News Release

People get more ‘top’ news in print than by computer, study shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

Champaign, IL — A new study confirms what many experts have long suspected about how people use Internet news sites: Online readers tend to avoid – and insulate themselves from – the goings-on in the larger world around them.

In the study of college students reading the New York Times, researchers found that online readers were less likely than their paper-reading counterparts to have read national, international and political news – all typical “front section” newspaper topics. On one day of the study, “front section” news accounted for almost two-thirds of the stories read by the print audience and only 41 percent of those read by the online group. The differences in their reading habits, in turn, resulted in “significant and substantial differences in readers’ knowledge about public affairs.” These are the findings of David Tewksbury and Scott Althaus, professors of speech communication at the University of Illinois, whose experiment is the first to examine the differential effects of exposure to print and online versions of a major daily newspaper. Their findings appear in the latest issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, released in January.

The selection differences apparently lie in the reader’s visual cues – or lack of them. While a reader of a printed newspaper encounters many obvious cues about a story’s significance – the placement, headline, length of story, for example – the online reader, who often finds stories using an index organized by categories, has fewer of these cues – primarily the item’s topic and relative placement in the index.

Since the online version reduces and reorganizes story salience cues about the importance of events, “it severely limits editors’ ability to control what audiences read,” Tewksbury said. “In the balance between newspaper-supplied cues and reader interests, online news appears to give the latter an advantage.”

There is another inherent problem: “Online news sites often give prominence to fast-breaking stories that in the grand scheme of things aren’t that important,” Tewksbury observed. “While this is sensible, given the competition from 24-hour news outlets like CNN and other online papers, it can affect what people know and don’t know about the truly important events of the day.”

Tewksbury, therefore, advises online editors to “Beware of relying too heavily on timeliness as a news value. Too often a story soars to the top spot on online news pages because the story is brand new. Our data suggest that people consume only a few stories, and if that consumption is occupied with fleetingly timely stories, people will miss the truly important stories.”

Fundamentally, the news values of print and online editors are different, the researchers found. “People are used to the news values that print editors use,” Tewksbury said. “They have served our democracy for decades. Are we ready for the new online values?”

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