Subjectivity and Online News Sharing

Viral online news sharing is emerging as a new norm of distributing news to the masses than traditional news outlets. News titles are often subjective to attract more readers, while the content may not be so. In addition, images in the articles may influence viewership. In this study, we draw from the media richness theory to explore an amplification effect of images on title and textual subjectivity of news articles on the news sharing frequency. We use a publicly available secondary dataset of 39,797 articles and find that the number of images complement subjectivity expressed in the title and the content of an article to influence sharing. Our findings provide important insight that can be used by researchers to further investigate different aspects of sharing and by media management practitioners to develop strategies to increase audience engagement