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News Informatics: Engaging Individuals with Data-Rich News Content through Interactivity in Source, Medium, and Message

Published: 29 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of “news informatics” to refer to journalistic presentation of big data in online sites. For users to be engaged with such data-driven public information, it is important to incorporate interactive tools so that each person can extract personally relevant information. Drawing upon a communication model of interactivity, we designed a data-rich site with three different types of interactive features—namely, modality interactivity, message interactivity, and source interactivity—and empirically tested their relative and combined effects on user engagement and user experience with a 2 (modality) × 3 (source) × 2 (message) field experiment (N =166). Findings shed light on how interface designers, online news editors and journalists can maximize user engagement with data-rich news content. Certain interactivity combinations are found to be better than others, with a structural equation model (SEM) revealing the underlying theoretical mechanisms and providing implications for the design of news informatics.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2022
      10459 pages
      ISBN:9781450391573
      DOI:10.1145/3491102
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      Published: 29 April 2022

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      2. User Engagement
      3. Website Interactivity

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