News value research has contributed a great deal to the understanding of news selection. For a long time scholars focused exclusively on news selection by the media. Yet, more recent approaches — inspired by cognitive psychology — have conceptionalized news factors as relevance indicators that not only serve as selection criteria in journalism, but also guide information processing by the audience. This article examines the theoretical and methodological developments in the German research tradition and discusses selected results for newspaper and (...) television news. Its theoretical perspective focuses on the conceptionalization of news factors as either event characteristics or characteristics of the reality construction by journalists and recipients. This article explores how and why news factors affect media use and the retention of news items. Finally, this contribution's empirical perspective discusses various modifications of the assumed factors and presents methodological advancements in the measurement of news factors in selection processes. (shrink)

Online communication is often seen to promote audience fragmentation because it facilitates selective exposure and therefore is likely to divide audiences into sub-publics that hardly share common issues with other sub-publics. This study takes a micro-perspective on fragmentation by focusing on issue diversity in media items users have encountered in a particular week. Diversity was assessed via content analyses based on online diaries of 645 participants who recorded their media use concerning the German debates on climate change and federal elections. (...) Findings show lower degrees of diversity for users of non-journalistic online media than for users of journalistic mass media. (shrink)

Drawing on the spiral of silence theory and heuristic information processing, we contend that individuals use likes as sources for assessing public opinion. We further argue that individuals may even adapt their personal opinions to the tenor reflected in those cues. The assumptions were tested using data from an experiment involving 501 participants, who encountered media items on two issues with or without likes. The findings show that respondents inferred public opinion from the media bias if it was supported by (...) likes, however, only in cases of high levels of fear of social isolation. Respondents further adapted their personal opinion to the media bias if it was supported by likes. (shrink)