From “Far Away” to “Shock” to “Fatigue” to “Back to Normal”: How Young People Experienced News During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This paper explores how young people used and experienced news during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 22 in-depth interviews with Dutch young people (19-36), we found four successive phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. First, before the virus reached the Netherlands, they saw it as "a problem far away" and felt indifferent toward the news. During the second phase of "shock", as COVID-19 reached the Netherlands, news use increased as participants frantically tried to make sense of the situation. Third, participants experienced "Corona-fatigue" due to informational and emotional overload and began "dosing" their intake of news. Finally, they became used to "the new normal" and returned to (perceived) regular levels of news consumption. Two new rituals stood out during the first wave: press conferences seemingly "interpellated" participants as Dutch citizens who should take their responsibility, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases were used as a gauge for how "we" were doing. Overall, participants' position could best be described as critical-but-pragmatic: even if they questioned the veracity of some news, they chose to follow measures to curtail the virus.

Tuning Out the News. A Cross-Media Perspective on News Avoidance Practices of Young News Users in Flanders During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Now isolated, participants reported an intensification of news practices at the onset of the national lockdown. Here, we find a reflection of patterns described by previous authors related to both information seeking behaviour (Albertson and Gadarian 2015) as well as the coronavirus pandemic (Ohme et al 2020;Groot Kormelink and Klein Gunnewiek 2021) where users specifically seek out information to cope with "insecurities", and turn to messaging apps to discuss the information they found among peers: "When the first measures were announced, we immediately started sharing and discussing them. It was on everyone's minds" (Jessica, 27, F).…”

“…In the wake of the pandemic, audiences appeared to increasingly seek out news in order to stay informed. Recent studies have shown an increase in news consumption in Flanders (Anrys et al 2020;Ohme et al 2020;Vandendriessche et al 2021), a trend which had also been noticed globally since the start of the pandemic (Nielsen 2020;Groot Kormelink and Klein Gunnewiek 2021). These findings resonate with research which argued that times of crisis, and feelings of anxiety, can form significant motivators in increasing information seeking behaviour in users (Albertson and Gadarian 2015;Westlund and Ghersetti 2015).…”

The COVID-19 infodemic at your fingertips. Reciprocal relationships between COVID-19 information FOMO, bedtime smartphone news engagement, and daytime tiredness over time

“…This bedtime news engagement may, then again, further foster people's COVID-19 information FOMO, and the loop starts anew. People who are stuck in this reinforcing spiral may be less likely to engage in efficient coping behaviors, such as selective news engagement ( Ahmed, 2020 ; Groot Kormelink & Klein Gunnewiek, 2021 ), to avoid more severe consequences and may be more likely to become “news junkies” for whom news engagement is compulsive ( Broersma & Swart, 2021 ).…”

Agenda-Setting for COVID-19: A Study of Large-Scale Economic News Coverage Using Natural Language Processing

“…The pandemic "has substantially increased news consumption for mainstream media" as is shown in a survey conducted in 2020 in the U.K., the U.S., Germany, Spain, South Korea and Argentina [2]. People search more intensively for information to make sense of a new, disruptive situation like a crisis [3]. As agenda-setters, journalists fuel and respond to these information needs [4].…”

“…As agenda-setters, journalists fuel and respond to these information needs [4]. But in the case of COVID-19, news media's herd behavior cascaded in overreporting on the topic, such that the longer the pandemic lasted, the more people became "coronavirus-news-fatigued" [3,5]. Decisionmakers in organizations engage in issue management to cope with exogenous challenges such as those posed by the pandemic crisis.…”