Tinius Digest March

Tinius Digest

Tinius Digest report on changes, trends and developments within the media business at large. These are our key findings from last month.

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Insight March 2023

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A watershed moment for the media industry

The Future Today Institute has published its annual trend report. This year the 820 pages report spans a whopping 14 sectors. Underneath are only the main findings from the report about trends in the news sector. 

Download the main report. | Download the News-report.

Five main findings:

1

New business model adaptation

Large language models (LMM) and omniscient digital assistants will revolutionise how people discover and consume content, challenging existing platforms and requiring new thinking about journalism’s production, distribution, and commercialization.

2

New skill requirements

LLMs are developing fast, changing the workflow of journalists and requiring entirely new technical skills.

3

Automated and hyperlocal

Smaller media companies can now use new technology to provide automated hyperlocal journalism, even at the neighbourhood level.

4

Tighter paywalls

New technology risks, revenue pressures, and stagnant subscription rates will likely result in more and stricter paywalls. As a result, people’s access to reliable journalism will be further limited, which could have socioeconomic and political ramifications.

5

New opportunities

Free or cheap access to new tools and technology creates opportunities for growth for new and innovative media companies. Large media companies have more significant opportunities to use and develop new tools but are often more sceptical of substantial changes.

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Negativity drives online news consumption

A dataset of over 105,000 headlines and 370 million news story impressions from Upworthy.com shows emotional language’s impact on news consumption. The report is a collaboration between researchers from the U.S., Germany, Switzerland and Sweden.

Download the report.

Four main findings:

1

Negativity sells

Headlines containing negative language were significantly more likely to be clicked on than headlines containing positive language. For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3 percent.

2

Sadness trumps joy

Basic emotions such as ‘sadness’ increased the likelihood that a news headline was clicked on, while ‘joy’ decreased the possibility that a news headline was clicked on.

3

Affects journalism

Even though Upworthy branded itself as a ‘positive news outlet’, the study uncovered a negativity bias in the data, which suggests that negative language increased news consumption while positive language decreased it.

4

Government and economy

Negative words have a stronger impact on consumption rates for news about “Government & Economy,” according to the study, suggesting that people are more inclined to read negative news in this area.

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Microsoft: Sparks of artificial general intelligence

Researchers at Microsoft Research believe that several large language models (LLM) exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM.

Download the report.

Four main findings:

1

Remarkable abilities

GPT-4 is found to be part of a new cohort of LLMs that ‘exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks’. The researchers believe GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM are ‘challenging our understanding of learning and cognition.’

2

Close to human level

GPT-4 can solve novel and complex tasks across various domains, including mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more, without special prompting. Its performance is strikingly close to the human-level performance.

3

But not yet there

Even though GPT-4 is seen as an early version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system, the researchers underline that there are considerable challenges ahead in advancing towards more profound and comprehensive versions of AGI. 

4

Many open questions

The report reflects on potential societal influences of the technology but finds that positive and negative impacts can’t be known in advance given the uncertainties about the use cases and applications created and the practices established within and across sectors.

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Muslim and Female Facebook Users Most Targeted by Hate Speech

A comprehensive analysis of 10.5 million Norwegian Facebook comments shows the extent of hate speech and the primary victims. The study does not include comments on personal profiles and in Facebook groups.

Download the report.

Four main findings:

1

Muslims and women most targeted

Hate speech is most often directed towards Muslims (29.7%) and women (18.8%). These are the percentages of 40,894 comments that were defined as hate speech. 

2

Hate speech not widespread

Only 0.4 percent of Norwegian Facebook comments include hate speech. These comments include attacks directed towards, e.g. race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, social class, and disability.

3

Attacks more common

177,077 comments (1.7 percent) were identified as linguistic attacks. These comments contain stigmatising, derogatory, offensive, stereotypical, exclusionary, harassing, or threatening expressions. Discussions about the criminal justice system (4.9 percent) and crime (4.2 percent) most often trigger linguistic attacks in Facebook comments.

4

Polarising politics

Of the 20 politicians with the highest percentage of linguistic attacks in comments on their Facebook pages, 12 are from the Norwegian Progress Party, three are from the Norwegian Green Party, two are from the Norwegian Liberal Party, two are from the Norwegian Democrats, and one is from the Norwegian Conservative Party.

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More vulnerable to fake news on social media

Researchers from the U.S., Canada and Mexico have examined mechanisms for evaluating trustworthiness and sharing news on social media.

Download the report.

Three main findings:

1

Order matters

In the study, participants correctly identified 65 percent of fake news when asked about both their likelihood to share the story on social media and their perception of its trustworthiness. However, when participants were asked about trustworthiness before the likelihood of sharing, they correctly identified 82 percent of the fake news.

2

Falsehood judgement

Simply considering sharing news on social media reduces the extent to which people discriminate truth from falsehood when judging accuracy.

3

Particularly vulnerable

The study results suggest that people may be particularly vulnerable to believing false claims on social media, given that sharing is a core element of what makes social media ‘social.’

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Norwegian Twitter: Dissecting Ideological Polarisation

The Norwegian Institute for Social Research has studied the drives for ideological polarisation on Twitter during the 2017 Norwegian Election campaign.

Download the report.

Three main findings:

1

Not isolated echo chambers

Norwegian political Twitter is not an isolated echo chamber. It consists of interlinked communities with different ideologies. The more polarised communities aren’t more uniform or partisan, suggesting that those factors don’t drive polarisation on Norwegian Twitter.

2

Different degrees of polarisation

The degree of ideological polarisation differs across communities and topics, with some topics, such as political hate and far-right politics and economy and taxes, being more polarised than others.



3

Challenging conventional wisdom

The research challenges the idea that social media inevitably fuels polarisation. Instead, it shows that polarisation on social media is connected to specific contexts and topics. Norway’s political system and culture may encourage cross-ideological engagement and reduce polarisation on social media. However, there’s still a divide between mainstream and radical-right politics on Norwegian Twitter that can lead to polarisation.

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35 Swedish municipalities lack local news coverage

MedieSverige has published its annual report describing the changing Swedish media landscape.

Download the report.

Four main findings:

1

Access to local news under pressure

Newspapers’ reduced revenue and scope have consequences: In 2022, some 35 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities lacked regular local news coverage, raising concerns about citizens’ access to local news.

2

Generation gap

Younger generations gravitate towards streaming services, podcasts, and online social networks. Older generations (45+ years) still prefer newspapers, with digital newspapers being the only online medium more popular among this demographic.

3

Digital advertising increases

Advertising market becoming increasingly digital: In 2021, 69 percent of Swedish advertising investments went to online advertising, totalling SEK 32 billion out of SEK 46 billion.

4

Google and Meta dominate

72 percent of online advertising investments in Sweden went to global search engines and social media platforms in 2021. Decreased advertising revenue and shrinking readership lead to cost-cutting measures and challenges for local and regional newspapers.

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