The efficacy of news browsing: The relationship of news consumption style to social and political efficacy

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 85, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 257-272

  Tewksbury, David ^a   Hals, Michelle L ^a   Bibart, Allyson ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACCESS RESTRICTION; INFORMATION PROCESSING; MASS MEDIA; PERCEPTION; SOCIAL IMPACT;

EID: 54749100457     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900808500203     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Stephen S. Chaffee and Miriam J. Metzger, "The End of Mass Communication?" Mass Communication & Society 4 (fall 2001): 365-79.
2. See, for example, Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2001).
3. Klaus Schoenbach, Ester de Waal, and Edmund Lauf, "Online and Print Newspapers: Their Impact on the Extent of the Perceived Public Agenda," European Journal of Communication 20 (June 2005): 245-58.
4. Leo L. Bogart, Press and Public: Who Reads What, When, Where, and Why in American Newspapers, 2d ed. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989).
5. Doris Graber, Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide, 2d ed. (NY: Longman, 1988).
6. Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch, "Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual," in The Uses of Mass Communication: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research, ed. Jay G. Blumer and Elihu Katz (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1974), 19-32.
7. Alan M. Rubin, "Ritualized and Instrumental Television Viewing," Journal of Communication 34 (summer 1984): 67-77.
8. For example, Jack M. McLeod and Daniel G. McDonald, "Beyond Simple Exposure: Media Orientations and Their Impact on Political Processes," Communication Research 12 (January 1985): 3-33.
9. Silvia Knobloch, Francesca Dillman Carpentier, and Dolf Zillmann, "Effects of Salience Dimensions of Informational Utility on Selective Exposure to Online News," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (spring 2003): 98-108.
10. Charles K. Atkin, "Instrumental Utilities and Information Seeking," in New Models for Mass Communication Research, ed. by Peter Clarke (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1973), 205-42.
11. Atkin, "Instrumental Utilities and Information Seeking."
12. Atkin, "Instrumental Utilities and Information Seeking," 208.
13. Bogart, Press and Public.
14. Pegie Stark Adam, Sara Quinn, and Rick Edmunds, Eyetracking the News: A Study of Print and Online Reading (St. Petersburg, FL: The Poynter Institute, 2007).
15. Adam, Quinn, and Edmunds, Eyetracking the News, observed two online and print news reader types: methodical and scanner readers (p. 28). Scanners "viewed headlines and other page display elements without reading much text...eventually the scanner would click on a headline or story link." The methodical readers "read top to bottom. They did not scan very often...When viewing online news, they used drop-down menus and navigation bars to locate stories." This taxonomy appears to be orthogonal to the selector-browser distinction. Selectors can scan for the news topics they seek or use menus and other navigation. Similarly, browsers can read top to bottom or scan for content.
16. David Tewksbury and Michelle Hals, "The Development and Effects of Newspaper Reading Patterns: The Impact of Exposure Medium" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA, 2004).
17. Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark, Eyes on the News (St. Petersburg, FL: The Poynter Institute, 1991).
18. Rubin, "Ritualized and Instrumental Television Viewing."
19. Daniel G. McDonald and Carroll J. Glynn, "The Stability of Media Gratifications," Journalism Quarterly 61 (autumn 1984): 542-49, 741.
20. Pamela J. Shoemaker, "Hardwired for News: Using Biological and Cultural Evolution to Explain Surveillance Function," Journal of Communication 46 (summer 1996): 32-47.
21. For example, Phillip Palmgreen and J. D. Rayburn II, "Uses and Gratifications and Exposure to Public Television," Communication Research 6 (April 1979): 155-80.
22. For example, Palmgreen and Rayburn, "Uses and Gratifications and Exposure to Public Television."
23. Charles K. Atkin, "Anticipated Communication and Mass Media Information Seeking," Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (summer 1972): 188-99.
24. Atkin, "Anticipated Communication and Mass Media Information Seeking."
25. Mark R. Levy and Sven Windahl, "Audience Activity and Gratifications: A Conceptual Clarification and Exploration," Communication Research 11 (January 1984): 51-78.
26. Maxwell McCombs and Paula Poindexter, "The Duty to Keep Informed: News Exposure and Civic Obligation," Journal of Communication 33 Gune 1983): 88-96.
27. Atkin, "Instrumental Utilities and Information Seeking," 199.
28. McCombs and Poindexter, "The Duty to Keep Informed";
29. Paula Poindexter and Maxwell E. McCombs, "Revisiting the Civic Duty to Keep Informed in the New Media Environment," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (spring 2001): 113-26.
30. McCombs and Poindexter, "The Duty to Keep Informed";
31. Poindexter and McCombs, "Revisiting the Civic Duty to Keep Informed."
32. Mohan J. Dutta-Bergman, "Complementarity in Consumption of News Types Across Traditional and New Media," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 48 (March 2004): 41-60.
33. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Francesca Dillman Carpentier, Andree Blumhoff, and Nico Nikel, "Selective Exposure Effects for Positive and Negative News: Testing the Robustness of the Informational Utility Model," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82 (spring 2005): 181-95.
34. Knobloch-Westerwick et al., "Selective Exposure Effects for Positive and Negative News," 183.
35. Albert Bandura, "Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication," in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, 2d ed., ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002), 125.
36. Steven L. Anderson and Nancy E. Betz, "Source of Social Self-Efficacy Expectations: Their Measurement and Relation to Career Development," Journal of Vocational Behavior 58 (February 2001): 98-117.
37. Sidney VeTba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1995).
38. The presence of participants in the computer laboratory made it possible to observe online news reading. Parallel observation of print newspaper reading and television news viewing was not practicable. For the purposes of validating a self-report measure of browsing, one medium should suffice.
39. The goal of validating the browser-selector distinction drove the sampling decision. The least obtrusive way to measure actual news exposure behavior-rather than self-reported, which is prone to reporting errors - is through observation of online news selection. Therefore, it was desirable for this project to be undertaken in a laboratory setting. The practical difficulty of recruiting the relatively large laboratory sample used here via probabilistic methods dictated the recruitment approach used in this study.
40. A comparison of this profile with 2000 census data for Champaign county shows that the two are similar. The proportion of African Americans is slightly higher in the sample than in the population (19.9% in the sample, 11.2% in the county), but the proportion of Asian Americans is close (9.5% in the sample, 6.5% in the county). The median income in the census data is $35,000 to $45,000, close to the sample; the median education level is below that in the sample ("some college, no degree"). Thus, the sample is better educated, but also more ethnically diverse than the county-level census data indicate. This likely reflects the tendency for the participants to come from the urban area that includes the university.
41. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, News Audiences Increasingly Politicized (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2004).
42. The topics were political figures and events, sports, business and finance, international affairs, local government, entertainment/culture and arts, science and technology, and health news.
43. A second coder analyzed approximately 20% of the URLs from each site. The reliability of the coding was high (Cohen's Kappa for the CNN site = .92; Kappa for the USA Today site = .92). The full list of topics was arts and entertainment, business and money, features, health, local and state, obituary, opinion-editorial, politics, sports, science and technology, U.S. national, world, and weather.
44. The options were political figures and events, sports, business and finance, international affairs, local government, entertainment/culture and arts, science and technology, and health.
45. This question wording is used extensively by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, News Audiences Increasingly Politicized. Conversion of responses to an interval scale follows a process reported in Scott L. Althaus and David Tewksbury, "Patterns of Internet and Traditional News Media Use in a Networked Community," Political Communication 17 (January-March 2000): 21-45.
46. While the use of different methods to measure use of these three media may account for the structural differences in the availability of news in these media, combining them in the way described here is less than ideal. Caution should be exercised in the comparison of regression coefficients for the three measures.
47. McCombs and Poindexter, "The Duty to Keep Informed."
48. The three questions read, "We all have a duty to keep ourselves informed about news and current events," "It is important to be informed about news and current events," and "So many other people follow the news and keep informed about it that it doesn't matter much whether I do or not" (reverse coded).
49. The four questions read, "Other people look to me as a source of conversation topics," "I am likely to share with others information that I have read in the news," "I enjoy discussing a range of topics with others," and "Other people appreciate the contributions I make in conversations."
50. The measure was designed to be distinct from self-esteem, but there may be some overlap between these concepts and their measurement.
51. The two questions read, "Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can't really understand what's going on" and "People like me don't have any say about what the government does." Both were reversed.
52. Because of the use of a different number of questions in the measurement of news exposure in each medium, caution should be exercised when comparing their coefficients.
53. Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch, "Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual."
54. For example, Dutta-Bergman, "Complementarity in Consumption of News."
55. For a discussion of fragmentation, see James G. Webster and Patricia F. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997).
56. For a discussion of reductions in the newspaper audience over time, see Wolfram Peiser, "Cohort Trends in Media Use in the United States," Mass Communication & Society 2&3 (spring and summer 2000): 185-205.