The Clicking Economics of Media and Shifts in News Content: The Case of North Cyprus Online Media

Abstract

The new media ecology has resulted in shifts in news content. The audience metrics that provide data about the preferences, expectations, and habits of the audiences based on clicks bring about the creation of new strategies and business models to increase income. The theory of the political economy of media says that just as economic relationships shape the whole of society, they also affect the production, distribution, and consumption of media content, forming the theoretical infrastructure of this study. On this basis, the study aims to reveal how the news content of Northern Cyprus’ internet newspapers is shaped according to the number of clicks. The social media pages of four online newspapers in North Cyprus were analyzed using the content analysis method. On this basis, the aim of this article is to reveal how shifts occur in news content depending on consumer participation, social media, and clicks that have emerged with the development of internet technology. Content analysis was conducted considering the multimedia infrastructure of Internet journalism, and the coding was done by taking different media formats such as news text, video, and photography. The results show that the production phase, topic, and content of the news are affected by audience interaction data.