Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016) 34 – 38
International Conference on Communication in Multicultural Society, CMSC 2015, 6-8 December 2015, Moscow, Russian Federation
Can more pictures bring more readership?: an examination of the “Picture superiority effect” in the news consumption process Yingying Ma* Hong Kong Baptist University, CVA914, CVA Building, 5 Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
Abstract “Picture superiority effect” refers to the notion that viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts. In this paper, the author studied the “Picture superiority effect” in the news consumption process in order to see if pictures have significant impact on the readers when they select news from the Internet. The study will be conducted by analyzing almost 8000 pieces of news from one Chinese news App. The study’s academic contribution lies in the influence of “picture superiority effect” in the mass media domain. 2016Published The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. ©©2016 by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). Keywords: Big data; news production; picture superiority theory; photo effects; newsroom practise
1. Introduction of the “Headline News” website and the data sources The site is an online news aggregator in Mainland China. It was founded in August 2012, and it attracted millions of users since then. According to the website, the “Headline News” website attracted 240 millions of regular users and 20 millions of daily active users till March 2015. And the website had 31%significant improvement for the previous 6 months. In other words, the website is getting more and more popular among the Chinese nitizens. And the website ranked the sixth of the seven major online news aggregators in China. Besides, it scored the highest satisfaction marks among the major news aggregators from the mobile users’ perspectives.
* Corresponding author. E-mail address:
[email protected]
1877-0428 © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.12.012
Yingying Ma / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016) 34 – 38
2. The Picture Superiority Effect (PSE) The Picture Superiority Effect (PSE) is the well-established experimental finding in retrospective memory research that people exposed to stimuli in picture format perform better on explicit retrospective memory tests than people exposed to the same stimuli in word format. The picture superiority effect suggests that you would remember to complete more tasks with the picture to-do list. This picture superiority effect (PSE), as it has come to be called, is a robust phenomenon with numerous demonstrations of the basic finding that pictures are better recognized and recalled than their labels (e.g., Brady et al., 2008; Madigan, 1974, 1983; Nelson, Reed, and Walling, 1976; Nickerson 1965, 1968; Paivio, 1991; Paivio and Csapo, 1973; Paivio, Rogers, and Smythe, 1968; Shepard, 1967). In addition, the number of pictures that can be remembered is striking. Standing (1973) showed that people could remember thousands of unique pictures with great accuracy. There are also literatures about the impact of images on the attitudes of the viewers. Some study proved that images have a significant impact on a viewer’s attitude, and the impact is impossible to be created by text alone. In a news context, the presence of a photograph will surly alter the readers’ attitude toward the framed issue. Literatures also show that visuals can have a significant impact on a reader’s involvement and feelings toward an event or issue. Newhagen and Reeves (1992) found the increased cognitive load caused by negative arousal raised by intense and vivid images on television actually caused viewers to forget the verbal and visual information presented prior to the image and heightened their memory for visual and factual information presented after the compelling images. There are literatures talking about the “picture superiority effect” in advertising while very few of them dealing with the news production/consumption. Considering the theory itself and the study in other areas, I would like to put forward the following research hypotheses: H1: The more images with the news on the front page, the more likely that readers click and read the news in detail. H2: The more images with the news on the front page, the more likely that readers forward the news. H3: The more images with the news on the front page, the more likely that readers like the news. H4: The more images with the news on the front page, the less likely that readers dislike the news. H5: The more images with the news on the front page, the more likely that readers comment about the news. 3. Methodology In order to test the hypotheses, we collected the data from the “headline news” from January 2015 to March 2015. After collecting 79567 pieces of news, we analyze the relationships between numbers of images and different variables. One of the advantages of this research is the use of big data. The large quantity of data increase the reliability and validity of the research. Besides, instead of analyzing the relationship between different variables directly, we take “read” into consideration to improve the accuracy of the research result. 4. Research findings and discussion The main research findings are represented in the following graphs (A – D):
Read 3784.632̩̪.007 →112.5
Image
(A)
Forward
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Yingying Ma / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016) 34 – 38
Read
3784.632̩̪.003 →
Image
Digg
-14.268 (B) Read
3784.632̩̪.002 →
Image
Burry
-15.928 (C) Read
3784.632̩̪.003 →
Image
Comment
-70.826 (D) Noted: “Read” refers to the number people click and read the news. “Image” refers to the number of images with the news on the front page. “Digg” refers to the number of “like”/ “thumb up”. “Burry” refers to the number of “dislike”/ “thumb down”. “Comment” refers to the number of “comments” under the news. “Forward” refers to the number of “forward”. The results reveal the relationships between: image and forward (with and without considering read), image and dig (with and without considering read), read and burry (with and without considering read), image and comment (with and without considering read). Graph A shows the relationship between image and forward (with and without considering read): “image” and “forward” are positively related, B=138.6 ,Beta=.065,p
