Abstract

The bet on soft news. News marketing and journalism's market- oriented transformation influence - in terms of content - news media inclination towards soft and entertainment news, in contrast to hard issues as politics and economics. This paper focuses on this topic, looking at which kind of content news media share on Twitter. Following the literature on this subject, the study deals with two theoretical concepts: news organisations' communication model on Twitter; the balance between hard and soft content. On the latter issue, the article analyses relations between content shared on Twitter (hard vs soft news) and level of user engagement. The empirical investigation is based on the content analysis of 2.962 tweets from five different types of Italian news media. Results show that they tend to use Twitter adopting a one-way communication model, which lacks of interactivity with the audience. Besides particular features and differences among media outlets, such self-referential model is mainly characterized by soft and catching content. The platform's users seem to welcome this news-softening trend in journalism. Indeed, they show higher engagement towards soft news.