Analyzing Sensationalism in News on Twitter (X): Clickbait Journalism by Legacy vs. Online-Native Outlets and the Consequences for User Engagement

Digital Journalism 2025, Vol. 13, no. 8, 1482–1502 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2394764

Autor: 

1. Salman Khawar; Communication science, university of amsterdam, amsterdam, the netherlandshttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7303-7774
2. Mark Boukes; amsterdam school ofCommunication research, university of amsterdam, amsterdam, the netherlands;  markboukes@gmail.comhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-3377-6281

Keywords: sensationalism; journalism; clickbait;twitter; X; social media news; online news; legacy media; online-native media. 

Abstract: News consumption patterns have evolved as people increasinglyget news through social media. a by-product of this change hasbeen the rise of “clickbaits”—a form of journalism that utilizes sen-sationalist techniques to lure readers into clicking on links.although clickbaits have become common, not much is knownabout the use of this journalistic practice. this study empiricallyinvestigates whether online-native news outlets utilize more sensa-tional features than legacy news outlets to promote their newsstories on Twitter (now X). the impact of sensationalism on subse-quent user engagement metrics is also tested. First, a manual con-tent analysis of 1,440 tweets by news media organizations wasconducted, identifying sensationalism through ten features. second,an automated content analysis was conducted on a dataset of25,600 tweets, replicating the manual coding process. the resultsconfirm that online-native outlets (Huffington Post, BuzzFeed) uti-lized more sensationalism than online legacy outlets (USA Today,L.A. Times). Furthermore, a positive relationship was found betweenthe number of sensationalist features employed and the favoritecount, confirming the effectiveness of clickbaits. the automatedcontent analysis by-and-large corroborated the findings of themanual annotation, and additionally revealed a positive effect ofsensationalism on the number of retweets.

Idioma: English 

Publicación: 24 de septiembre del 2024. 

Volumen: Digital Journalism 2025, Vol. 13, no. 8.  

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