Block, Hide or Follow—Personal News Curation Practices on Social Media

In today's hybrid media environment new content creators challenge the status of professionally produced journalism and blur the lines between professional and non-professional content. Growing up in this information landscape, younger generations have developed news-related practices and attitudes that lie in stark contrast to those of previous generations. In addition, discrepancies exist between news definitions and the use practices of young people. We conducted focus groups with German adolescents (15–17 years), young adults (18–24 years) and adults (40–53 years) in August 2020 to uncover young peoples’ orientation toward news and journalism. Our study indicates that the boundaries of what journalism is and what it is not are becoming increasingly indistinct. However, distinctions do emerge between the journalistic and non-journalistic sources that adolescents and young adults use and the functions they associate with them according to their information needs. Differences between the age groups become apparent in their motivations to stay informed which highlights the important role non-journalistic sources play in information behaviour and opinion formation. For teenage participants especially, Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are relevant within these processes, which are linked to a perceived social duty-to-keep-informed. Moreover, findings from the focus groups highlight cohort-specific differences regarding the understanding of journalism and, consequently, differences in the assessment of trust and reliability as well as the verification strategies that are applied. In sum, for young participants journalism is a reliable source of information, especially in the case of current events and for crosschecking online information, while non-journalistic sources fulfil social needs.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Journalism Still Matter? The Role of Journalistic and non-Journalistic Sources in Young Peoples’ News Related Practices

Wunderlich

Hölig

Hasebrink

2022

“…Moreover, it requires treating social and emotional factors as fundamental components, not merely backdrop, of emergent information practices (Wahl-Jorgensen 2020). This is especially true as close engagement with informational content depends upon personal interest, relevance, and investment in issues and events, which intertwine with social relations and affect (Edgerly 2021; Kümpel, 2019; Merten 2020; Tandoc, Lim, and Ling 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This body of work suggests we should consider the ways in which judgments of information value are entangled with everyday practices online. Encounters with content on social media are highly individualized-personal curation practices (Merten 2020) mean that no two news feeds are identical-but the experience of the news feed is simultaneously highly social. The extent to which users judges a piece of content as valuable (if at all) may be related to how they are connected to whomever shared the content (Kümpel, 2019), and to the pathway that content took to reach their news feeds.…”

Section: Judgments Of Information Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

Judging Value in a Time of Information Cacophony: Young Adults, Social media, and the Messiness of do-it-Yourself Expertise

Cotter

Thorson

2022

In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is characterized by the jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up information, under conditions of low media trust and an absence of a pre-defined epistemic hierarchy of sources. We illustrate how the volume and discordance of voices circulating content online makes it difficult for young adults to know what to believe, and show that young peoples’ strategies for evaluating information are deeply entangled with the sociality and emotionality of the experience of information cacophony. We argue that existing theory is not yet well-developed to account for content evaluations and effects resulting from the novel complexities of navigating information cacophony. Existing work remains focused primarily on news exposure and effects, which misses the broader informational context within which young adults find themselves, and evolving strategies for evaluating information.

“…On social media, users usually do not encounter news bundled or curated by a single news media outlet (Merten 2021). Instead, news articles from a variety of outlets and sources are distributed by algorithms and reach users on a case-by-case basis in their news feeds (Bergström and Jervelycke Belfrage 2018).…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change in News Access, Change in Expectations? How Young Social Media Users in Switzerland Evaluate the Functions and Quality of News

Schwaiger

Vogler

Eisenegger

2022

Online media environments have changed the way young people access news. Despite much research on the topic, the expectations of journalistic news by young adults who have turned their back on traditional news media remain unclear. We use a novel multimethod qualitative online study design to investigate the perceived quality, functions, and expectations toward journalistic news of young adults in Switzerland who use social media as their main source for news and rarely consume traditional media. Nineteen young adults between 20 and 25 years of age with different educational levels participated in our study in May 2020. Our results show that even though the participants only occasionally use traditional news media channels, they still consider journalistic news relevant and appreciate quality standards of professional journalism such as actuality and veracity (Swart 2021b). Among the functions of news, the participants highlighted sociability and identification. Exchange and discussion of news are, thus, of high relevance online but also offline. Also, the participants show a high affinity toward news on mobilizing topics, which are of interest to themselves and their peers, and motivate them to engage with news more intensely. According to the participants, news should be attractively prepared, such as with audiovisual formats and easy to understand and integrate into everyday life. The participants also expressed a preference to consume news articles from different media brands within a single platform. Our study outlines a fruitful path for comprehensive qualitative research with innovative online tools.