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Accidentally Informed: Incidental News Exposure on the World Wide Web
Abstract
An important element of news delivery on the World Wide Web today is the near ubiquity of breaking news headlines. What used to be called search engines (e.g., Yahoo! and Lycos) are now “portals” or “hubs,” popular services that use news, weather, and other content features to extend the time users spend on the sites. Traditional models of news dissemination in the mass media often assume some level of intention behind most news exposure. The prevalence of news on the disparate corners of the Web provides opportunities for people to encounter current affairs information in an incidental fashion, a byproduct of their other online activities. This study uses survey data from 1996 and 1998 to test whether accidental exposure to news on the Web is positively associated with awareness of current affairs information. The results indicate that incidental online news exposure was unrelated to knowledge in 1996 but acted as a positive predictor in 1998.
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Cited by
Digital Inequality: Differences in Young Adults' Use of the Internet
Hargittai, E., & Hinnant, A. (2008) · Communication Research · doi:10.1177/0093650208321782 · Cited by 1,251
Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?
Van Aelst, P., Strömbäck, J., Aalberg, T., Esser, F., de Vreese, C., Matthes, J., Hopmann, D., Salgado, S., Hubé, N., Stępińska, A., et al. (2017) · Annals of the International Communication Association · doi:10.1080/23808985.2017.1288551 · Cited by 974
Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis
Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2018) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/1461444817724170 · Cited by 738
Political News in the News Feed: Learning Politics from Social Media
Bode, L. (2016) · Mass Communication and Society · doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045149 · Cited by 545
Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Matassi, M. (2018) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/1461444817750396 · Cited by 435
Metadata
- Authors
- Tewksbury, D., Weaver, A. J., & Maddex, B. D.
- Venue
- Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2001-09
- Volume
- 78
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 533-554
- ISSN
- 1077-6990 (ISSN-L)
- 2161-430X
- OpenAlex
- W2047651311
- Cited by
- 393
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Tewksbury, D., Weaver, A. J., & Maddex, B. D. (2001). Accidentally Informed: Incidental News Exposure on the World Wide Web. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900107800309
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
