News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era (OXFORD STUDIES DIGITAL POLITICS SERIES) by Dunaway Johanna & Searles Kathleen

Author:Dunaway, Johanna & Searles, Kathleen [Dunaway, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Changing Communication Technologies and Learning from News

Previous work examining information effects in an online environment typically focused on comparing media platforms (i.e., print, broadcast, and online). This work most often compared the impact of radio, television, newspapers, and magazines on content recall (Conway and Patterson 2008 ), and due to conflicting results, yielded little consensus. Some studies found that newspaper readers were better at recalling information than television viewers (Graber 1984 ; Bennett, Swenson, and Wilkinson 1992 ) while others found that television helped viewers recall information better (Katz, Adoni, and Parness 1977 ; Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien 1970 ). Researchers also found that recall was affected by reader sociodemographic factors, such as education and income; medium characteristics, such as visual and audio formats; contextual factors, such as the level of distraction among news watchers; and content characteristics, such as the importance attached to a story, proximity and incivility (Mutz 2015 ), and the quality of news programs (see Pipps et al. 2009 for a summary).

Research examining information recall in an online environment finds a similar impact of sociodemographic and medium-related factors. In one of the earliest studies examining the effect of online and print newspapers on readers’ ability to recall information, Tewksbury and Althaus (2000) compared the readers of the print and online edition of the New York Times and found that compared to the print version, the online site provided fewer cues about a story’s importance, such as story placement, story length, and headline size, but offered readers greater freedom to choose the stories they prefer to read. As a result, Tewksbury and Althaus (2000) concluded that readers were less likely to read or remember the front-page stories of the day, as compared to readers of print newspapers.

Similar to previous research comparing types of media platforms, d’Haenens et al.’s (2003) study revealed that the time spent reading the online and print version of a paper varied by gender, news topic, number of stories in each section, general knowledge, and level of interest. However, the overall impact of the two types of media on information recall was too mixed for the authors to come to a definite conclusion. In another study comparing different media, Conway and Patterson (2008) compared television and web recall and found that television viewers were better able to recall stories than web users, although the latter group remembered a broader variety of stories. The authors attributed this to differences in format. Print and television media present news in a linear, chronological order while online platforms present news in a non-linear, hyperlinked manner. While the format of presentation on print and television enables audiences to remember facts (Eveland, Seo, and Marton 2002), the online format encourages selective scanning and causes a decrease in factual learning (Eveland and Dunwoody 2002). Research also demonstrates how media can differentially affect perceptions of proximity, threat, and arousal—with consequences for memory and recall (Mutz 2015 ).

These documented differences in recall across various media platforms, and the fact that people consume news differently on various devices, echo our theory.

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