News Consumption Practices of Students in Athens, Istanbul, and London

The final IAMCR 2019 session I’m attending today is on news consumption, and starts with Eylem Yanardagoglu. Research shows that news consumption in general appears to be in decline around the world, with a distinct generational difference in the platforms being used for accessing the news – there is also a substantial shift to online and social media as news sources amongst younger users.

The present study examined news users in Athens, Istanbul, and London, focussing on media and engineering students in each city. Time spent online is greatest in London, but all were significantly active online; Athenian users were substantially more active on social media, however.

Many of the students never read newspapers or listened to the radio; much of their news consumption – if it happens at all – is online. Politics is the subject they find to have most news value, and news media engagement is mainly for information seeking and monitoring – but such engagement is incidental and embedded into routine practices like public transport, as news snacking. Time spent on public transport and accommodation arrangements are important spatial and temporal factors that influence such news routines.

Trust in or avoidance of the news is influenced by current political trends, too – concerns over the lack of media freedom are especially prevalent in Turkey, but there are expectations of objectivity and accountability in each country. Users therefore also engaged in fact-checking and news triangulation through search engines.

This means that the news consumption routines across the three media systems appear to be broadly similar, if affected by local contexts. All participants get 90% of their news online, especially through mobile devices, and the availability of mobile news is shaping their news consumption habits. There is a significant move to news snacking and incidental exposure as opposed to news consumption at appointed times, and the users consult a variety of news sources rather than being particularly loyal to any one of them. London and Istanbul students were using news aggregators especially frequently.