"In August of 2013, Facebook introduced new algorithms to promote high quality news. Since then, many newsrooms have been enjoying substantially increased traffic brought by Facebook to their own websites. 30% of US adults now get news from Facebook according to a 2014 survey by Pew Research Center. Facebook remarked that this strategy is based on mutual benefits between itself and news publishers. In economists' words, Facebook, as well as other social media platforms including Twitter and LinkedIn, have recognized their roles as multisided platforms (MSPs) and sought ways to enhance such roles. It is not the first time for them to try to play an intermediary role as they, especially Facebook, have been constantly coordinating between users, game and app developers, content providers and advertisers. For newsrooms, however, this ecosystem is fairly new. Watching search engines and social media emerging as new multi-sided platforms, news publishers are forced to learn how to adapt their journalistic practices and business models for yet another new media format, reminiscent of the past when newspapers learned to differentiate themselves from radio and television, and filmmakers learned to have their works visually restructured to display better on smaller and narrower television screens. The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand how online audiences respond to and utilize for their own ends news publishers' content placed with social media and how publishers might adjust their online strategies in response. It aspires to develop a realistic and integrated framework for investigating the mechanisms of content consumption and diffusion on social media by drawing on theories from psychology, communication and economics. While testing applications of these social science theories, I employ newly developed statistical tools to take advantage of the thorough documentation of online activities by social media services to address puzzles newsrooms confront in the everyday practice of online journalism. These include the motivations behind liking, commenting and sharing behaviors; how different news topics, message length, sentiment (positive or negative), and reading ease influence these behaviors; how news publishers can accurately assess the performance of news stories given that users' reactions are heavily shaped by the nature of the content; and, finally, the strategies newsrooms might use to gain more attention from social media users and grow their audiences and revenues by attracting more fans and followers in the new media ecosystem"--Pages ii-iii.
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