The emergence of socially oriented news consumption: The nature, predictors and consequences of news sharing on online social networking site

Citizens increasingly consume news by sharing it with others, thanks primarily to the popularization of online social networking sites (SNSs). Accordingly, their news experiences have become more diverse. At the present time, news consumers not only read news provided by others but they also actively create, re-contextualize, and re-transmit news. Taken together, these changes call for the necessity of the re-evaluation of the role of journalism.;To address this issue, the present study sheds light on the changing patterns of news experiences by defining it as news sharing and then explores the nature, the predictors, and the consequences of such changing news-related activities. Data for the study was collected through a national online survey of 1,052 adults in the United States.;The study first explicated the concept of news sharing by identifying the sub-dimensions of it and examined how these dimensions are structured. The study's findings showed that news sharing is comprised of two distinctive behaviors: News internalizing (by those who read news) and news externalizing (by those who offer news to others). Furthermore, news internalizing and externalizing have two sub-dimensions, respectively: News browsing (i.e., the reading of any available news) and news personalizing (i.e., the reading of news from particular sources chosen by the news consumer) for news internalizing, and news recontextualizing (i.e., the dissemination of news by repackaging and recreating it) and news endorsing (i.e., expressing reactions to news) for news externalizing. Based on these newly-defined news exposure variables, the study then explored the question of who shares news (and for what reasons) by focusing on users' motivations, media usage habits, and technology clusters.;Next, the study examined whether news sharing contributes to the healthy functioning of democracy by investigating its role in promoting citizens' exposure to counter-attitudinal political views and their active participation in political processes. The findings showed that the sharing types of news consumption generally contributes to accomplish both goals, although the contribution of each type of news activity differs. When people actively participate in the browsing and endorsing of news within online social networks, they are more likely to be exposed to fellow citizens who hold views that are dissimilar to their own. On the other hand, those who actively consume news by personalizing and recontextualizing news content on SNSs were found to be politically more engaged citizens.