To kick off the our third season, Brett and Karen decided to do something a little different. They decided to record a live podcast taping from the AMA conference in Chicago.

Brett and Karen present two papers, both of which won awards in the field.

Does the content of a news article influence the effectiveness of ads placed within it? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon discusses the recently published paper, “Attention Spillovers from News to Ads: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Experiment,” with authors Andrewy Simonov (Columbia Business School),Tommaso Valletti, and Andre Veiga (both from Imperial College Business School). The idea for the paper was born in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the researchers learned that some advertisers were using “block lists” to prevent their ads from appearing on publishers' websites with pandemic-related news content. Did the advertisers have a point? Or, they wondered, might this be based on a misunderstanding of how we, the audience, actually engage with content and the ads that appear alongside it?

We all likely know that there’s valuable data in our social media posts, but just how can this be used? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Verena Schoenmueller and Simon Blanchard about their paper, “Who Shares Fake News? Uncovering Insights from Social Media Users’ Post Histories,” co-authored with Gita Johar. What started out as a collaboration to understand the spread of misinformation led them to uncover the value of social media post histories. While user post history can indeed be useful in predicting fake news sharers, it likely holds much more insight for which this paper’s multi-method approach may serve as a foundation.