Why the news is so frustrating to us

Editors prefer negative informational drives, because they are better distributed by the audience. Is that true? We have checked.

In order to study the emotional impact of news on the audience, we asked a focus group from regular media users to evaluate how they are influenced by the news of the ten Ukrainian media that we traditionally use as a balanced by format and owners sample of editions.

We chose the calendar week of August 6-12, because at that time in Ukraine there were no significant events that would require the inevitable attention of all traditional media.

What have we found:

For readers, the news is extremely emotionally charged. The negative share is not only 4 times higher than the share of positive, but also the share of publications that cause calm interest.

Most of the news in the Internet media has its own reader: 89% of the publications were interesting for at least one person in the focus group. An indicator of news that is interesting to everyone is also high - 42%.

Number and share (%) of news that cause each type of emotion
Number and share (%) of news that cause each type of emotion

The contribution of individual media from the TOP-10 to the total negative proportion is different. Of course, increasing the proportion of negative publications can not be a universal recipe for how to improve the effectiveness of the media brand. But the trend line in the graph below clearly shows that effective media brands pay more attention to negative info drives, while focusing on the mass audience.

MEDIA BRAND EFFICIENCY AND SHARE OF NEGATIVE
MEDIA BRAND EFFICIENCY AND SHARE OF NEGATIVE

The shares of news that cause positive and negative emotions have virtually the same weekly distribution. Almost the same - with a daily distribution.

Of course, the media agenda is important: if there were any catastrophe, deaths, extremenly influential political events, etc. during that week, we would see more sharp surges of emotions. Looking at the statistics during the week when nothing like this happened, we can assume: the positive and negative shares are reflected primarily by the media logic of the editors from the sample and rarely change from day to day.

Dynamics of massages that cause each type of emotion
Dynamics of massages that cause each type of emotion

You can learn more about how attendance and popularity of sites influence "emotions" they create in their news feeds, and how many interactions in Facebook receive news with different emotional shade, by downloading the presentation below.

Download the full version in pdf
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