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Speech Communication
Print vs. Online News Readership
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 but 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 in LAS, whose experiment is the first to examine the differential effects of exposure to print and online versions of a major daily newspaper. 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, and 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 says. "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 observes. "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."
Fall 2001