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Facebook Status Messages as Seductive and Engaging Headlines: Interviews with Social Media News Editors

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News Values from an Audience Perspective

Abstract

One of the main functions of news headlines is to get the public interested in the news article, using different strategies. With the shift from print to online and from online to social media news, further research into news headlines is necessary to understand their use in this new context. This study focuses on a very specific form of news headlines on social media, namely the Facebook status message, an extra headline that is placed on top of a Facebook news post and that is characterized by subjective wording and the use of emoji. Via expert interviews with 22 Flemish and Dutch social media news editors, we gain more insight into the hows and whys of these new headlines.

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Correspondence to Michaƫl Opgenhaffen .

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Opgenhaffen, M. (2021). Facebook Status Messages as Seductive and Engaging Headlines: Interviews with Social Media News Editors. In: Temmerman, M., Mast, J. (eds) News Values from an Audience Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_7

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