Ahmed Al-Rawi - News 2.0

In terms of future news research, there are promising opportunities. Mobile news apps are still highly under‐researched, especially the means by which audiences interact among themselves in a high‐tech version of the comments section. Also, there are many digital tools and online platforms that can be better utilized by researchers for the future study of news. For instance, Facebook Ads Manager is an interesting platform that can be employed to understand the demographics of Facebook news production and dissemination. It can provide detail on international audiences' consumption of news along different variables, including gender, age, geographical location, educational level, ethnicity, interests, and so forth. This tool has recently been employed in many different studies to identify audiences' interests regarding a variety of issues, such as news bias, disease surveillance, migrant monitoring, gender gaps, and schizophrenia awareness, among other things (Araujo et al. 2017; Saha et al. 2017; Zagheni et al. 2017; Fatehkia et al. 2018; Ribeiro et al. 2018). For example, there are 6.7 million users on Facebook, aged from 18 to over 65, who show interest or engagement with the following media outlets: the Globe and Mail , ABC News, CNBC, the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC News, CTV Television Network, CBS News, the Washington Times , CNN, Fox Broadcasting Company, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal . To give another example, there are over 13 million people worldwide interested in the Fox News channel, including 6.8 million males and 6.8 million females aged between 18 and over 65. Geographically, there are 110 000 users in the United Kingdom, 67 000 in Australia, and 140 000 in Canada interested in this news channel.

There are many other avenues opening up for future research. The GDELT Project, a global media‐monitoring database associated with Google Jigsaw, offers some interesting areas of news research, though there are limitations in terms of its thematic and visual classification of news stories. It can be used to examine and test several theories and concepts related to news values, biases, agenda setting, and intermedia agenda setting.

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