ABSTRACT
One (Twitter-sponsored) survey of 4,700 social media users found that 90% of Twitter users use it for news and three-quarters of them do so every day. It is attractive because it is fast, and news comes in real time. Kalsnes and Larsson asked what kind of stories are most shared on Norwegian social media, and whether news organisations have been able to successfully identify what kind of stories go viral. They found that social issues, science and technology, crime and sports news were most shared. The impact on news is twofold. First, many publishers increasingly rely on traffic coming from social media to their own websites. Second, the move onto social media means that control of news distribution has passed from the hands of the editors to secondary gatekeepers in the form of large technology companies.
