News Consumers (and Non-Consumers)

At any given moment there are a multitude of media options competing for the public’s attention. While some of these options include news, many others include entertainment offerings. This chapter discusses the underlying psychology of news consumption, including the obstacles and challenges that prevent news consumption and hinder news engagement, as well as the need to think of audiences in more specific ways. This understanding requires journalists to learn and develop a new skill set that marries news judgment with audience-based research. Today’s journalists need to know who consumes what, how, and why. With this knowledge, journalists have the ability to tell stories from a perspective that audiences care about and to create innovative distribution channels for their work. Such insight is necessary for combating the growing inequalities in how much people intentionally seek out news or incidentally consume it, or what researchers refer to as “news exposure.”