Online Hard News: The Pulse of Society
The Internet allows society a novel choice of news retrieval. Previous studies examined specific ways in which online news influences other media, civic duty, and political thought, but have not looked specifically at online hard news reading. It is unknown how the Internet influences hard news reading and this gap in research will help to understand this influence. This study examines societal viewing of hard news (i.e. national and world news, politics, business, science, and technology) through a test pool of Champaign-Urbana residents. These individuals were subjected to a survey of pertinent questions and then utilized a major Internet-based news site to read news content of their choice. The subsequent analysis examines the correlation between certain societal factors (education level, primary media use, tendency to follow hard news, political knowledge, and opinion of civic obligation) and the tendency to read hard news online. Results show that Internet use, education level, civic duty, and political knowledge correlated with frequency of viewing high hard news topics online. A reliance on television was associated with less frequent hard news viewing online, and newspaper reliance had no significant correlations.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Speech Communication
Research Advisor:
David Tewksbury
Department of Research Advisor:
Speech Communication
Year of Publication:
2006