  News organizations are increasingly using social media to reach out to their
audience aimed at raising their attention and engagement with news. Given the
continuous decrease in subscription rates and audience trust in news media, it
is imperative for news organizations to understand factors contributing to
their relationships with the audience. Using Twitter data of 315 U.S. newspaper
organizations and their audiences, this study uses multiple regression analysis
to examine the influence of key news organization characteristics on audience
engagement with news: (1) trustworthiness computed by the Trust Scores in
Social Media (TSM) algorithm; (2) quantity of tweets; and (3) skillfulness of
Twitter use. The results show significant influence of a news organizations'
trustworthiness and level of Twitter activity on its audiences' news
engagement. Methods to measure trustworthiness of news organizations and
audience news engagement, as well as scalable algorithms to compute them from
large-scale datasets, are also proposed.
