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Explanation:
This report investigates how members of the public make decisions about what news to engage with as they navigate a high-choice media environment across multiple devices and platforms. While digital media provide a wealth of data about revealed news preferences – what stories are most widely clicked on, shared, liked, and so forth – they tell us very little about why people make the choices they do, or about how news fits into their lives.
To understand how audiences themselves make sense of the news, this study uses an innovative, qualitative approach that can reveal latent patterns in the news repertoires people cultivate as well as the factors that drive those preferences. This method sets aside the conventional categories often relied on by the news industry as well as academic researchers – such as politics, entertainment, sports, etc – in order to group news stories in terms drawn from the people reading them.
We find that members of the public can very effectively articulate the role that news plays in their lives, and that relevance is the key concept for explaining the decisions they make in a high-choice media environment. As one study participant told us, ‘Something that affects you and your life. … That’s what you read, isn’t it?’ Specifically, we find that:
Relevance is the paramount driver of news consumption. People find those stories most relevant that affect their personal lives, as they impinge on members of their family, the place where they work, their leisure activities, and their local community.
Relevance is tied to sociability. It often originates in the belief that family and friends might take an interest in the story. This is often coupled with shareability – a wish to share and tag a friend on social media.
People frequently click on stories that are amusing, trivial, or weird, with no obvious civic focus. But they maintain a clear sense of what is trivial and what matters. On the whole people want to stay informed about what goes on around them, at the local, national, and international levels.
News audiences make their own meanings, in ways that spring naturally from people’s life experience. The same news story can be read by different people as an ‘international’ story, a ‘technology’ story, or a ‘financial’ story; sometimes a trivial or titillating story is appreciated for its civic implications.
News is a cross-media phenomenon characterised by high redundancy. Living in a news-saturated culture, people often feel sufficiently informed about major ongoing news stories; just reading the headline can be enough to bring people up to date about the latest events.
News avoidance, especially avoidance of political news, often originates in a cynical attitude towards politicians (‘They break rules all the time and get away with it!’), coupled with a modest civic literacy and lack of