Pushing and Pulling: How News Organizations Frame Push Notifications to Capture Audience Attention

Abstract

Push notifications have become a crucial touchpoint between news organizations and mobile audiences, yet little is known about how organizations strategically frame these brief messages. Drawing on framing theory, this study examines 3,459 push notifications from 11 major news organizations using data from Project Push, overcoming previous data collection limitations. Through quantitative content analysis, we investigate how organizations differ in their framing approaches across topic selection, urgency, news type, locality, calls to action, clickbait language, and message length. Results reveal significant organizational variation: some outlets prioritize traditional news values with longer, urgent, informative notifications, while others emphasize engagement through shorter, clickbait-heavy messages. Topic-based patterns emerge, with inherently urgent topics receiving straightforward framing while softer news relies on curiosity-provoking language. These findings extend framing theory to the constrained mobile environment and demonstrate how organizational priorities and brand identities manifest in push notification strategies, with implications for audience engagement and journalistic credibility.