A recent study on the use of Instagram Stories by the globally acclaimed news outlets found that sports dominate the story topics, followed by “society news” and “people.”
The study was conducted by researchers Jorge Vázquez-Herrero, Sabela Direito-Rebollal and Xosé López-García of Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
They analyzed 1,938 stories from 17 legacy and popular digital media outlets such as The Times, Le Monde, Politico, The Washington Post, New York Times, Buzzfeed, La Nación, El Mundo, Marca, and Jornal de Notícias.
The researchers analyzed these media outlets’ Instagram accounts because they were regularly “active.” The analysis was done in two phases in the first two weeks of both January and March 2018.
In both phases, sports, society, and culture were found to be dominant among all topics covered by the news outlets on their Instagram accounts. In January it was 29.9% for sports, 13.7% for society news, and 10.4% for culture, while in March these topics’ rates were 21.8%, 19.7%, and 11.6%, respectively.
Between the studied period in January and March 2018, all analyzed media saw an increase in the number of followers between 2.5% and 7.7%.
To read more: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119888657
Vázquez-Herrero, J., Direito-Rebollal, S., & López-García, X. (2019). Ephemeral Journalism: News Distribution Through Instagram Stories. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119888657
