You’re flicking through tweets, reading email, Googling recipes, or watching dogs sticking their heads out of car windows in slow motion when a headline catches your eye. Before you know it, you’re reading the news, even though you didn’t mean to. Maybe you didn’t even want to.
A lot of readers get their news just like this — incidentally — according to a growing body of research. That is, they don’t turn to the web seeking news. The news finds them. And that has implications for how that news gets produced and distributed.
Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a post-doctoral fellow at Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute, studies how people get information and how it makes them feel. In 2009, she surveyed 148 adults, mostly highly educated, in the college town of Columbia, Mo., then followed up with 20 one-on-one interviews. Some respondents said they don’t trust the news, some were ambivalent, but most said they get informed one way or another — often by accident.
Comments
Add Your Comment