open-­letter­malcolm-­turnbull-­angry-­lesbian/ Stack, L. (2015, April 19). BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/04/20/business/media/buzzfeed-­s ays-­p osts-­w ere-­d eleted-­ because-­of-­advertising-­pressure.html Sundén, J. (2003). Material Virtualities. Peter Lang. Taylor, J. (2015, November 5). No Cynicism, Plenty of Branding as Australia’s Bright Young Things Network. Crikey. https://www.crikey.com. a u / 2 0 1 5 / 1 1 / 0 5 / n o -­c y n i c i s m -­p l e n t y -­o f -­b r a n d i n g -­a s -­a u s t r a l i a s -­ bright-­young-­things-­network/ Thompson, D. (2013, February 23). Ad War: BuzzFeed, the Dish, and the Perils of Sponsored Content. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ a r c h i v e / 2 0 1 3 / 0 2 / a d -­w a r-­b u z z f e e d -­t h e -­d i s h -­a n d -­t h e -­p e r i l s -­o f -­ sponsored-­content/273406/ Trilling, D., Tolochko, P., & Burscher, B. (2017). From Newsworthiness to Shareworthiness: How to Predict News Sharing Based on Article Characteristics. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 94(1), 38–60. Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsman’s Notions of Objectivity. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660–679. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14. Waisbord, S. (2019). The Vulnerabilities of Journalism. Journalism, 20(1), 210–213.

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Ward, M. (2016). Junkee Media Pledges to Ditch Display Ads, Claims Half of All Millennials Use Adblockers. Mumbrella. https://mumbrella.com.au/ junkee-­media-­to-­ditch-­banner-­ads-­352151 Wasserman, E. (2013, January 30). Advertising Goes Native, and Deception Runs Free. HuffPost. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/native-­advertising-­ atlantic-­scientology_b_2575945 Weissman, C.  G. (2017, August 29). BuzzFeed, Once a Banner-Free Zone, Embraces Ads. FastCompany. https://www.fastcompany.com/40459795/ buzzfeed-­once-­a-­banner-­free-­zone-­embraces-­ads Willens, M. (2018a, November 30). Pivoting to Nowhere: How Mic Ran Out of Radical Makeovers. DigiDay. https://digiday.com/media/mic-­ transformations-­pivoting-­nowhere/ Willens, M. (2018b, December 3). Why ‘news for millennials’ Media Plays Never Panned Out. DigiDay. https://digiday.com/media/mic-­news-­millennials­media-­plays/ Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge. Yeo, A. (2018, December 4). Marvel Is Making an Asian-Led Superhero Movie and I’m Crying. Junkee. https://junkee.com/shang-­chi-­asian-­marvel-­ movie/185062 Zatat, N. (2016, March 24). Jeremy Corbyn Has Just Been Accused of Being a Thatcherite Sell-Out. Yes, Really. Indy100. https://www.indy100.com/news/ jeremy-­c orbyn-­h as-­j ust-­b een-­a ccused-­o f-­b eing-­a -­t hatcherite-­s ellout-­y es-­ really-­7293951 Zeilinger, J. (2015, January 30). No, the Dove ‘love your curls’ Ad Is Not a Feminist Victory. Mic. https://www.mic.com/articles/109258/ no-­the-­dove-­love-­your-­curls-­ad-­is-­not-­a-­feminist-­victory Zhou, N. (2017, March 6). Big Australian Banks Invest $7b More in Fossil Fuels Than Renewables, Says Report. Guardian Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/26/nines-­f air fax-­t akeover-­w hat-­i s-­t he-­ deal-­and-­what-­will-­it-­mean Zuckerman, E. (2014). New Media, New Civics? Policy & Internet, 6(2), 151–168.

CHAPTER 6

Futures

Introduction The middle 2010s were a boom time for social news. Outlets had sprung up across the Anglosphere, while trendsetters like BuzzFeed were expanding their bureaus to Germany, India, and Japan (BuzzFeedPress, 2014). Investors remained enthusiastic as social news outlets continued to ride the waves of social media engagement (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a). It was a golden era for “news for millennials” (Willens, 2018b), and it seemed like Facebook and native advertising were going to save journalism. As the decade closed, however, conditions were much different. Facebook, following negative attention about misinformation and “clickbait”, had started to shift away from news. Meanwhile, audiences who were once young were now growing older, and the new young people (“Generation Z”) were no longer using Facebook, preferring trendier platforms instead. There were financial troubles, too: the money flowing from venture capitalists (VCs) to news start-ups was running dry, and investors were finally seeking returns. Social news was not only old hat: it was, seemingly, collapsing. And yet, some social news outlets persisted, and became established players within their domestic media ecologies. So then, what is the future of social news? In this chapter, I retrace these later developments by examining on the one hand, the fall of outlets like Mic and BuzzFeed from the dizzying heights of 2015, and, on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_6

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other, the steady absorption of Pedestrian into Australian media conglomerate Nine Entertainment in the late 2010s. Along with this recent history, I also unpack the future of social news as a genre. In the second half of the chapter, I ponder the lessons of social news and ask what we (i.e., media scholars, practitioners, and news audiences) can retrieve from it if we want to build a new, critical, and public-serving journalistic project.

Facebook’s Departure from News As we have seen, the early 2010s were “glory days” for news on Facebook (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a, p. 6). It was an era when it was “so easy”, as one Australian news worker put it, to “get heaps of reach and engagement”: when the platform welcomed, even encouraged, news, and was happy to direct its massively growing userbase to news sites (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a, p. 6). Social news outlets, beginning with UpWorthy and BuzzFeed, were early winners in this new social media ecosystem, and they took advantage of these conditions for clicks and massive reach. These conditions were so favourable that these outlets, and others such as Junkee and Mic, considered doing away with, or at least largely ignoring, home pages altogether. Instead, they began putting all their eggs into the Facebook basket, a strategy that seemed to make sense when the times were so good. Even other, non-social news outlets were reaping the rewards of Facebook engagement, and growing “excited”, as one Australian news executive recalled, at the seeming ease of reaching “millions of people with a click of the finger” (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a, p.  6). The Facebook page became not just an auxiliary, but a key component—for some outlets, even the main site—of an emerging multiplatform news distribution strategy. But the good times did not last. By the mid-2010s, Facebook was beginning to distance itself from news. It did so through a number of high-profile changes to its newsfeed algorithms that were made in response to public controversies. The first major change was a 2014 algorithm tweak that targeted what Facebook called “click baiting” and “spammy” stories (El-Arini & Tang, 2014). Facebook announced that they would be decreasing the reach of these stories in the newsfeed, and instead the algorithm would be prioritising stories that took users away from the platform for a significant amount of time: the idea being that, with clickbait stories, users would come “straight back” to Facebook once they realised that they had been “baited” (El-Arini & Tang, 2014). Facebook also included

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other measures, such as whether users were liking and commenting on stories, and not just clicking, in order to determine valuable engagement (and therefore algorithmic priority). There was a discernible concern here for news quality: clickbait, it seemed, was  harming the respectability of Facebook as a destination for content—and the platform has since been determined to demonstrate that it stands on the side of journalism, not sensationalist chum-bucket news (Simo, 2017). Certainly, at least according to a survey that Facebook conducted, users were becoming unhappy with the prevalence of low-quality news content on the platform (El-Arini & Tang, 2014). And while the social news outlets examined in this book have always distanced themselves from charges of “clickbait”—preferring to emphasise “engagement” rather than clicks—at the time it was difficult to ignore the associations between the kinds of content they popularised, and the news Facebook was now cracking down on. This association was even made in coverage of the algorithm change, with outlets such as Vox musing on the implications for BuzzFeed and UpWorthy now that Facebook was taking a stand (Kafka, 2014). Regardless of whether social news outlets were especially impacted by the 2014 algorithm change, the message seemed to be clear: that “easy engagement” would not last forever. Additional changes to the algorithm followed in 2016, when the platform once again targeted stories with headlines that “intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead” (Peyaskhovich & Hendrix, 2016). Such stories were further downranked in the newsfeed. The desire from users for “authentic” stories was cited by Facebook as the impetus for cracking down on “clickbait” for a second time, but there were additional concerns: in particular, the rise of “fake news” and other kinds of misinformation packaged-as-news that were reportedly flourishing on the platform during the US Presidential election  that year (Solon, 2016). Cracking down on “inauthentic” and “misleading” content, therefore, was increasingly beneficial for Facebook as a way to demonstrate selfregulation during a time when journalists and governments were beginning to consider public oversight (Faiola & Kirchner, 2017; Meese & Hurcombe, 2020b). This shift towards viewing news as a political liability rather than an economic opportunity served as the context for the next and most damaging change to the algorithm. In 2018, Facebook announced that they would prioritise content from “friends” in the newsfeed over “public content” from the pages of “businesses, brands, and media” (Mosseri, 2018).

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The justification for this—that Facebook wanted to help bring people “closer together”—suggested that news content was not just “crowding out” more “personal moments” (Mosseri, 2018), but that news was also a polarising and inflammatory force in the newsfeed. News, it seemed, was creating division, tension, and negative feelings. Facebook would later revise this stance somewhat when it began developing partnerships with “trusted” news organisations for its new Facebook News feature. Yet the nature of this new feature—a separate tab showcasing content from licensed news organisations, many of which have entered into multi-­ million dollar deals with the platform (Samios, 2021)—has cemented this shift away from Facebook being a space for smaller, independent publishers to thrive, especially as these partnerships have tended to favour large, established news organisations that emanate institutional legitimacy. This has led to some social news outlets, such as Junkee, raising concerns about possibly being excluded from these deals (Blackiston, 2020). There were also other controversies in the latter 2010s that heightened tensions between the platform and news outlets. Most infamous was the 2017 so-­ called pivot to video, when the platform incentivised news outlets to produce video content. This pivot led to restructures and layoffs within those outlets—only for them to later find out that Facebook had artificially inflated their video metrics (Oremus, 2018). Following all these changes, social news outlets found that their audience metrics had significantly declined (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a). For outlets such as Mic, there was a drastic fall: in October 2018, the outlet was down to 5.5 million unique users from 18 million in November 2016 and saw a reduction of more than 90% in video views during the same period (Willens, 2018a). In the case of BuzzFeed, after the 2018 algorithm change many stories were only getting a tenth of the clicks that they used to receive (Willens, 2019). The “glory days” are gone, and social news outlets are still finding it difficult to recover (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a). But there have also been reasons other than algorithm woes for the decline of many social news outlets over the last few years. Generational shifts have been happening, and millennials are getting older.

“Millennial” News After Millennials When social news was new, Facebook was thriving with young people: the so-called millennial generation. Yet while older demographics would progressively adopt the platform as the decade wore on—to the point where,

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by the late 2010s, Facebook was seen as social media for “baby boomers” (Jezer-Morton, 2017)—younger generations were moving off it. Millennials were increasingly antipathetic towards the platform: “we created it, we adopted it early, and now we’re tired of it”, wrote Kathryn Jezer-Morton from US born-digital youth outlet The Outline (2017). It was fun being on the platform when it was fresh, innovative, and safe from your parents. But as Facebook began to cater to this mature audience, and as young people found it harder to be themselves on the platform without surveillance from older generations, they began to spend less time on it (Moore & Moore, 2019). Besides issues of surveillance and  the awkwardness of “context collapse” (Marwick & boyd, 2011), there have been other perceived negatives about Facebook becoming inundated with “boomers”. For example, there have been perceptions that older generations, due to their apparently lower literacy in digital media (Warzel, 2020), are flooding the platform with “fake news” and other kinds of misinformation (Dickson, 2020). Moreover, the presence of older people has meant, it seems, a greater chance of political conflict: whereby political disagreements in the home or around the Christmas dinner table are now being brought into Facebook newsfeeds (Blanchette, 2017). In other words, while social news was built off the idea that Facebook audiences were young and progressive (and indeed, that was the stereotypical social media user during the early 2010s), that perception was meeting stark new realities by the end of the decade. But not only has the platform been getting older (in  both age and demographics), but millennials have been as well. As we have seen in the previous chapter, many social news outlets, and especially Mic, have pitched themselves as being the news for, of, and by, “millennials”, the latter framed as a fresh, youthful, and disruptive demographic with unique sensibilities. The brand image of these outlets was early on designed around these supposed sensibilities, and investors were excited about this promising new market (Willens, 2018b). Yet by the later 2010s, this demographic was no longer as fresh and “disruptive” as it was seen to be in the early part of the decade. Millennials are now getting older, having families, and starting careers—as are the owners, editors, and writers of social news. The youthful sheen of social news that initially attracted venture capitalists has since been wearing off. Some social news outlets have attempted to rectify this by developing separate, more teen and generation Z (the new young people) friendly content, with mixed success. In 2018, Pedestrian, for example, launched the short-lived gen-Z outlet called

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“Pez”. In what seemed to be a moment ripe for the infamous “how do you do, fellow kids?” meme (KnowYourMeme, 2021), co-founder Chris Wirasinha claimed that “Pez” was an “affectionate” term for Pedestrian popular with younger readers (Samios, 2018a). Junkee, however, has had more success with its teen and gen-Z-focused spin-off Punkee. The outlet is even more informal, colloquial, and pop-culture-centric than the Junkee main site and it achieved significant engagement in the later 2010s due to its comedic video recaps of popular reality television shows such as The Bachelor (Samios, 2018b). Social news outlets have also tried to reach younger audiences by meeting them on newer platforms. Gen-Z has, for the reasons listed above, avoided Facebook for other platforms like Instagram and the short video-­ sharing platform TikTok. The latter has become especially popular with this young generation (Muliadi, 2020; Zeng & Abidin, 2021), and has appeared to possess the kind of exciting, innovative, and youthful appeal that Facebook and Twitter previously had—or at least, that is how it has often been represented in news coverage (Jennings, 2019). And while it has perhaps been most famous for its meme-like dance videos, the platform is also becoming known for its political content, a space for the kind of youthful activism and disruptive digital publics that older platforms like Twitter were famous for in 2011 (Herman, 2020; Abidin & Kaye, 2021). For this reason, TikTok, alongside Instagram (which, while an older platform, has remained popular with young people and young activists), have been gaining attention as platforms for news (Schmidt, 2019). Social news outlets have attempted to take advantage of this potential. Pedestrian, for instance, after discovering that their audience was moving over to Instagram, began experimenting with alternative distribution strategies— such as using their bio section to link to curated news stories—many of which have now become common with other outlets on Instagram (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a). Other social news outlets, such as BuzzFeed and Junkee, are also now on TikTok, although Junkee’s account has been mostly inactive. Still, the different functionalities, algorithmic logics, and user cultures of these platforms mean that social news content cannot be simply transferred over. Instead, outlets must adapt and demonstrate literacy in these platforms, in the same way that they did with millennials on Facebook in the early 2010s. It is still unclear whether social news outlets can do this in the long term. And more crucially, it is uncertain if some social news outlets have the money to do so.

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VC Troubles: BuzzFeed and Mic’s Decline Venture capitalist money fuelled the growth of the big two US social news outlets, BuzzFeed and Mic. Investors were hungry for reach, and saw opportunities in social news start-ups for capturing what they saw as lucrative youth markets neglected by established news media (Willens, 2018b). At the beginning, this was a mutually beneficial partnership. Peretti even called it a “perfect” partnership for doing what BuzzFeed eventually achieved: that is, building a “giant company relatively quickly” in an “emerging space” that was “not mature enough to generate a lot of revenue early on” (Salmon, 2014). Within this context, Peretti believed that being VC-backed was “great”. And for years, investors simply prioritised growth (Salmon, 2014), deferring returns on investment to a future date, after social news outlets had built themselves up as formidable players in news. By 2019, however, the conditions had changed and venture capitalists were finally looking for returns on their investments. While BuzzFeed had continued to grow throughout the late 2010s, and even hit its $300 million revenue target in 2018 (Willens, 2019), it was still having trouble making a profit. There were previous warning signs: in 2017, the company finally started including banner adverts on its main site, in an attempt to diversify its revenue stream and be less reliant on native advertising (Dua, 2017); and in 2018, BuzzFeed began pursuing a donations-based subscription model to fund its journalism (Mullin, 2018). But venture capitalists were beginning to lose patience (Lee, 2019). BuzzFeed now needed to reduce costs, so it could satisfy its backers and regain control over its “own destiny, without ever needing to raise funding again”, as Peretti put it in a substantial shift in tone from his earlier praise for the VC model (Lee, 2019). It did so through restructures and downsizing. In January 2019, the company announced that it was planning to lay off 15% of its staff, which amounted to around 200 employees losing their jobs (Lee, 2019). Included in these layoffs was the downsizing, and eventual closure, of BuzzFeed’s international bureaus, such as BuzzFeed Australia (Meade, 2019): a sudden reversal of the high-profile, international expansion that the company underwent during its glory days only a few years earlier. The more high-paying and resource intensive jobs, such as the news team, tended to be the focus of the 2019 cuts (Waterson, 2019), a message which seemed to indicate that the days of successfully financing born-­ digital journalism were over. BuzzFeed is still around, and its US team

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continues to produce significant journalism. The outlet even won its first Pulitzer prize in 2021 (Mack & Nashrulla, 2021). But financially, the company is still struggling to bounce back. Mic, however, has fared worse than BuzzFeed. The lofty aspirations and optimism of 2014 had, by 2018, crashed, when Mic announced in late November that it was laying off nearly its entire staff. The immediate cause of these layoffs was a deal with Facebook falling through (Kafka, 2018), but there were also broader reasons for the outlet’s decline. As with BuzzFeed, although Mic had achieved rapid growth in the mid-2010s, the company had experienced difficulty finding a sustainable and profitable business model (Willens, 2018a). The company had always been agile: to observers, it had “embodied the digital media pivot”, and had become used to changing its content and audience strategy numerous times during its short history in its attempt to please investors and platform algorithms (Willens, 2018a). For instance, Facebook’s algorithm changes made the outlet shift its focus towards search engine optimisation (SEO) on Google, which was by the late 2010s taking over Facebook’s earlier lead in news— but this shift had mixed success (Willens, 2018a). The company had also experienced major losses during the infamous 2017 “pivot to video”. In that year, Mic cut staff producing text content to focus its resources on short-form videos. When Facebook switched to prioritising longer videos over shorter ones in 2018, Mic’s video views on the platform dropped massively: a more than 90% drop between December 2017 and October 2018. By this time, the outlet was becoming desperate to satisfy the VCs who had invested more USD 60 million in Mic during those early, optimistic years. Eventually, in a move that suggested that the outlet had finally run out of pivots, Mic was sold to the Bustle Digital Group in November 2018 for less than USD 5 million (Boboltz & Strachan, 2018). It was described it as “one of the most dramatic rises and falls of any digital media outlet this century” (Boboltz & Strachan, 2018). The outlet continues to produce content—but it is in a skeleton state. Beyond platform and finance problems, there were also other internal issues plaguing Mic throughout its short tenure. Despite the lavish offices and the Silicon Valley-style perks (such as customised Nikes for the employees), employees were reported to have been underpaid and overworked: one former Mic staff writer had stated that they were paid only around USD12 per hour (Strachan, 2019). And in 2018, a senior reporter was fired for several allegations of sexual misconduct (Shepard, 2018). In many ways, then, as HuffPost reporter Maxwell Strachan ironically noted,

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Mic did  indeed become the “archetypal millennial” workplace, with its  deflated optimism and its lowly paid workforce who “yearn[ed] for stability” (2019). The kind of start-up digital news that Mic and BuzzFeed represented, fuelled by an atmosphere high on optimism about digital innovation and investor-driven growth, had by the end of the decade crashed. BuzzFeed was mostly able to save itself—but Mic was brought down by hubris, mismanagement, and its own always-shaky foundations.

Bought Out: Pedestrian and Junkee Institutionalised Over in Australia, however, Junkee and Pedestrian have survived the digital news crash of the late 2010s. As described above, both outlets had suffered a decline in Facebook audience engagement following the algorithm changes of 2016 and 2018 (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a; Bailo et  al., 2021). But, while certainly past their 2015 golden age, Junkee and Pedestrian have nonetheless grown into established youth actors within Australia’s media ecology. They have become institutionalised mainstays in Australian news. There were distinct regional conditions that enabled this outcome, but there were also important contrasts between Junkee and Pedestrian’s growth models and those of their US counterparts that prevented the Australian outlets from suffering the latter’s fate. Both Junkee and Pedestrian were bought out in the mid-2010s, before the 2018 algorithm crash. Advertising company oOh! Media bought 85% of Junkee’s parent company, Junkee Media, for a reported AUD$11.05 million in 2016 (Hayes, 2016). In Pedestrian’s case, media conglomerate Nine Entertainment purchased a 60% stake in the social news outlet in 2015 (Thompson et al., 2015), and in 2018 bought the remaining 40% for a reported AUD$10 million. At the time, Nine Entertainment valuated Pedestrian at around AUD$100 million (Redrup, 2018). The combination of, on the one hand, Junkee and Pedestrian’s millennial reach, and their marketing prowess, on the other, apparently explained the high-­ profile media buyouts. For example, Junkee’s strength in native advertising was cited by oOh! Media as a reason behind the purchase (Hayes, 2016), while Nine Entertainment reportedly sought Pedestrian’s youth audience and its profitable native ad business model (Thompson et  al., 2015). And unlike Mic and BuzzFeed, Junkee and Pedestrian were also not reliant on or heavily indebted to venture capitalist investors (Rigby, 2021).

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In the above ways, Junkee and Pedestrian’s comparative success in contrast to US-based social news can be partially explained by regional contexts. As with Mic and BuzzFeed, the two Australian outlets were built by entrepreneurial grit. Pedestrian co-founders Chris Wirasinha and Oscar Martin, for instance, claimed that during their early years they were accustomed to 90–100 hour weeks and little sleep (Redrup, 2018). But however much work and experimentation the two outlets put in, the highly concentrated and demographically smaller Australian media context shaped their success significantly. Australia with its 27 million people and its even smaller population of young people meant that, once they had become recognisable brands early on (for both audiences and advertisers)—in other words, once they had achieved a kind of institutional status—that status could more easily be perpetuated. Certainly, the media buyouts were another expression of institutionalisation. Nine Entertainment, one of Australia’s two dominant media corporations, sought to expand its oligarchic hold on Australian news media through purchasing one of the country’s two major youth media brands. Pedestrian, having been absorbed into Nine’s media portfolio (which also includes other recent purchases, such as the former Fairfax Media metropolitan newspapers) is now more a youth arm of a news conglomerate than it is “independent media”. Pedestrian has also since been promoted within Nine Entertainment and has become a subsidiary called “Pedestrian Group”, operating other Nine acquisitions such as the Australian editions of international digital media brands Business Insider, Gizmodo, and Kotaku (Mediaweek, 2018). And while Junkee was not bought by a media empire, it has still undergone a comparable institutionalisation over the last decade. It is now a stable, recognisable youth brand supported by an owner with commercial interests beyond news. These media buyouts also helped Pedestrian and Junkee persevere through the 2018 algorithm crash, when the two outlets saw their Facebook metrics decline drastically (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020a). But while buyouts saved Junkee and Pedestrian, they cannot be relied on to save social news. There were already signs in the late 2010s that, while Pedestrian and Junkee were achieving success, other comparable ventures into digital youth news were not so lucky. Other small Australian digital youth outlets, such as Your Friends House, never achieved the same kind of growth, and have since largely collapsed. Attempts by other Australian news companies to establish similar social news-style outlets— such as Channel Ten’s 10Daily and the Australian Broadcasting

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Corporation’s  ABC Life—also failed. 10Daily and ABC Life had closed down by the end of the decade, the former apparently due to a shift in “strategy” (Boseley, 2020), while the latter shut down following government cuts to the national broadcaster (Worthington & Hitch, 2020). Following the closure of BuzzFeed Australia and Nine’s buyout of Pedestrian along with the former Fairfax Media newspapers, Australia’s media ecology is now more concentrated than ever (Evershed, 2020). These conditions are more likely to lock out, rather than foster, new independent digital youth media.

The Future of Sociability and Positionality Where then, does all this leave social news? The current state of individual outlets, sketched above, suggest that social news is on the decline—or institutionalised, and thereby partially emptied of the disruptive potential that seemed to define it in the early 2010s. And indeed, as seen throughout this book, social news did undergo an institutionalisation throughout the 2010s: becoming established entities with shared organisational practices and business structures. The “canonical” social news outlets may now be old hat, their boisterous and sincere optimism eventually wearing thin as the decade wore on and as old allies (Facebook, young people, and investors) turned their backs. The bold promises made by Mic, BuzzFeed and Pedestrian to transform the news industry are now looking somewhat ironic, considering the ultimate fate of those outlets. But social news has always been more than individual outlets. It is also a genre, and this genre has had potential beyond the ultimate success or failure of BuzzFeed, Junkee, Pedestrian,  or Mic. This is because genres, although comprised of individual outlets or outputs, are also not bound to them: they can be kept alive, or revived, through participation. They are recognised styles, symbols, and practices as much as they distinct entities or texts (Lomborg, 2014). Instead of looking towards individual outlets to gauge the future of social news, we can instead critically examine the state of the genre: its presence, influence, and relevance. What is the status of the social news genre in the 2020s? And in particular, what is the relevance of sociability and positionality—those two key journalistic contributions from social news? The influence of social news can be seen, for instance, in how pervasive its audience strategies and reporting priorities have become. This influence is evident in how the social news genre has been adopted by alreadyestablished outlets: Indy100 here being a clear example of a social news

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outlet emerging from an existing news organisation seeking the same millennial, progressive, and digitally savvy audiences that Mic and BuzzFeed captured. The short-lived ABC Life, established by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2018, was another example of a long-­ standing media organisation adopting audience strategies that the early social news outlets innovated—even if the national broadcaster denied accusations that it was undergoing a “BuzzFeedification” (Sunderland, 2018). Beyond new sub-outlets being established, the influence of social news has also been visible in how legacy media have adopted some of the stylistics associated with BuzzFeed, Junkee, and so on—for example, by including GIFs within the flow of article text (e.g., Marsh, 2017). It is the “explainer”, however, that has perhaps been most widely adopted, becoming a regular format for well-known outlets like the ABC, the BBC, CNN, along with many more. It was Duggan who claimed that it was Junkee and BuzzFeed that really led the way with this article format (Carson & Muller, 2017, p. 18), and although this is likely not entirely true, the widespread adoption of the explainer format indicates a broad acceptance by news outlets that journalists need to do more to make their reporting accessible to audiences overwhelmed by news and (mis)information. The classical “informed citizen” model (Zuckerman, 2014)—the notion that it is the individual’s responsibility to “keep up” with the news, rather than the reporter’s prerogative to explain it—is seemingly being chipped away, and for this, social news deserves some credit. But it is on platforms that require unconventional news delivery—and which, crucially, young people use in greater numbers—that the influence of social news’ audience strategies is most evident. As discussed above, young people (in particular, the elusive gen-Z) are increasingly shying away from Facebook, preferring the audio-visual platforms Instagram and TikTok. When outlets have tried to reach young people on these platforms, they have had to adopt new forms of content delivery. Many of these forms emulate the stylistics and audience strategies that social news innovated on Facebook: informal audience address, the use of emoji, and—especially on TikTok—attempts to demonstrate literacy in memes and pop-culture. For instance, the ABC News Instagram account regularly uses emoji within post captions as a visual shorthand in lieu of worded descriptions (“morning news”, e.g., is typically denoted by newspaper and a coffee emoji, while a camera emoji tends to indicate “image credit”) (ABC, 2021). The BBC’s TikTok account, on the other hand, has been making memes and other kinds of short and humorous videos to deliver

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news. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this included the communication of government-mandated social distancing announcements through pop-culture references (BBC, 2021). Over in the US, individual journalists—such as CNN news reporter Max Foster (n.d.)—have been using their verified TikTok accounts in similar ways, such as sharing platform-­ specific memes to deliver daily news stories. These outlets and journalists were not necessarily directly influenced by social news: they could simply be responding to platform logics and user cultures. And yet, that major news institutions such as the BBC and CNN are adopting such practices suggests a partial normalisation of the kind of sociable journalism that social news spearheaded a decade ago. Social news’ influence can be traced, too, in what have become new reporting priorities for a growing number of mainstream outlets. As seen in Chap. 4, social news outlets have been distinguished by their early dedication to “internet culture” as a worthwhile news beat—or at least, worthwhile content. Now that the physical consequences of things that happen online are increasingly difficult to ignore—as platform-based misinformation and radicalisation hinder vaccine rollouts and incite real-world violence (Yurieff & Darcy, 2021; Canales, 2021)—dedicated internet reporters are becoming more commonplace within major news organisations (Napoli, 2021). In the US, NBC reporters such as Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins have been gaining recognition for their investigative journalism into platform-based conspiracy subcultures (Katz, 2021), while Guardian Australia similarly has received industry awards for its data journalism (Guardian, 2019), a beat which includes reporting into platform-­based misinformation. In such ways, literacy in internet cultures and knowledge of platform-based politics—qualities that social news outlets demonstrated years ago—are now journalistic skills that a growing number of mainstream news outlets want to promote. That other major journalistic contribution from social news—what I have been calling its positionality—also remains highly relevant, although this non-objective style has largely not been embraced by mainstream outlets. Most of these outlets maintain a dispassionate address in their journalism, along with the pretence that the journalist is just reporting the “news’” Still, the Trump Presidency challenged some of these outlets, such as CNN, to re-evaluate this pretence—most notably, when it and other US news broadcasters used their chyrons in November 2020 to correct the former’s Presidents election-night lies live on air (Baj, 2020). The Guardian, too, has recently revised its language style guide for its environmental reporting:

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mandating the terms “climate crisis or breakdown” over “climate change”, and “global heating” over “global warming” (Carrington, 2019). Katherine Viner, The Guardian’s editor chief, explicitly mentioned the need to move away from neutral language so as to better communicate the ecological crisis the planet is facing (Carrington, 2019). Other terms popularly used by the media within this context, such as “climate sceptic”, have also been revised by The Guardian for accuracy reasons (with “sceptic” becoming “climate science denier”), even if that meant the outlet had to take a more overt stance on the issue. Digital outlets such as Teen Vogue—a teen-focused spin-off of long-running fashion magazine Vogue—have also recently incorporated explicit political perspectives into their news content by blending, as Junkee and Pedestrian do, celebrity and pop-culture coverage with vocal progressive viewpoints (Keller, 2020). However, mainstream outlets still have more to learn from positionality’s critique of objectivity and “balance”.  These critiques are  especially timely, considering the growing threats from the far- and extreme-right, and how these movements manipulate journalistic “balance” for their own ends (Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Phillips, 2018), as well as the ongoing severity of the climate crisis, which many outlets continue to report on with the neutral language that The Guardian only recently discarded. At the same time, the demands from racial justice movements to decentre white voices are becoming louder (IFJ, 2020; Anand, 2020)—and yet, in Australia and elsewhere (Faruqi, 2020), journalism continues to marginalise people of colour (Lewis, 2016; Arana, 2018; Usher, 2021), and “objectivity” remains a common tool to deflect accusations of racial bias (Lowrey, 2020). As standpoint theorists like Donna  Haraway (1988) and Black Feminist scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) argued decades ago, challenging objectivity does not threaten the journalistic imperative to report accurately. On the contrary, journalism can better meet this goal if it platforms those who can more clearly see how racism, sexism, and classism operate. Positionality, therefore, continues to be relevant in so far as it can help practitioners adopt new journalistic criteria through which to organise and evaluate their work. Such criteria could include “accuracy” instead of “objectivity”, and “perspective” or “argumentation” rather than straight “opinion”: placing value, here, not so much on whether the writer and their views are present or not, but instead on the validity of their reports and their claims. Where “facts” would remain—as The Guardian motto goes—“sacred”, but without the presumption that they can be presented to the reader in a disembodied fashion, as if “reality” can simply be

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transmitted to readers. Judging on “perspective” and “argumentation” can also better counter the excuses from problematic outlets (such as Fox News) that their frequently incendiary political commentary is just “opinion” that has a right to be voiced. De-emphasising the value of “opinion”, and promoting accurate “argumentation”—albeit, from differing perspectives—could be a useful strategy, in this regard. And as part of this, knowledge can be foregrounded: not just academic expertise, but also the knowledge that comes from personal experience. “Truthfulness” is not abandoned. What would be left behind is simply a journalism that marginalises experiential knowledge, and which excuses deliberate falsehoods (such as climate change denial) as a merely necessary and “balanced” viewpoint. Still, there are some aspects of positionality that have been implicated in our current media ills. The for/against audience strategy that social news capitalised on, whereby it positioned itself in opposition to other outlets, is now a characteristic of our contemporary media ecology. The rise of “hyperpartisan” outlets (Rae, 2021), as they have come to be known, has demonstrated both the profitability and the dangers of audience strategies reliant on and fuelled by an ideological opposition between “us” and “them”. US-based outlets like Brietbart and NewsMax, as well as older broadcasters such as Fox News, have threatened social cohesion and even the existence of a “shared reality” (Warzel, 2017) through their regular boosting of Trump’s lies, along with their relentless attacks on Democrats, “liberal mainstream media”, and public health officials. And in Australia, the Murdoch-owned cable broadcaster Sky News has found recent success on social media through pursuing a similar conspiracist and hyperpartisan audience strategy that also often utilises a “constitutive humour” to mock so-called leftists (Wilson, 2020). Furthermore, the kind of conflict-driven content that social news produced in the 2010s has left a rather unhealthy legacy for the social media news cycle. Social news partially thrived off content that emphasised and exploited divisions between news media actors. There was a back-and-­forth trolling element here, with Junkee provoking News Corp columnists and Indy100 mocking Telegraph readers, that not only at times amplified the harmful and malicious, but savvy (Marwick & Lewis, 2017), messaging of right-wing media identities, but also normalised a perpetual social mediabased “culture war”. And far-right hyperpartisan outlets and politicians have embraced this “culture war” with glee (Bittle, 2020; Lahut, 2021). There was always danger when outrageous and hateful behaviour became attention-grabbing and monetisable “content” in politicised social

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media spaces, and when malicious actors exploited political struggle through profitable “culture wars”. But the question is now how we can fix this mess without returning to a problematic “objectivity” that tended to privilege the concerns, views, and bodies of the powerful. Social news, for all its faults, presented some solutions to this problem, in so far as it not only helped challenge the epistemic authority of “professional journalism”, but also offered the makings of a sociable and social justice-powered alternative to it.

Conclusion Social news left the 2010s, it seemed, without the explosive success and fanfare which greeted its entry into that decade. There are multiple reasons why social news no longer appears to carry the fresh and disruptive energy that it boasted during its early years. On the one hand, there has been the dramatic decline of canonical social news outlets alongside the absorption of others into established media empires. On the other hand, Facebook has been shaking off news, and a formerly young generation has aged. It is not as if social news is dead—but it’s not the hot new thing anymore, either. In this chapter, I have assessed the future of social news: not just individual outlets, but the genre more broadly. I have located both a decline and an institutionalisation. The latter referring not just to individual outlets being bought out by media conglomerates—the disruptive independence of these outlets becoming somewhat neutralised—but also the adoption by established outlets of the kinds of sociable aesthetics and audience strategies which social news outlets first innovated. Social news’ future, therefore, may be simultaneously a partial collapse and a steady normalisation. But there are current trajectories, and then there is potential: or to put it differently, there is a difference between where we are going, and where we could go. In the last section of this chapter, I have emphasised how positionality can help scholars and practitioners develop new journalistic values to evaluate and organise news, as well help rectify and transform structural inequalities in the media. The challenges of our current hyperpartisan and polluted (Phillips & Milner, 2021) platformed media ecology tempt a return to an idealised time when all that supposedly mattered was the presentation of “facts”. Social news, however, has helped demonstrate

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that this return is a false hope, because what we need is a more critical, diverse, self-reflexive, embodied, and justice-seeking journalism, not simply a “balanced” and “objective” one. In the next, concluding chapter, I continue these critical reflections on the legacy of social news, constitutive humour, and internet culture, and ask, “how can we solve a problem like sociability?”

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Mullin, B. (2018, August 27). BuzzFeed News Asks Readers to Chip in with Donations. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ buzzfeed-­news-­asks-­readers-­to-­chip-­in-­with-­donations-­1535395575 Napoli, P.  M. (2021). The Platform Beat: Algorithmic Watchdogs in the Disinformation Age. European Journal of Communication, 36(4), 376–390. Oremus, W. (2018, October 18). The Big Lie Behind the ‘pivot to video’. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-­o nline-­v ideo-­p ivot-­ metrics-­false.html Peyaskhovich, A., & Hendrix, K. (2016, August 4). Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed. Facebook Newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2016/08/ news-­feed-­fyi-­further-­reducing-­clickbait-­in-­feed/ Phillips, W. (2018). The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators. Data & Society. Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2021). You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. The MIT Press. Rae, M. (2021). Hyperpartisan News: Rethinking the Media for Populist Politics. New Media & Society, 23(5), 1117:1132. Redrup, Y. (2018, September 2). How Two Millennials Built Pedestrian into a $100m Business. Australian Financial Review. https://www.afr.com/companies/how-­two-­millennials-­built-­pedestrian-­into-­a-­100m-­business-­20180902-­ h14tto Rigby, B. (2021, March 15). Nine’s Pedestrian to Revive Vice and Launch Refinery29  in Australia. Mumbrella. https://mumbrella.com.au/nines­pedestrian-­to-­revive-­vice-­and-­launch-­refinery29-­in-­australia-­673321 Salmon, F. (2014, June 11). BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long. Matter. https:// medium.com/matter/buzzfeeds-­jonah-­peretti-­goes-­long-­e98cf13160e7 Samios, Z. (2018a, January 9). Pedestrian Officially Launches Teen Website Pez. Mumbrella. https://mumbrella.com.au/pedestrian-­officially-­launches-­teen-­ website-­pez-­492590 Samios, Z. (2018b, September 6). Building Punkee: Moving Beyond The Bachelor Recaps. Mumbrella. https://mumbrella.com.au/building-­punkee-­moving­beyond-­the-­bachelor-­recaps-­539248 Samios, Z. (2021, March 16). News Corp Australia, Nine Strike Facebook Deals. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ news-­corp-­australia-­signs-­deal-­with-­facebook-­20210316-­p57b1f.html Schmidt, C. (2019, June 18). Meet TikTok: How The Washing Post, NBC News, and The Dallas Morning News Are Using the Of-the-moment Platform. NiemanLab. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/meet-­tiktok-­how-­the-­ washington-­post-­nbc-­news-­and-­the-­dallas-­morning-­news-­are-­using-­the-­of-­ the-­moment-­platform/

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Shepard, J. E. (2018, September 24). The Next Step for #MeToo Is into the Gray Areas. Jezebel. https://jezebel.com/the-­next-­step-­for-­metoo-­is-­into-­the-­gray-­ areas-­1829269384 Simo, F. (2017, 11 January). Introducing the Facebook Journalism Project. Meta. https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/introducing-facebookjournalism-project. Solon, O. (2016, November 11). Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarised politics get Trump elected? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories. Strachan, M. (2019, July 23). The Fall of Mic Was a Warning. Mic. https://www. huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/mic-­layoffs-­millennial-­digital-­news-­site-­warnin g_n_5c8c144fe4b03e83bdc0e0bc?ri18n=true Sunderland, A. (2018, August 6). Life… As We Know It. ABC. https://about. abc.net.au/2018/08/life-­as-­we-­know-­it/ Thompson, S., Macdonald, A., & Mitchell, J. (2015, March 30). Nine’s No Digital Pedestrian. Australian Financial Review. https://www.afr.com/street-­ talk/nines-­no-­digital-­pedestrian-­20150329-­1ma7hk Usher, N. (2021). News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. Columbia University Press. Waterson, J. (2019, January 24). BuzzFeed to Lay Off 200 Staff in Latest Round of Cuts. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jan/ 24/buzzfeed-­to-­lay-­off-­200-­staff-­in-­latest-­round-­of-­cuts Warzel, C. (2017, December 28). 2017 Was the Year That the Internet Destroyed Our Shared Reality. BuzzFeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ charliewarzel/2017-­year-­the-­internet-­destroyed-­shared-­reality Warzel, C. (2020, November 24). What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomer. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/ facebook-­disinformation-­boomers.html Willens, M. (2018a, November 30). Pivoting to Nowhere: How Mic Ran Out of Radical Makeovers. DigiDay. https://digiday.com/media/mic-­transformations-­ pivoting-­nowhere/ Willens, M. (2018b, December 3). Why ‘news for millennials’ Media Plays Never Panned Out. DigiDay. https://digiday.com/media/mic-­news-­millennials-­ media-­plays/ Willens, M. (2019, January 30). Dented by Layoffs, BuzzFeed Charts a Path to a Sustainable Business. Digiday. https://digiday.com/media/dented-­layoffs-­ buzzfeed-­charts-­path-­sustainable-­business/ Wilson, C. (2020, November 6). ‘In digital, the right-wing media is 24/7’: How Sky News Quietly Become Australia’s Biggest News Channel on Social Media. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/sky-­news-­australia-­ biggest-­social-­media-­channel-­culture-­wars-­2020-­11

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Worthington, B., & Hitch, G. (2020, June 25). Up to 250 ABC jobs to go, ABC Life brand scrapped, flagship radio news bulletin dumped to tackle $84 million budget cut. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-24/abcannounces-cuts-toprogramming-and-jobs-funding/12384972 Yurieff, K., & Darcy, O. (2021, February 9). Facebook Vowed to Crack Down on Covid-19 Vaccine Misinformation But Misleading Posts Remain Easy to Find. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/07/tech/facebook-­instagram-­ covid-­vaccine/index.html Zuckerman, E. (2014). New Media, New Civics? Policy & Internet, 6(2), 151–168. Zeng, J., & Abidin, C. (2021). “#OkBoomer, Time to Meet the Zoomers”: Studying the Memefication of Intergenerational Politics on TikTok. Information, Communication & Society. Published online first: https://doi. org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1961007

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Millennial Skinny Jeans and TikTok Teens It was February 2021, and the teens on TikTok were at it again. Generation Z was on a campaign against skinny jeans. Those slim, figure-hugging pants beloved by millennials, gen-Z declared, were out, and 90s-style baggy blue jeans, which the teens had revived, were in. Millennials did not take this kindly. They responded in the most millennial way possible: through a BuzzFeed listicle. “Gen Z Is Telling Us To Stop Wearing Skinny Jeans, And Millennials Are Not Having It”, went the BuzzFeed headline (Heinrich, 2021). It was a clear “us” versus “them”. “My fellow millennials”, the author began. “You may or may not be aware of the fact that Gen Z had decided to come for our beloved side part”—a reference here to another episode in what BuzzFeed described as the ongoing “Gen Wars”. “But that’s not the only thing they’re defaming”, the author announced ominously, and only maybe semi-ironically. “They’re also coming after our SKINNY JEANS!!!” In a reminder of what we fellow millennials were fighting for, a stock photo of women wearing tight jeans then appeared, with a big cartoon red cross placed over it. “That’s right, according to the Gen Z’ers of TikTok, skinny jeans are OUT and we should swap them out for baggy jeans immediately, lest we appear lame.” And millennials, the cool generation of hipsters, tech start-ups, and indie synth bands, could never be “lame”, surely? But there was an even greater danger: for the skinny jeans © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8_7

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controversy was revealing something “even worse”—that, maybe millennials were getting “old”—and not just physically ageing, but acting old on social media, too! The article followed up with a series of “Gen Z” TikTok videos. In one, a gen-Z’er demonstrated the “swag” (that is, trendiness) that came with baggy jeans compared to the relative lack of “swag” that skinny jeans brought. In another TikTok video, a gen-Z user confessed that they’d rather be homeless than wear skinny jeans, to which BuzzFeed captioned incredulously: “They’d rather lose their homes…” And then the next TikTok escalated the issue even further, by declaring death before skinny jean: “they’d rather DIE than wear skinny jeans!!”, went BuzzFeed. The TikTok users were not really being entirely serious, of course. The claims that they’d rather be “die” and “be homeless” were riffs on existing TikTok audio templates, rather than verbalised statements from the users themselves. Regardless, the millennials, BuzzFeed reported, were not going to take “this skinny jeans hate sitting down.” The millennials went to the gen-Z home turf to set the record straight about the best jeans. Multiple TikToks from millennials were then showcased in the BuzzFeed article, with millennials users making, apparently solid, arguments about the benefits of skinny jeans: claiming, for instance, that skinny jeans can show off your shoes and your “assets”, and that millennials already went through the 1990s and 2000s baggy-jeans phase, anyway. The article concluded with a call for user engagement, by asking readers where they stood on the “skinny jeans versus baggy jeans discourse”. Other social news outlets also participated in the jeans controversy (Rennex, 2021; Bruce-Smith, 2021). Junkee and Pedestrian were both enticed by the spectacle of teens on TikTok “roasting” millennials and took the bait accordingly (Pedestrian, somewhat predictably, turned the controversy into a native advertising piece about baggy jeans brands). BuzzFeed even followed up a couple of weeks later with more “Gen Wars” content: this time, millennials were the ones making fun of gen-Z on the internet, which BuzzFeed called an “absolute pleasure to see” (Sloss, 2021). In many ways, then, these articles were typical social news fare, and not unlike all the other “internet reacts” pieces discussed in this book. But their participation in the skinny jeans controversy was revealing in different ways. For it demonstrated that, despite their best efforts, the BuzzFeed writer’s fears were justified. The outlets were being old on the internet. BuzzFeed and others were revealed to be old in a multitude of ways. Because younger people were leading fashion trends that the millennials

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did not innovate or understand, the millennials social news writers were outed as old. By “clapping back” at the youth, these millennials looked to be out of touch—as there’s nothing more distinctively old than complaining about young people. And not only were the writers old and acting old, but the story itself was old. The gen-Z-millennial skinny jeans TikTok meme was over six months old by the time BuzzFeed started reporting on it (Broderick, 2021). The TikTok teens had mostly moved on, and yet millennial users and social news writers were only catching up. As internet reporter Ryan Broderick, himself a former BuzzFeed writer, pointedly wrote, it was difficult to “really argue you have your fingers on the pulse of culture when you’re chasing months-old TikTok trends for outrage bait” (Broderick, 2021). BuzzFeed writers, who had always based their brand around being at the forefront of internet culture—the literal feed, that is, of what was buzzing on the internet—were now being “outraged” by old memes. It all appeared to indicate that maybe social news’ literacy in platform cultures was slipping, or at least, social news outlets were lacking literacy in new platforms like TikTok—because their writers seemed to miss that gen-Z were playing with audio templates (Abidin & Kaye, 2021), rather making literal statements about skinny jeans. The 2020s, therefore, opened with formerly young people aging publicly. In the last chapter, I laid out the recent history of social news, assessed the state of the industry, and made some predictions about where the genre could go. In particular, I highlighted the potential of positionality as a source for reflexive and critical journalism. The skinny jeans controversy presents another logical endpoint for social news, however. It is a picture of what happens when youth media gets old, and when a generation ages, as Broderick described, “fast” and “violently” (2021). But perhaps more importantly, the controversy also revealed the tensions within and between the institutional logics that I have sketched in this book. These tensions remain unresolved.

Moving Beyond Constitutive Humour and ‘fetishised laughter’ The skinny jeans controversy was yet another demonstration of the limits of the kind of sociable and constitutive humour that BuzzFeed and others have so often deployed. As seen in the third chapter, constitutive humour can be generative in so far as it signals and rallies groups around

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a shared identity (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p.  99). In that sense, it can bring groups, including marginalised groups, together in a socially positive fashion. Social news’ constitutive humour was socially positive, for instance, when it was rallying LGBTQI people during the Australian same-sex marriage survey, in the face of bigotry and a violence. It was socially positive, as well, when social news rallied millennials to fight back against intergenerational injustices, such as housing affordability, unemployment, and climate change. But as I have been emphasising throughout this book, an “us” always implies a “them”, and humour itself is not an inherent vehicle for justice (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p. 99). The skinny jeans controversy was the flipside of these earlier instances of constitutive humour. Rather than punching up at oppressive groups, social news outlets used the rallying cry of “us” to complain about teens. “Gen-Z”, in this framing, was an entity smaller than the sum of its parts. “Gen-Z” was a group of people packaged into an object of curiosity and generational antagonism. Of course, generational categories such as “gen-­ Z” or “millennials” have largely always operated in a reductive fashion, and the ways in which social news outlets have framed “boomers” as a group to resent was no different in this regard. Yet, while there have been justified reasons for social news’ criticism of older generations—for it has allowed the writers to think through and articulate generational inequities—the skinny jeans articles lacked these critical qualities. These articles were not necessarily harmful: the kind of intergenerational ribbing that BuzzFeed and others performed hardly counts as hate speech. But they showed how easily sociability and constitutive humour can turn into “fetishised laughter” (Phillips & Milner, 2017). This is the process by which laughter strips what is being laughed at of its full context, “allowing participants [that is, those laughing] to focus only on the amusing details” (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p.  98). Just as fetishised laughter is magnetic and generative, thereby deepening a shared sense of collective identity amongst participants—Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner call this the building and tightening of “shared social worlds” (2017, p. 99)—it also simultaneously reduces the fetishised object of its full complexity, even its humanity. In such ways, as the “millennial” identity magnetised around the identity marker of “skinny jeans”, “gen-Z” became a fetishised object of (albeit playful) antagonism through shared laughter at a collection of old TikTok memes. To reiterate, the skinny jeans controversy was not seriously harmful: if anything, it was more embarrassing for my fellow millennials than it was hurtful to teenagers. But it demonstrated the unresolved

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tension between sociability and constitutive humour, and even between sociability, positionality, and the kinds of socially positive journalistic possibilities that I sketched in the last chapter. For 2021 opened with another, much more explosive, instance of constitutive antagonism inflamed by platform-based cultural-political conflict. The world was shocked when the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C. was besieged by Trump supporters seeking to interrupt the count of electoral votes that would confirm Joe Biden’s Presidency. And yet, the violence that day was fuelled and shaped by the same logics that I have been calling engagement, sociability, and personalisation. A constant drumbeat, for example, came from conservative and far-right media rallying its viewers around a shared identity—“Republican”, “conservative”, “real American”, and so on—against a phantomised and supposedly anti-­American “Left” (Jurkowitz et al., 2020). Platforms amplified outrage, and media opportunistically fed and monetised that outrage, only to be further rewarded by platforms with more visibility in a vicious cycle of engagement (Starbird et al., 2019). A relentless monitoring of online controversy—Twitter “cancellations” and “woke culture”, in particular—was repackaged as yet more examples of left-wing “lunacy” (Lahut, 2021). And lastly, there were memes that sociably brought people together through a creative use of platform vernacular—but these memes also fetishised political opponents by stripping them of their humanity, transforming them simultaneously into both objects of ridicule (“liberal snowflakes” and “the loony left”) and an otherised existential threat (“globalists” and “satanic Democrats”). It is therefore unsurprising that large groups of people could not only believe a lie (that the election was “stolen”) but could also follow a social media President’s order to act on it in spectacular fashion. In some ways, the Capitol siege has vindicated social news’ focus on the internet by violently demonstrating the real-world consequences of things that happen online. BuzzFeed, for its part, has been a valuable source of reporting on the fallout from the Capitol siege, especially in regards to Facebook’s role in fuelling and organising the violence on that day (Mac et al., 2021). Despite the cuts, the newsroom shutdowns, and the TikTok controversies, the outlet remains in touch with the politics of platforms and the role tech giants play in facilitating misinformation and physical harm. Other recent examples of BuzzFeed’s reporting on such topics include problematic Instagram emoji recommendation algorithms (Mac & Silverman, 2021a), as well as Facebook’s role in censoring posts critical of the Modi regime in India (Mac & Silverman, 2021b). The outlet may

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not be literate in TikTok vernacular and gen-Z memes, but it hasn’t lost sight of both the more subtle, as well as the especially brazen, abuses of platform power. Its platform-attuned journalism is not only still relevant, but indeed more necessary than ever. Yet how can outlets be literate with platforms and online controversy, but not native to their cycles of amplification? How can born-digital outlets—and others—take the internet seriously and be successful on platforms, without only adding content, and therefore oxygen, to the fires? There was not a one-way trip from UpWorthy to the Capitol, but the institutional logics that guided social news to success in the 2010s also shaped and radicalised the antagonism that produced the siege. It is true that we are always working, even living (Deuze, 2012), in a “polluted” media ecology (Phillips & Milner, 2021). We (and even more so  those outlets seeking audiences on platforms) are always implicated in these cycles of amplification, and we cannot hold ourselves astray from the fray, as professional journalism maybe once hoped. Like the standpoint theorists argued, we are always already situated (Hartsock, 1983; Haraway, 1988). Instead, maybe we need new online ethics, and new ways of navigating the muck. We—and by we, I mean outlets, journalists, writers, social media users, and everyone else on the internet—should not abandon a self-reflexive positionality because we want to return to a calm “objectivity”. Quite the opposite: we need to think ecologically more than ever, to be conscious of our actions “within an ever-shifting network map”, and to think about how “our individual me is entwined within a much larger we” (Phillips & Milner, 2021). We also need to continue to hold powerful platforms and their toxic business models to account— rather than simply exploit them for monetised engagement, as many problematic outlets did in the 2010s did with terrifying success. Nonetheless, this book has given numerous positive examples of social news’ journalism, produced according to these logics of engagement, sociability, and personalisation. From BuzzFeed’s marriage equality listicles which harnessed an otherwise maligned format for a moment of national catharsis, to Junkee’s use of positionality to enrich reporting on pop-­ culture—not to mention Pedestrian’s humour that made articles more engaging, in both the entertaining and thoughtful sense. And even despite its somewhat cringey earnestness and its ultimately shaky business model, there was something valuable in Mic’s mission to give a voice to a generation neglected by established media. Social news, by building on a tradition from earlier experiments in journalism, fruitfully broke down

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problematic binaries between the personal and the newsworthy, entertainment and news, objectivity and opinion. In the case of Junkee, Pedestrian, and BuzzFeed, they continue to do so, despite the skinny jeans foibles. It would be difficult to resolve the tensions between audience engagement and toxic amplification, between sociability and fetishised laughter, and between positionality and hyperpartisanship. But as much as social news foreshadowed our partisan and polluted media ecology, the genre has also opened up exciting opportunities. New possibilities, that is, of both reckoning with and finding a way out of the muck.

References Abidin, C., & Kaye, D. B. V. (2021). Audio Memes, Earworms, and Templatability: The ‘aural turn’ of Memes in TikTok. In C. Arkenbout, J. Wilsom, & D. de Zeeuw (Eds.), Critical Meme Reader (pp. 58–68). Institute of Network Cultures. Broderick, R. (2021, March 4). Yes He Drives a Jetski. Garbage Day. https:// www.garbageday.email/p/yes-­he-­drives-­a-­jetski Bruce-Smith, A. (2021, February 10). 8 Pairs of Jeans That Aren’t Skinny Legs Now TikTokers Have Declared Them Deeply Uncool. Pedestrian. https:// www.pedestrian.tv/style/skinny-­jeans-­alternatives-­tiktok-­gen-­z/ Deuze, M. (2012). Media Life. Polity. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hartsock, N. C. M. (1983). The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In S. Harding & M. B. Hintikka (Eds.), Discovering Reality (pp. 283–310). Springer. Heinrich, S. (2021, February 5). Gen Z Is Telling Us to Stop Wearing Skinny Jeans, and Millennials Are Not Having It. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed. com/shelbyheinrich/gen-­z-­millennials-­skinny-­jeans Jurkowitz, M., Mitchell, A., Shearer, E., & Walker, M. (2020, January 24). U.S.  Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided. Pew Research Center. https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/democrats-­ report-­m uch-­h igher-­l evels-­o f-­t rust-­i n-­a -­n umber-­o f-­n ews-­s ources-­t han-­ republicans/ Lahut, J. (2021, April 6). Fox News Is Betting Big on the ‘cancel culture’ Wars Post-Trump. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/fox-­news­cancel-­culture-­tucker-­carlson-­gutfeld-­new-­show-­2021-­4?r=US&IR=T Mac, R., & Silverman, C. (2021a, February 8). A Search for ‘dog’ on Instagram Surfaces an Emoji for a Chinese Takeout Box. BuzzFeed News. https://www. buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/searches-­for-­dog-­on-­instagram-­returned-­ emojis-­for-­chinese

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Mac, R., & Silverman, C. (2021b, April 28). As Indians Face a Covid-19 Crisis, Facebook Temporarily Hid Posts with #ResignModi. BuzzFeed News. https:// www.buzzfeednews.com/ar ticle/r yanmac/facebook-­b locking-­p osts-­ hashtag-­resign-­modi Mac, R., Silverman, C., & Lytvynenko, J. (2021, April 26). Facebook Stopped Employees from Reading an Internal Report About Its Role in the Insurrection. You Can Read It Here. BuzzFeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ article/ryanmac/full-­facebook-­stop-­the-­steal-­internal-­report Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity. Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2021). You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarised Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. The MIT Press. Rennex, M. (2021, February 5). Gen Z Are, Once Again, Roasting Millennials by Cancelling Skinny Jeans and Side Parts. Junkee. https://junkee.com/ gen-­z-­millennials-­tiktok-­2/287138 Sloss, M. (2021, February 24). Millennials Are Roasting the Crap Out of Gen Z, and It’s an Absolute Pleasure to See. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ morgansloss1/millennials-­roasting-­gen-­z Starbird, K., Arif, A., & Wilson, T. (2019). Disinformation as Collaborative Work: Surfacing the Participatory Nature of Strategic Information Operations. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–26.

Index

A Advocacy journalism, 64, 66 Affect, 56, 80, 89–91, 93–96, 118, 119 Algorithms, 8, 9, 43, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54–56, 134–136, 140–142, 161

E Engagement, 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 35, 37, 41–66, 78, 84, 85, 89, 95, 110, 111, 133–135, 138, 141, 158, 161–163 Entertainment, 7, 11, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 36, 93, 110, 163

B Bias, 37, 123, 124, 146 Blogs, 34, 35 Branding, 14, 43, 53, 61, 62, 77, 78, 110, 115, 124

F Facebook, 8, 9, 11, 14, 41–43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 54–57, 64–66, 76, 77, 83, 85, 90, 96, 105, 107, 133–138, 140–144, 148, 161 Fake news, 21, 29–33, 36, 135, 137

C Civic engagement, 42, 56–62 Clickbait, 2, 4, 8–10, 14, 42–47, 59, 66, 79, 85, 121, 133–135 Connectivity, 75–80, 89, 90, 96 Constitutive humour, 15, 52–57, 76, 94–96, 124, 147, 149, 159–163

G Generation Z, 133, 137, 157 Genre, 3, 5–7, 11–15, 21, 28–30, 32, 34, 37, 41, 54, 59, 76, 77, 80, 88, 97, 115, 117, 121, 134, 143, 148, 159, 163

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hurcombe, Social News, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8

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INDEX

GIFs, 2, 6, 14, 36, 45, 54, 55, 65, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 90, 94, 96, 144 H Hyperpartisanship, 163 I Identity, 5, 27, 28, 35, 49, 53, 56, 57, 65, 77, 89, 94, 95, 103, 105–107, 118, 120, 123, 125, 147, 160, 161 Informed citizen, 23, 32, 116, 144 Instagram, 9, 14, 65, 76, 138, 144, 161 Institutionalisation, 5, 6, 11, 12, 22, 23, 32, 36, 142, 143, 148 Institutional logics, 4, 13, 14, 37, 41, 52, 96, 97, 159, 162 L Listicles, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 45, 46, 52, 59, 61, 79, 94, 113, 114, 157, 162 Literacy, 14, 45, 46, 49, 56, 65, 75, 84–86, 103, 106, 137, 138, 144, 145, 159 M Media logics, 4, 51 Memes, 14, 36, 45, 54, 58, 65, 80, 82–84, 86, 87, 90, 96, 138, 144, 145, 159–162 Metrics, 2, 14, 41, 42, 47–52, 55–57, 66, 107, 136, 142

Millennials, 1–3, 12–14, 44, 57, 83, 95, 108, 110, 112–115, 124, 133, 136–138, 141, 144, 157–163 Misinformation, 9, 36, 86, 133, 135, 137, 145, 161 N Native advertising, 13, 108–112, 114, 125, 133, 139, 141, 158 New journalism, 21, 28, 35 O Objectivity, 3, 5, 10, 15, 22, 23, 29, 36, 56, 62, 97, 116, 121–123, 146, 148, 162, 163 P Participatory culture, 7, 22, 33–36, 66, 78 Personable, 60, 116–121, 123 Personalisation, 6, 13, 14, 45, 96, 103–125, 161, 162 Personal profile, 104–106 Platform paradigm, 78, 107 Platform vernacular, 14, 66, 80–86, 161 Pop-culture, 34, 53, 54, 58–61, 80, 144–146 Positionality, 14, 15, 29, 56, 97, 104, 121–125, 143–148, 159, 161–163 Professional journalism, 21–29, 31–33, 36, 46, 57, 62, 63, 97, 104, 121, 122, 148, 162 Public sphere, 27, 62

 INDEX 

Q Quality journalism, 3 S Shareability, 14, 50, 76, 79, 80, 84, 91, 94 Sharing, 7, 34, 36, 75–80, 86, 89–92, 95, 97, 105, 106, 109, 113, 117 Sociability, 6, 13–15, 56, 75–97, 106, 114, 117, 143–149, 160–163 Social journalism, 7 Social media logics, 5, 75, 76 Social networking sites (SNS), 42, 48, 104–107 Soft news, 26, 46 Start-ups, 78, 104, 112, 114, 115, 133, 139, 141, 157 T Tabloidisation, 22, 24–27, 46, 55, 66 Techno-determinism, 5 Television, 5 TikTok, 138, 144, 145, 157–163

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Twitter, 2, 9, 11, 14, 35, 42, 43, 46, 48, 51, 54, 58, 65, 76, 83, 85, 87–90, 161 U User generated content (UGC), 35, 78, 86, 88 V Venture capitalists, 12, 114, 115, 125, 133, 137, 139–141 Viral, 11, 12, 45, 46, 52, 84, 95 W Web 2.0, 104 Y Yellow journalism, 21 Z Zines, 28, 29