Comment Counts or News Factors or Both? Influences on News Website Users’ News Selectioners’ News Selection

Abstract

In this article, we investigate how news selection on news websites is influenced by popularity indicators and news factor intensities. For Internet users, popularity indicators such as comment counts, published in the context of news items, might complement journalistic relevance attribution. We therefore conducted an experiment (N = 320) in which we investigated the impact of comment counts and news factor intensities on news selection. We found that comment counts did not affect the selection of associated news items, whereas news factors affected news selection positively. The implications of these results are discussed.