So, the team decided to try a new strategy: deception. Trussler and Soroka invited participants from their university to come to the lab for "a study of eye tracking". The volunteers were first asked to select some stories about politics to read from a news website so that a camera could make some baseline eye-tracking measures. It was important, they were told, that they actually read the articles, so the right measurements could be prepared, but it didn't matter what they read.
The results of the experiment, as well as the stories that were read most, were somewhat depressing. Participants often chose stories with a negative tone — corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on — rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.
And yet when asked, these people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories. The researchers present their experiment as solid evidence of a so called " negativity bias ", psychologists' term for our collective hunger to hear, and remember bad news. It isn't just schadenfreude, the theory goes, but that we've evolved to react quickly to potential threats.
Bad news could be a signal that we need to change what we're doing to avoid danger. As you'd expect from this theory, there's some evidence that people respond quicker to negative words. Soft news is often less timely than breaking news so editors can delay soft stories to make room for more timely stories. If an idea for a story is a poor one, the story can be salvaged by solid reporting.
If a journalist notices inconsistencies or inaccuracies in sources' statements, it is the journalist's duty to call them liars so the readers are not misinformed.
Reporters must be aware of the different neighborhoods of their communities because people in different neighborhoods may have different experiences and opinions regarding issues. Most news organizations avoid sensationalism, but not sensational stories. Trade names should always be used in stories because they add to the detail of a story. Editors, instructors and the public are particularly critical of errors in facts because there is rarely any excuse for them, but are not critical about simple errors such as misspelling because they recognize that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
The information appearing in professional news media is not as accurate as most Americans believe. Reporters are vulnerable to misinformation because many people want to get their views publicized. On the whole however, participants explain their relevance priorities quite lucidly as they sort the 36 news story cards, and show a keen awareness of the commercial incentives that result in the diverse news fare they come across daily.
As one explains,. So the more likely, for me, would be either things that are going to impact on me personally, or things that I have an active interest in. Andrew P As he takes a final evaluative glance over the stories he has sorted on the grid in front of him, Michael reflects on his priorities:.
I have moved the pollution to over here, moved the drone over. And then a bit of technology and a bit of world news and TV and gaming. Racism, sport and then your sort of celebrities and music and American news I suppose down at the bottom end. Michael P4. However, perceived topic relevance is not always sufficient ground for reading a story. Whether people interrupt their browsing in order to read a relevant story also depends on whether they feel sufficiently informed by other news media.
Often, just reading a headline is enough to remind people about what they already know and bring them up to date. I already know Netflix is very popular, becoming more popular, and the BBC is probably losing license payers.
Probing more deeply into these discussions, we identified five grounding principles for understanding news relevance among everyday citizens. We conclude by distilling these into a basic model of the factors that drive relevance.
Personal relevance is an indispensable gate-keeper of engagement with a news story. Personal relevance often originates in the fact someone we care about might take an interest.
Work-related matters are a frequent source of relevance. For similar reasons, Victoria would engage with a story about rape in India Story 3 and one about psychologists recommending probation for the rapist John Worboys Story 33 :. I like this especially because I worked in Sri Lanka recently. Victoria P Geographical proximity plays a major role in shaping news relevance. Many participants express a natural interest in local news, irrespective of topic:. Alice P2. Discussions provided many specific examples of this.
Participants will sometimes engage with a seemingly trivial story that speaks to a more general, perhaps civic, interest. Thomas P He sees this as a story about how the legal system works, and how it sometimes fails to protect people from unjust accusations Martin P8. In this study we neutralised the effects of news brand bias by anonymising the presentation of stories. However, participants sometimes recognised or thought they recognised the news brand behind a story, and reflected aloud about how brand may affect their decision to engage with a piece of news.
In some cases, in line with previous research, we found that topic relevance may overrule distaste for a particular news brand cf. For instance, reflecting on an editorial about psychologists who freed a convicted rapist, Elizabeth provided a glimpse of the complicated process of deciding whether to read a story or not Story 33 :.
So if it was in the Sun versus the Guardian? Another important factor that decides if people read a news story or not is the time available in the situation where people encounter the story, whether on social media, a news media site, or the printed page.
Ideas about the best use of time also inform how people evaluate news brands. As Lucinda told us:. Lucinda P In the natural process of news selection, people are motivated in part by their familiarity with different news brands.
Some would never dream of using news from the Daily Mail or the Sun , due to their tabloid image or political leaning; conversely, others would steer clear of the Guardian and The Times. In contrast, this study is designed to zoom in on content preferences. We used a non-naturalistic design that forced participants to focus on stories themselves, without regard to news brand or visual elements. Our approach finds support in recent research that systematically compares the different motivational factors underlying news engagement and finds that topic — what a story is about — is the key variable.
Building on such findings, and based on discussions by participants in this study, we have developed a simple model of the factors that help to drive and define news relevance as understood by actual members of the public.
This model , depicted in Fig. Figure 3 The factors that drive and define news relevance. In addition to supporting a general model of news relevance, this study yielded distinctive profiles of news interest that distinguished participants from one another.
We call these news content repertoires. Our analysis identified four specific repertoires, reviewed below:. These repertoires are derived from the sorting exercise described earlier. The people who belong to a content repertoire, or type, are people whose card configurations were sufficiently similar to statistically group them as having a shared horizon of news story relevance, distinct from other participants in terms of both liked topics and rejected topics.
These news story repertoires were on the whole found to defy neat demographic connections and thus force us to complexify our understanding of news engagement. The seven people in Repertoire 1 are characterised by a distinctive political and civic interest, as shown in their ten highest-ranked news stories.
Chris P3. Stories about health, education, and the environment, which all have a hook to the political system, were given a high ranking.
Some tolerate soft news mainly for the sake of sociability, for instance relating to in-laws:. I have more recently been going on to the Daily Mail female page where you get junk about all the celebrities.
Because I am massively not in the know about any celebrities anymore. Repertoire 2: Dispreferred Content. People in Repertoire 2 express a high interest in stories with a social-humanitarian perspective on the world. For instance, they want to read about how teachers oppose tests for their very young pupils Story 17 ; a story about the joy of a family when their boy was cured from cerebral palsy Story 15 ; and a story about Muslim parents opting for home-schooling because their children are bullied Story 25 :.
Jamie P They are interested in political affairs but not in politics per se. And people getting away with polluting the rivers and stuff like that. Joe P9. It may also reflect modest civic literacy and lack of political knowledge:. Repertoire 3: People with a Cultural Interest in News. However, the reasons why the four members of Repertoire 3 like such stories differ.
Sue P5 and Mark P17 have a traditional interest in classical music. Repertoire 3 shows how a story preference profile can be shared by people with very different backgrounds and circumstances.
Sue P5 is a year-old retired personal assistant with little formal education, married, and owns a flat in the south of Spain. Mark P17 is 68 years old, married to an artist, and is a retired metallurgy engineer. Meanwhile Lucinda P16 and Philip P20 are both in their twenties. Lucinda works as an events manager at a local hotel, but will return to university next year to study politics and economics; she is a rowing coach and draws political cartoons for a college newspaper. Philip P20 works long hours as a kitchen assistant, and spends the rest of his time recovering and relaxing, for instance playing Japanese manga games.
Their most dispreferred stories, often dismissed by the members as clickbait stories designed to lure readers into reading, fall in the categories celebrity and human interest:. Just celebrities. Philip P This interest in democratically important topics, from a politically neutral Martin P8 or partisan Diane P11 stance, goes together with a broad interest in general news.
Other prominent news stories in this repertoire include human interest stories, based on a civic or compassionate interest:.
A lot of the volunteering I do is quite young people-focused, and I know bullying is a massive issue and something that affects what I do on a day-to-day basis. Andrew P26, Story Martin P8, Story 3.
Considerable interest is expressed for stories about science and technology, a suicide triggered by social media exposure, local news, and international news. Sounds quite interesting. Paul P25, Story So I suppose I look at this as being a technology story and about the clash of new technology websites doing new things and governments trying to catch up. Paul P25, Story 1. The four members of Repertoire 4 get their news from a mixture of general and more specialised news sources.
They are voracious but discriminating readers, keenly aware of different news genres and widespread sensationalism. Andrew P26 is interested in the story about plastic pollution of rivers Story 18 , but objects to the exaggerations he often finds in stories about the environment:. The analysis above has established four types of news interests — groups of people who share common news story repertoires, each consisting of a diverse diet of news stories.
We saw how many of the top-ranked stories are indicative of a pronounced civic or political interest. However, these 24 participants also tell us they will frequently click on stories that have no or little civic interest which they come across online, whether on social media or a news app or site.
After all, humans often indulge in activities just to pass idle time. At the same time, civic interest among ordinary people, whether modest or keen, does not mean that they are politically active in a traditional sense — most of our participants are not. They may be fed up with traditional politics, distrusting national and local politicians. But on the whole they want to stay informed about what goes on around them, at the local, national, and international levels.
They are drawn to news that has personal relevance for them or their loved ones, but also want to talk knowledgably to others about both serious and entertaining issues. Another analytical glance at our 24 interviews, which takes us beyond the news diets of the four story repertoires, enables us to see how news interests play out across all participants.
Box 2 lists the 14 stories out of 36 that were given top-ten priority by one-third of the 24 participants or more. Seven of these stories were preferred by at least half of the participants. The highest traditionally political stories ended up in 4th place: a story about the Prime Minister intervening to support families who have lost a child — a story that combines action on the political scene with a strong emotional, human interest angle — and one about local elections that provides factual information about the essentials of local democracy mechanisms.
The news stories that get most traction with our news consumers report on education, the environment, multicultural society, and health. Most participants care deeply about the conditions and challenges facing children in schools, as well as about the ways schools are coping with bullying. Similarly the growing problem of child obesity makes many participants curious to learn more about health warnings on fizzy pop. Stories given a high priority by between one third and a half of our participants included human interest stories about life-threatening deceit on social media and child rape in India.
At least half of our participants singled these out as stories they would not want to read. In some cases the reason why people turn their backs on a story reflected topic fatigue. This is the case with the Trump story: many participants declare a great interest in US affairs and in the Trump phenomenon, but they sometimes feel they need to take a break from the constant stream of reporting about him.
Our news material included two sport stories, which were both rated low overall. This is not indicative of a low interest in following sport among our participants, but is probably a finding created by the fieldwork requirements: because the interviews were spread over three weeks, it would make little sense to show people football stories about specific match results and analysis, because these would become obsolete after just a few days.
Of the 36 news stories some ended up neither among the would-like-to-read nor among the would-not-like-to-read stories. These stories occupy a middle ground where quite a few news consumers sometimes would take an interest in reading more than the headline. However, quite a few such middle-ground stories were given top ranking by one or more of the four content repertoires see above. The lesson to be learnt from this finding is that overall story popularity should not make news producers ignore that such stories meet the interests of substantial segments of their audience.
This report sheds new and more complex light on the ways in which people use news to keep track of what goes on in the world around them and to build public connections in a democratic as well as personal sense. The key finding is that audience news preferences are also driven by civic interests. People can themselves articulate the role that news plays in their lives.
Our findings about news relevance and the four news content repertoires were discovered in a qualitative study of 24 news users in and around Oxford. They can therefore not be generalised to the UK population. However, there is reason to believe that, due to the principle of maximum variation of our sample, they are fairly typical of what we would find in other localities, with respect to diversity and distribution of news topics.
It would be interesting to repeat the research design with a sample approximating national representativeness, in order to discover content repertoires that could serve more forcefully as a guideline in the newsrooms of national news media.
In-depth qualitative studies of news preferences can complement surveys and online tracking to help news organisations address the complex balance of personal and civic concerns that their readers care about. Some of it is hardly worth our fleeting attention, let alone hard-earned cash. This report about how relevance works for news audiences and about the composition of audience content repertoires can be seen as a modest contribution to the rethinking that needs to be done in order to accomplish these goals.
His research interests comprise the analysis of audience uses and experiences of media. His recent work explores mixed methods for mapping news consumption.
Also thanks to Rebecca Edwards for invaluable administrative help, and to Alex Reid for her expert handling of the production stage. My thanks also go to the research team at Kantar Public, London, for constructive sparring about the fieldwork design, especially to Nick Roberts, Lindsay Abbassian, and Jill Swindels. I am deeply grateful to then Director of Research, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, for hosting me as a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute January—July and for making this fieldwork-based study possible.
Finally, my warmest thanks to my long-time collaborator Christian Kobbernagel, who did the Q-methodological factor analysis with meticulous care. Date all Paris is seeking damages from Airbnb, accusing it of failing to respect laws designed to curb holiday rentals.
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