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Understanding Online News Behaviors

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The news landscape has been changing dramatically over the past few years. Whereas news once came from a small set of highly edited sources, now people can find news from thousands of news sites online, through a variety of channels such as web search, social media, email newsletters, or direct browsing. We set out to understand how Americans read news online using web browser logs collected from 174 diverse participants. We found that 20% of all news sessions started with a web search, that 16% started from social media, that 61% of news sessions only involved a single news domain, and that 47% of our participants read news from both sides of the political spectrum. We conclude with key implications for online news, social media, and search sites to encourage more balanced news browsing.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2019
9077 pages
ISBN:9781450359702
DOI:10.1145/3290605
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. bias
  2. log analysis
  3. news
  4. polarization
  5. web search

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CHI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 703 of 2,958 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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