News Quality in the Digital Age

This book brings together a diverse, international array of contributors to explore the topics of news "quality" in the online age and the relationships between news organizations and enormously influential digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Covering topics ranging from internet incivility, crowdsourcing, and YouTube politics to regulations, algorithms, and AI, this book draws the key distinction between the news that facilitates democracy and news that undermines it. For students and scholars as well as journalists, policymakers, and media commentators, this important work engages a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives to define the key concept of "quality" in the news media.

Regina G. Lawrence is Research Director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, and editor of the journal Political Communication. Dr. Lawrence's books include When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press, 2007, with W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston), Hillary Clinton's Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009, with Melody Rose); and The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality (University of California Press, 2000). Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is the author/editor of seven books, including, most recently, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019).

PART 1: FOUNDATIONS Introduction Communication Technology and Threats to Democracy: We the People are (also) the Problem PART 2: MEASUREMENT APPROACHES TO NEWS QUALITY 3. Social Media Metrics and News Quality 4. Is that News for Me? Defining News-ness by Platform and Topic 5. User Comments as News Quality: Examining Incivility in Comments on Perceptions of News Quality 6. Beyond the "Trust" Survey: Measuring Media Attitudes through Observation PART 3: ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS AND NEWS QUALITY 7. All the News that's Fit to Tweet: Sociotechnical Local News Distribution from the New York Times to Twitter 8. Out of Control? Using Interactive Testing to Understand User Agency in News Recommendation Systems 9. Gaming AI: Algorithmic Journalism in Nigeria 10. Editorial Values for News Recommenders: Translating Principles to Engineering PART 4: NEWS QUALITY, GOVERNMENT, AND MEDIA POLICY 11. How Australia's Competition Regulator is Supporting News, but not Quality 12. Government Interventions into News Quality 13. Conclusion