Tracking readers' online news habits is difficult; analysis of news sites' recent Facebook trends helps a little

Local News Resource Center chart; click to enlarge it.

If you want your news organization to be a big hit on Facebook, post more photos. That's the key takeaway from a recent analysis of local newspaper and news sites' Facebook pages. 

The Local News Resource Center of the Local Media Association pulled public metrics from the Facebook pages of 2,678 local newspapers and news sites (but not broadcasters) from May 1-30, 2019 to gather a snapshot of online behavior and trends. They divided publishers into tiers based on the number of page likes, then analyzed posting frequency, what kind of content was posted (links, photos, videos, plain text, etc.) and the interaction rate, which is the number of post engagements— i.e, likes, shares, or comments— divided by the number of page likes, reports Emilie Lutostanski of the LNRC.

They found that the biggest Facebook pages, all major metro publishers, posted an average of 34 times per day, and that the pages with the fewest followers posted an average of twice a day. The majority of posts— 83 percent— were links, followed by 11% photos, 2.6% statuses and owned video, 0.6% shared video, and 0.3% other video. But photos got the highest median interaction rate, at 0.27%, followed by 0.26% for links, 0.22% for Facebook videos, 0.15% statuses, and 0.8% for other videos, Lutostanski reports.

The analysis is one way of trying to crack a tough nut. Identifying how Americans get news online and interpreting survey respondents' answers about their online news habits has been a longtime problem in measuring online news use, Elisa Shearer reports for the Pew Research Center.

Pew Research Center chart; click on the image to enlarge it.

Many online news sources don't fit neatly into survey categories, and as news organizations have expanded their online presence, pollsters have added more and more survey categories. That makes it hard to track apples-to-apples data over the past 20 years, Shearer reports.

Also, it can be difficult to parse just how a survey respondent thinks about news. "For example, when a respondent is getting news from nytimes.com, does she primarily remember getting news online or getting news from The New York Times newspaper brand, whose flagship product is a print newspaper?" Shearer reports.

Regardless of how Pew pollsters phrase their questions, it's clear that the internet is approaching primacy. More Americans get their news from social media than print newspapers, and the share of Americans who get their news online is approaching the share who get it from TV.