Web statistics say that articles about weird news, celebrities and scandal get a lot of attention. This is good for business. How should journalists use this information to plan coverage?
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website saw information of something
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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.’
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 knowledge about politics.
In addition, we identified four specific types of news interest – four groups of people with common repertoires of news stories they take an interest in. Each of these four repertoires consists of a diverse diet of news stories that belong to many different topic areas, cutting across standard categories such as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news, or politics and entertainment. Their interest profiles reflect people’s tastes for news and information that is relevant as a resource in their everyday lives, and many of their top-ranked stories are indicative of a sustained civic, or political interest. We define these four profiles as follows:
Repertoire 1: People with political and civic interest in news
Repertoire 2: People with a social-humanitarian interest in news
Repertoire 3: People with a cultural interest in news
Repertoire 4: People who seek (political) depth stories
The main insight provided by this study, for researchers and practitioners alike, is that we have to complexify our understanding of news audience tastes and preferences. There are no simple recipes for meeting the relevance thresholds of news audiences. To the extent that journalists prioritise news stories with civic value, they should trust their instincts rather than relying on the unreliable seismograph offered by ‘Most Read’ lists.
Introduction
Despite well-publicised threats to the news industry, members of the public have never had more news to choose from than they do today. With the rise of digital and social media as major news platforms, and the potential for content to cross regional or national borders, media users navigate a high-choice media environment where they must decide every day which of many potentially informative or entertaining stories are worth their time.
Some members of the public respond by avoiding news altogether (Schrøder and Blach-Ørsten2016; Toff and Nielsen 2018). But most people engage actively in building personal media repertoires across the offline/online divide. As one influential study in this area observes, ‘A cacophony of narratives increasingly competes with mainstream journalism to define the day’s stories. News audiences pick and choose stories they want to attend to and believe, and select from a seemingly endless supply of information to assemble their own versions’ (Bird 2011: 504).How do people make these choices? It is a truism in the media business that ‘content is king’.