Lindita Camaj, Lea Hellmueller, Sebastian Vallejo Vera, and Peggy Lindner, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (2024)

This study explores discourse features on Facebook pages of news organizations during the 2020 U.S. primary debates using a state-of-the-art machine-learning model. Informing the scholarly debate about the implications of strategic game reporting in online spaces, we find that it is not necessarily linked to uncivil discourse, yet it might deter from relevant conversations. Second, addressing fears about the undesired outcomes of uncivil talk, our data suggest that incivility can coexist with rational discourse in user comments, although this relationship is not pervasive. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of the role of hybrid media for political engagement during electoral campaigns. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj, Erlis Çela, Gjylije Rexha, Journal of Information Technology & Politics (2024)

This study provides insights on how journalists in the Western Balkans conceptualize and practice audience engagement during electoral campaigns. Taking a holistic approach, we first explore audience demand and news supply of strategic and negative election news on Facebook, then turn to news editors to explore what type of audience logic drives their reporting. Our data confirm previous findings about audience demand for strategic news but contradict the predominance of audience negativity bias in the context of Southeast Europe. These findings support generic trends in how social media audiences engage with political information, but also emphasize the importance of the socio-political context as a determinant of audience engagement with online news. Interview data identified an alignment between journalists’ imagined readership preferences with the reality, yet reporting patterns on Facebook do not entirely follow engagement trends. Together, these findings suggest that journalism culture developed in this region is more nuanced than previously defined, while news editors embrace new technologies to serve the commercial needs and audience strengthening logics in parallel during electoral campaigns. ACCESS HERE.

Jason Martin, Lindita Camaj, and Gerry Lanosga, Journalism (2024)

This study explores what motivates data journalists to engage with audiences and their strategies for incorporating audiences into their work. Building on scholarship on audience engagement and participatory journalism, we investigate how data journalists perceive the role of audience; the stage of the reporting process at which the audience is engaged; and how optimistically or sceptically data journalists view the audience’s capacity to contribute to the data journalism reporting process. Using a news media logics theoretical framework, we find data journalists are primarily motivated by a mixture of professional and audience logics The mixture of these logics aligns with their goals to establish institutional identity and legitimization in society, but increasingly data journalists also emphasise hopes for greater authentic participation from their audiences across the reporting process. Analysis of data gathered from in-depth interviews with data journalists from 34 countries provides a better and broader empirical context for explanation of data journalists’ goals for audience engagement, the tools they use to connect with audiences, and the degree to which those goals are met. Our findings contribute to a clearer explanation of audience engagement motivations and strategies in data journalism and the similarities that emerge across a broad geographic array of data journalism work. With a focus on crowdsourcing, data disclosure, interactivity, and news dissemination as forms of audience engagement, we synthesise a portrait of attitudes about audience engagement from the data journalist’s perspective and highlight global similarities. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj, Jason Martin, & Gerry Lanosga, Journalism Studies (2022)

This study explores the balance between audience-focused roles and political roles in data journalism, exploring journalists’ conceptions via survey data and performances via content data. This is one of the first studies that explores how global professional journalism organizations might impact journalists' role perceptions and enactments using a cross-national sample. It's part of our larger Data Journalism project with Jason Martin and Gerry Lanosga. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj, Journalism Practice (2021)

Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this case study explores audience engagement practices within nonprofit newsrooms in South-East Europe, in order to elaborate on the impact of professional norms on such engagement in a complex media and political environment. This analysis explains how two nonprofit organizations in Kosovo have reinvented engagement by adopting a digital crowdsourcing platform that facilitates bottom-up storytelling and a public service model that transcends traditional journalistic roles. Unlike previous engagement models observed in societies with traditional professional culture, this study reflects how nonprofits with flexible professional boundaries find ways to expand engagement by also practicing advocacy and accountability. ACCESS HERE.

Lea Hellmueller, Lindita Camaj and Peggy Lindner
Presented at Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS)conference, August 9-13, 2021.

Data from 11 political debates from the 2020 U.S. primaries and 11 English and Spanish media organizations, suggest that visual and textual reporting features of political debates on FB matter for the way audiences engage with news content. We also argue that we need to consider how features of news reporting impact discourse quality directly, but also indirectly via emotional arousal. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj
Information, Communication & Society (2021)

Data from the 2016 U.S. elections suggest that real-time conversations on broadcasters’ Facebook pages in response to televised political debates might have important democratic value, as viewer comments expressed a considerable degree of interactivity, rationality and civility. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj and Temple Northup
Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (2019)

This study investigates the impact of dual-screening on audiences’ perceptions of presidential candidates during the 2016 electoral campaign. The results suggest that dual-screening can exert a significant moderation role, weakening the direct effects of the televised debates on candidate perceptions. ACCESS HERE.

Florian Ardent, Temple Northup & Lindita Camaj.
Media Psychology (2019)

Using a web-based study, we found that implicit and explicit attitudes toward television brands predicted choice. Each attitude construct predicted variance beyond that predicted by the other. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj
International Journal of Public Opinion Research (2019)

This study explores how agenda-setting theory works in a fragmented media environment while examining psychological motivations that drive selective exposure and information processing in the context of the 2012 U.S. elections. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj
Media & Communication (2019)

In this commentary I explore psychological conditions as they apply to attitude-based selection and make an argument that selectivity does not stop at exposure but continues as audiences engage with information they encounter and incorporate in their decision-making. VIEW

Lindita Camaj & Arthur Santana
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, (2015)

Through a comparative content analysis of user-generated political commentary on candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, this study explores the technical role of moderators and moderators’ political ideology for online deliberation. ACCESS HERE

Arthur Santana & Lindita Camaj
The Journal of Social Media in Society (2015)

This research examines the extent to which the Facebook messages of presidential nominees during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign were transferred to the online public on Facebook and, via a two-step flow, to the greater citizen’s agenda. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj
Mass Communication and Society (2014)

This study explores the ability of an interaction between need for orientation (NFO) and selective exposure to explain citizen's motivations to seek information from specific media sources and the consequences of this behavior for attribute agenda-setting effects. ACCESS HERE.

Lindita Camaj & David H. Weaver
International Journal of Communication (2013)

This study analyzes the relationships between need for orientation (NFO), frequency of media exposure, attention to media coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and second-level agenda-setting effects. ACCESS HERE.