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.
Yadamsuren quotes a respondent who exemplifies the incidental news reader:
She finds news when she is searching for something else on the Internet or she finds links to news stories from her e-mail. She said ‘it feels more legitimate and less like wasting time’ if she has gone to news from her e-mail. She thinks her husband is wasting his time as he constantly looks at all of the regional newspapers as part of his daily routine.Yadamsuren draws on a lot of previous research about information behavior, most notably the work of Denis McQuail, et al., on the “uses and gratifications” theory from the 1960s and ’70s. (She cites other work heavily, if you want to dive in.)
She identified four types of consumers: avid news readers, news avoiders, news encounterers, and crowd surfers...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/01/surprise-the-news-shows-up-in-the-least-expected-places/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=66e7a05410-DAILY_EMAIL
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