Beyond Clicks: Understanding News Browsing Patterns

Up next at ECREA 2014 is Tim Groot Komelink, who shifts our focus to the quantification of news usage practices through the news organisations' emerging online readership monitoring practices. This builds on services such a Google Analytics, and user monitoring of this kind has also led to the development of news content genres such as clickbait, and of 'news' operators specialising in such content.

So what are the motives, considerations, and experiences involved in browsing the news? The project engaged in sensory ethnography with some 56 news users to explore this. Dominant factors governing whether users clicked on links to news items included proximity, impact, recognition, and curiosity arousal; continuity, unexpected, and emotional content also led to clicks. By contrast, non-specific headlines about stories of interest to users were as much of a turnoff as headlines which already tell an article's entire story.

News checking practices tend to read only news headlines; monitoring focusses only on specific news areas; scanning looks only at headlines to get the gist of stories; and snacking is a low-involvement scrolling through the headlines, often with a strong focus on images over headlines. None of these tend to result in users click through to the full stories themselves.

Browsing patterns (rather than clicking patterns) seem to be a better indicator of users' news interests, then. This is reassuring in the face of worries that a focus on clickbait stories leads to a less informed populace; for editors, this means that clickbait may not be as attractive as raw access numbers appear to suggest. From a commercial perspective, mere clickbait publications may also be missing the importance of browsing.