Cross-National Patterns in Incidental News Exposure

The next ICA 2018 session is on incidental news exposure, and starts with a paper presented by Pablo Boczkowski. ‘Incidental’ here means that people encounter the news without actively seeking to do so. Such work on this has been predominantly quantitative, but there is some more qualitative work on this topic emerging as well. Most of this work has been focussing on single countries in the developed world, too.

Incidental consumption of news is far from new, but is becoming more important in digital and social media contexts, and with the rise in news consumption via mobile devices. Some groups who would have been particularly disconnected from the news otherwise are especially benefitting from such incidental exposure. The present study examined such developments across Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the U.S., in order to generate some comparative perspectives on incidental news consumption, and has already conducted a substantial number of interviews with news users.

Such incidental news consumption provides alternative pathways through the news. Young people in particular are gaining access to news stories they would not otherwise have encountered; they are able to escape from the repetitive cycles of daily news reporting but are likely to come across important breaking news through sharing via their social networks. This leads to significant information gains for such users – and the groups most benefitting from such incidental exposure vary (young women in Japan; religious groups in Israel; U.S. college students living away from home). Age remains a key factor throughout, though.

This research provides a more fine-grained understanding of some of the patterns in incidental news exposure, therefore. It also highlights the role of incidental news exposure especially in the context of breaking news events.