Do Novel Routines Stick After the Pandemic? The Formation of News Habits During COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Over half of our news use is comprised of habits: routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life. Conversely, citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines rarely form novel patterns of news use. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being, especially in real-life situations. Previous research suggests that considerable life changes and disruptions in daily routines can give rise to the adaptation or formation of habits. This paper asks how and to what extent citizens created novel patterns of news use or adapted existing news routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecting insights from social psychology to journalism and audience studies, it analyzes which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation. Employing a questionnaire with open-ended questions with 1293 Dutch news users, we identified 5 groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the COVID-19 pandemic: news avoiders, followers turned avoiders, stable news users, frequent news users and news junkies. In-depth follow-up interviews with these users (N = 22) show that differences in users’ everyday context, social cues, levels of stress and anxiety, and affective cues may explain these different behaviors.

KEYWORDS:

• Habit formation
• news and media habits
• news use
• societal crises
• COVID-19
• audience research
• everyday life

Introduction

News use is to a large extent habitual. Over half of it is routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life (Wood, Quinn, and Kashy 2002). Checking one's smartphone for news the first thing in the morning, watching the evening news or listening to the radio in the car are practices that are mostly not triggered by cognitive and deliberate motivations. They are enacted automatically; when people engage with news repeatedly and consistently in a similar context, they will associate this situation with it and repeat recurrent acts of news use. Conversely, for citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines, the formation of novel patterns of news use is very rare. They stick to established alternative practices unless there are immediate and repeated cues that provoke them to use news on a regular basis (Bentley 2001; Lally and Gardner 2013; Lee and Delli Carpini 2010).

This paper studies if and how news habits changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disruptive nature of this crisis allows to study in a real-life situation how news habits come into place and what motivates them. Research has shown that considerable life changes and major transformations of daily routines can give rise to new habits or adjusting existing ones (Diddi and LaRose 2006; Ghersetti and Westlund 2016; Carden and Wood 2018; Wood and Neal 2009; Verplanken, Roy, and Whitmarsh 2018). When countries went in lockdown, suddenly, daily patterns were disrupted. People had to navigate this new situation and develop novel routines. Moreover, worries about the yet unknown virus caused shock, stress and perceived danger. Managing such uncertainty takes a lot of effort and comes with confusion, stress and anxiety, until a “new normal” has taken shape. This might foster news consumption (Ghersetti and Westlund 2016). For others, the continuous influx of confirmed cases, daily death tolls and new governmental policies, and the feelings of fear, stress and helplessness this initiates, may create the opposite response and make users tune out from news (Nielsen et al. 2020).

So far, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being. Especially what affects people's news habit formation in later life stages, beyond the phase of strong parental influence and transition into adulthood, has remained largely unexplored. Moreover, due to its complexity and mundaneness habit formation has mostly been researched in experimental studies and not so much in a real-life context. This study therefore asks how and to what extent citizens created novel patterns of news use or adapted existing news routines, and identifies the reasons behind these changes. Connecting insights from social psychology to the fields of journalism and audience studies, we analyze which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation. We thus shed light on what cues activate the formation of news habits and what factors might explain why habits do or do not sustain.

Our research draws upon data from a questionnaire with open-ended questions with 1293 Dutch news users from different gender, age, and educational and regional background. It was administered online from April 14th until May 11^th 2020, during the first peak of the pandemic in The Netherlands. Through a qualitative, thematic analysis of these questionnaires, we identified five groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the pandemic. Following this typology, we conducted in-depth interviews with a selection of users from each subgroup, to further explore their motivations for (the lack of) behavioral changes, the durability of these novel habits and the situational contexts that hinder or sustain them.

The Formation of Habits

Research from psychology and neuroscience points strongly at the crucial importance of habits in people's everyday life. Habits are “automatic behavioral responses to environmental cues, thought to develop through repetition of behavior in consistent contexts” (Lally and Gardner 2013, s137). Many things people do are habitual. About 45 per cent of our daily activities are recurring in the same context every day (Wood and Neal 2009). Because we have done them that often, they do not require (much) active consideration anymore. Moreover, they strongly regulate our behavior because habits tend to dominate over goals and intentions: we (say that we) want one thing, but do another.

Habits are formed through repetition and, to a lesser extent, regularity, in a stable social, physical or temporal context (Lally et al. 2010; Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019). If we do something repeatedly and consistently in response to a certain contextual cue, the mental association of an act with this cue assures that alternative options are less likely and are deactivated (Wood and Neal 2009; Carden and Wood 2018). If we, for example, always drive the same road to work, we would only take another route when the road is blocked and we are forced to think about alternatives. Habits thus make it easier for people to perform many tasks in daily life simultaneously, without spending too much mental energy on all of them (Gardner and Lally 2018).

Habits build of perpetual cue-routine-reward loops. A habit is triggered by a certain commonly encountered cue, leading to repeated behavior that results in developing a routine. This then provides a reward that makes people even more perceptive to the cue. The more rewarding a certain behavior is, the more it is repeated and the more it develops into a routine (Judah et al. 2018). Because stimuli that “have been rewarded in the past acquire attentional priority over non-rewarded ones”, the loop is then started again and habits are reinforced (Carden and Wood 2018, 117).

The formation of new habits is a long-term and complex trajectory. Even if cues lead to initial change in behavior, for example in experimental settings or health interventions, these do not easily last when they are not accompanied by changes in the everyday life of people. Habit learning is therefore most successful when it is engrained in fundamental life changes. Only in case of discontinuities, people are enforced to reconsider how to act (Carden and Wood 2018; Wood and Neal 2009; Verplanken, Roy, and Whitmarsh 2018). Research into the effects of a partial strike of the London underground, for example, showed that most travelers lapsed back into familiar habits when the interruption ended after a few days. Only about 5 per cent of the commuters adopted lasting novel travel routines leading to more optimal travelling (Larcom, Rauch, and Willems 2017).

According to Lally and Gardner (2013; cf. Gardner and Lally 2018), habit formation consists of four stages. First, the individual must decide to take action. In this stage, motivations and deliberate decisions are important. Second, intentions should translate into action. This is not obvious; there is much research that points to the gap between intentions and actual behavior (Wood and Rünger, 2016). Many people make New Year's resolutions, but only a few turn these into a lasting habit. Third, the action needs to be repeated for a considerable period. This requires intrinsic motivation based on perceived rewards, such as pleasure or positive sensory experiences. Research suggests a stronger effect of such affective rewards than cognitive ones, such as perceived utility or benefits (Judah et al. 2018). In the final stage, which is intertwined with the previous one, behavior “must be repeated in a fashion conductive to the development of automaticity” (Lally and Gardner 2013, s139-40). Full automaticity is reached when behavior is efficient, unintentional, uncontrolled, and lacks awareness (Lally et al. 2010). However, it has been argued that with complex tasks such as those involved in media use, not all four features of automaticity need to apply. In mental scripts—sequences of habitual actions—conscious and automatic processes interact (LaRose 2010; Naab and Schnauber 2016). Also, automaticity does not have a clear demarcation point; the level of automaticity is lower for complex than for simple behaviors, and progresses over time (Lally et al. 2010; Verplanken 2006; Wood, Quinn, and Kashy 2002). A study into health interventions found that it took on average 66 days to reach automaticity, with a range of 18–254 days (Lally et al. 2010).

Habit formation is thus a process of moving from “an exploratory to an exploitive mode of activity, or in different terms, from action-outcome behaviors that pursue a current goal to nonconscious stimulus-response behaviors” (LaRose 2015, 370). Habits enable people to efficiently take advantage of regular situations. However, whenever familiar contexts suddenly change and people experience stress, like during a pandemic, they do not necessarily develop new routines. Chances are high that they fall back on existing habits. This might be the result of “the breakdown of higher-order-decision-making functions” or “a shift in the allocation of cognitive resources” (Wood and Rünger 2016, 302). In addition, habitual behavior provides a certain stability to life and helps to comprehend an unsure situation.

Conversely, experimental studies suggest that stressful situations might promote the formation of new habits (Wood and Rünger 2016). Radenbach (2015) found in a laboratory experiment in which participants had to make decisions in a computer game under acute stress that those who had experienced chronic stress due to stressful life events in the past 24 months leaned more towards habitual behavior. Most research, however, provokes only acute stress, and studies lower-level tasks. In general, permanently changing habits is difficult, because habitual memory traces remain and old habits become activated again automatically as soon as new contextual cues become weaker or less frequent. Overriding habits demands much resources, so people are likely to lapse back to old patterns as soon as things get back to normal (Walker, Thomas, and Verplanken 2015; Wood and Rünger 2016; Wood and Neal 2009). The question is to what extent this applies to people's habits of news use and how these evolved throughout the various stages of the pandemic.

Media and News Habits

Research into media habits “has been periodically discovered, forgotten and rediscovered in communication research”, Robert LaRose (2010) concluded. Indeed, habits have received relatively little attention in media and communication research. Media use is complex because it includes a broad range of goals and affords many rewards, ranging from entertainment to social interaction and information finding, even within one action or time frame. Moreover, it continuously provides people with new content which makes it different from more simple habits, such as fastening the safety belt whenever one enters the car (Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019). Media habits are therefore hard to study.

While there is a lot of evidence that media use is largely habitual, and thus unconscious, it has long been studied from a cognitive and goal-directed paradigm focusing on motivations. Its most influential proponent, uses and gratifications theory, argues that citizens actively seek for news and consciously select media outlets to gratify their needs for being informed, having social interaction, or being entertained. This assumes that people are aware of their needs within each social context and make rational, deliberate decisions about which news to consume (Ruggiero 2000; LaRose 2010).

Theories of habit formation challenge this assumption. First, they argue that most news use is not cognitively driven. While, in the first stage of habit formation goal-oriented behavior is important, later on people do not consciously decide on their media consumption, nor do they carefully assess the perceived outcomes of their choices (LaRose 2010; Diddi and LaRose 2006). They often find it hard to articulate how and why their news habits developed in the first place. “That's just part of it. That's just part of your experience of the day”, a respondent in an earlier study explained his 40-year subscription to a regional newspaper. People even used, and paid for, news media they not even liked (anymore) because consuming these had become a habit (Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2017).

Second, habit research argues that cognitive decision-making about which media to use is even less prevalent in a high-choice digital media ecology. To deal with the abundance of options, people rely on habitual behavior to save mental energy and prevent information overload. Moreover, research suggests that media habits form more quickly online than offline. Constant access via smartphones offers an abundance of cues and endless opportunities to repeat certain behavior. This fosters very tight stimulus-response loops (LaRose 2015, 373; cf. Bayer and LaRose 2018). Habit is a strong predictor of smartphone and social media use (Oulasvirta et al. 2012; Hsiao, Chang, and Tang 2016; Wohn and Ahmadi 2019).

Within our daily routines, media take a central place. People only prefer sleeping, drinking and eating over media use. Moreover, media-related desires are by far the hardest to resist because of “constant availability, huge appeal, and apparent low costs” (Hofmann, Vohs, and Baumeister 2012). The emergence of online and mobile media intensifies this, because habits are now not only triggered by external (i.e., in the social and physical context), but also by internal cues (i.e., technological affordances of media themselves). Cues such as push notifications or algorithmic recommendations are purposively engineered to establish habits and make people hooked on the medium (Bayer and LaRose 2018). Moreover, research has found that social media have an even stronger effect than mass media, because the social interactions they provide around news are particularly stimulating the brain to form habits. These emerge more quickly, are stronger and more persistent (Graybiel 2008; LaRose 2015).

Generational effects are strong predictors of news habits. Studies have showed the importance of the family context for habit formation and found that people tend to stick to the types of media they grew up with (Shehata 2016; Westlund and Weibull 2013; Yang and Huesmann 2013; Lee and Delli Carpini 2010). Shehata (2016) found based on longitudinal panel data that in Sweden news habits are quite stable among adolescents. Three quarters of the young people who avoided news at the start of the study still did so after three years. They not only tuned out from traditional, but also online news media. Palmer and Toff (2020) found that news avoiders in general saw news consumption as a “bad deal” with high emotional costs and limited rewards. This prevents news habits to form.

Substantial life changes might provoke the formation of news habits, though. Diddi and LaRose (2006) found in a study among college students in the early days of the internet that habit strength was the most important predictor of emerging patterns of news consumption. In this new stage of their life, students were more open to developing online news habits. Similarly, news events that disrupt the course of daily life can establish a fruitful context for habit formation. Westlund and Ghersetti (2015) point at a homogenization of media use during societal crises when people turn towards live reporting. They studied via a survey how Swedish citizens said they would respond to the hypothetical disaster of a gas emission. Habitual use was here defined as self-reported regularly used media and habit change in terms of envisioned media use at home, during work, and elsewhere during this hypothetical crisis. Their results suggest that habitual media use is reinforced during crisis situations (Ghersetti and Westlund 2016).

However, no research has been conducted yet on the formation of news habits during an actual societal crisis. This study uses the unique case of the COVID-19 pandemic, to analyze how news habits come into being. We ask:

RQ1: How and to what extent did citizens form novel news habits?

RQ2: Which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation?

Method

We use a qualitative approach to analyze if people have changed their news habit as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although self-reported, this allows for studying users’ novel and adapted news habits, to explore their motivations behind this and understand the complexities of media use in a crisis situation. Data was collected in two stages. First, at the start of the first lockdown in the Netherlands, we administered an online questionnaire with open-ended questions. Later, when most measures were (temporarily) relieved, in-depth follow-up interviews were conducted with a selection of these respondents.

Step 1: online questionnaire

The online questionnaire (see Appendix) was conducted with a non-representative sample of 1293 Dutch news users, of different gender, age, and with different educational and regional background. Since the first COVID-19 case on 27 February 2020, The Netherlands saw a quick rise of confirmed infections and number of deaths. On 15th March, this led to a partial lockdown during which schools, childcare centers, restaurants, sports clubs and many businesses remained closed, until the gradual re-opening of public spaces from 11th May onwards. The questionnaire was administered online from 14th April until 11th May, at the height of the (first) peak of infections.

Set up in Qualtrics, the questionnaire was spread via appeals on social media channels and the websites, Facebook pages and newsletters of national and regional Dutch news media. The goal of our study was to identify the diversity and nuances in how and why news habits develop in crisis situations; we did not aim to quantify how many users responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in a particular way. Hence, we did not strive for representativeness of the sample. The average age of the respondents was 54.9 years [SD = 15.8]. Women (65.8%) and higher-educated participants (57.9%) were overrepresented, as well as respondents living in the northern provinces of The Netherlands. Most participants lived together with a partner without children (45.1%). Others lived with their partner and their children (21.5%), 23.6% lived alone, and 9.8% had other living arrangements, such as single parents or students living with housemates.

The questionnaire, akin to a structured interview, contained ten open-ended questions to capture perceived changes in respondents’ everyday routines (#1), patterns of consuming COVID-19 related news (#6), perceived changes in their overall media (#2–4) and news use (#8), expectations about future media use (#5), if they had started to pay (more) for journalism (#9), how they assessed the quality and reliability of news (#7), and if they had encountered misinformation (#10). At the end of the questionnaire, participants answered questions about their demographics and could leave their contact details when they were willing to participate in a follow-up interview. A total of 1497 respondents started the questionnaire, of whom 1293 fully completed it. All completed questionnaires were exported from Qualtrics and then converted into Word documents for qualitative coding in Atlas.ti.

Qualitive, thematic analysis was used to analyze participants’ answers. Responses to all questions were coded, using open and axial coding to systematically identify concepts per question and merging them into broader categories (Corbin and Strauss 2015). In the final phase of coding, based upon these axial codes, participants with similar perceived behaviors, expectations and perspectives were sorted into groups, which were then labeled according to the group's commonalities. Though this process, we identified five groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Positioned upon a continuum, stable news avoiders and followers turned avoiders started to consume less news during the pandemic, stable news users did not change their news behavior, while frequent news users and news junkies actively started to use more news during the first months of the pandemic. Although our non-representative sample does not allow us to make any statements about the division between these groups in the wider population of news users, stable news users and frequent news users were the most prominent clusters in our sample, followed by news avoiders and news junkies, with followers turned avoiders forming the smallest group. To triangulate our findings, as a second step, we conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of the participants, to be able to contextualize and further specify our typology.

Step 2: follow-up interviews

Following our fivefold typology, a selection of users from each subgroup was contacted for a follow-up interview by phone. These interviews explored users’ motivations for (the lack of) behavioral changes, the durability of these novel habits as the pandemic progressed, and the situational contexts that hinder or sustain them. By differentiating between the five clusters, this second stage allowed us to explore the diversity in how citizens change their attitudes and behaviors around news during disruptive situations and to characterize these groups in detail.

A total of 22 respondents agreed to participate in the follow-up interviews: 5 news avoiders, 2 followers turned avoiders, 5 frequent news users, 5 news junkies and 5 stable news users. Twelve participants were male; 12 were higher-educated; and the age of the interviewees ranged from 20 to 80 years old. The interviews lasted around 30 minutes and were conducted between mid-July and September, when the number of infections in The Netherlands was relatively low. Questions were adapted based on the cluster the participant belonged to and the responses given when filling in the questionnaire. All interviews were audio recorded and then fully transcribed for qualitative, thematic analysis in Atlas.ti.

Findings

Study 1: Open-Ended Questionnaire

The outbreak of the COVID-19 in early 2020 initially fostered a surge in news consumption. Reach figures in the Netherlands show how people en masse flocked to the websites of public broadcasters and major newspapers for information (Bakker 2020). In a country of 17 million inhabitants, up to 7.7 million citizens tuned in for live broadcasts of the government's bi-weekly press conferences (Stichting Kijkonderzoek 2020) and Dutch quality newspapers welcomed a record number of new subscribers (Van Dongen 2020).

The responses to the open-ended questionnaire reflect this upsurge. Respondents noted how in these uncertain first days of the pandemic, they installed news apps, enabled push notifications or took up the habit of watching evening news broadcasts to monitor novel developments and governmental regulations. Some remarked that, to their own surprise, they “suddenly turned into a news junkie” (26-year-old male). Because other leisure opportunities, such as playing sports or going to bars and restaurants, were restricted or impossible, media became attractive options to spend free time. Just as Ghersetti and Westlund (2016) predicted based on perceived responses to a hypothetical societal emergency, the media habits of different demographic groups initially homogenized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, for most citizens, this initial uptake in news use quickly evaporated (Bakker 2020), just like in Italy and Spain where changes in news habits were equally short-lived (Salmerón 2020). Although most respondents were satisfied with the quality of COVID19-related news provided by the media they followed, participants simultaneously voiced complaints about corona news fatigue. They expressed emotions of news overload (“Sometimes I feel like it's all becoming too much”, 68-year-old male) and perceptions of repetition in news (“I’m surprised that all daily talk shows manage to produce a show every night, with their rotating file of experts”, 55-year-old female). While participants experienced a common sense of COVID-19 fatigue, in terms of their news use, they responded to the pandemic quite differently.

Based on the questionnaire, five groups can be distinguished. News avoiders withdrew from following COVID-19 related news almost right from the start of the crisis. This group voiced most complaints about the quality of reporting, for example stating that “media are increasingly looking for sensationalism” (53-year-old female). These respondents were joined by a second group of users as the pandemic progressed. These followers turned avoiders, at first, sought out news more frequently for stability, yet quickly began to evade news due to its negativity and their increasing sense of helplessness. Others, despite experiencing similar affective responses, continued to check in with news more frequently (frequent news users) or kept using more sources and more active news practices compared to their news routines before the pandemic (news junkies). Finally, a substantial group of respondents said not to have changed their news habits due to COVID-19 at all (stable news users).

While the open-ended questionnaire allowed us to discern these distinct patterns of adapting news habits (or not) to the pandemic, it does not answer the question what might explain these different behaviors. Therefore, follow-up interviews were conducted, which highlight four major differences between the five groups: (1) the extent to which COVID-19 affected people's general, everyday routines; (2) citizens’ social contexts; (3) level of anxiety caused by the pandemic; and (4) differences in perceptions of the emotional costs and rewards that these novel news habits bring.

Study 2: In-Depth Follow-Up Interviews

News Avoiders

News avoidance is typically defined as the intentional or unintentional low consumption of all types of news over a longer period of time, caused by a dislike of news or higher preference for other content (Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020). However, the participants labeled as news avoiders in this study are rather very selective news users. As a 66-year-old male emphasized: “It's not black and white, it's not that I’m reading nothing anymore. But at some point, I felt I had read it all and thought: whatever, so I started following less.” While they were already selective in their news use before the pandemic, after a very brief uptake in news use when the pandemic broke, they now started actively avoiding some or most news about COVID-19, averting particular news topics (i.e., news related to the coronavirus), platforms (e.g., Facebook, Reddit, certain news apps) or news genres (such as talk shows or current affairs programs). Moreover, such news avoidance was long-lasting: when interviewed a few months after filling in the questionnaire, participants in the follow-up study noted their news intake was still limited.

Previous research has identified a lack of trust in news, media or journalists as motivation for users to avoid news (Newman and Fletcher 2017; Palmer and Toff 2020; Zerba 2011). These news avoiders, however, had high trust in media's COVID-19 reporting, by legacy media in particular. While some said they had encountered misinformation about the pandemic on Facebook or other social media, they perceived media bias as minimal. As a 60-year-old male argued: “I don't have any reason to assume it's unreliable. We’re not living in Belarus or wherever.” It should be noted, however, that media trust in The Netherlands consistently ranks amongst the highest in the world (Newman et al., 2020; Edelman Trust Barometer 2019) and political polarization is relatively low.

Furthermore, in contrast to studies that highlight the negative emotional costs of news consumption as reasons to turn away from news (Boukes and Vliegenthart 2017; Palmer and Toff 2020), for this group of interviewees, the decision to limit their intake of news was not motivated by anxiety or fear. Rather, they withdrew from the news due to irritation or even boredom caused by a perceived low quality of news. First, news avoiders experienced COVID-19 news as repetitive. A 74-year-old male for instance mentioned the ongoing discussions about the effectiveness of face masks for preventing infections that in his perception did not seem to reach any solid conclusions. Second, several interviewees perceived news media as contributing to anxiety about the virus in society. A 60-year-old male: “Important things, fine, but all those opinions and so-called virologists and who knows what, starting to voice their opinions, that's not necessary. That's all information that isn't useful and only causes confusion and panic.” Third, the contradictory information in news reporting about the coronavirus added to interviewees’ sense of insecurity and uncertainty. For example, a 20-year-old male noted that he had found it difficult to find information about the contemporary anti-coronavirus measures: “Especially in the beginning: where am I allowed to be, where am I not allowed to be, what is open, what is not open and for how long?” Finally, context and background were perceived to be lacking. A 78-year-old female argued that journalism could do a better job of emphasizing the urgency of following corona measures and explaining why doing so was so important.

The durability of this group's habit of selective news consumption might be explained by the relative stability of their everyday routines, such as work. Similar to stable news users, the pandemic had relatively limited immediate personal relevance for these participants and was not experienced as very stressful. As a 20-year-old male noted: “I haven't really been looking for information, because I thought it would turn out all right.” Moreover, others in the participants’ immediate surroundings, such as family or friends, experienced little anxiety about the virus either. Some interviewees explained that in the area where they lived, infection rates were low. This discrepancy between their lived experiences and the severity of the situations portrayed in news reporting contributed to perceptions of COVID-19 coverage as too sensationalist: they recognized the crisis might strongly affect others, but felt it did not concern them as much personally. Consequently, news avoiders did not feel compelled to engage in any extensive monitoring of pandemic-related news.

Followers Turned Avoiders

For followers turned avoiders, initial changes in news habits were short-lived. While, at first, this cluster felt compelled to stay up-to-date about the virus, often due to the impact of COVID-19 on their personal circumstances, this was quickly followed by exceptionally strong perceptions of information overload that made these participants tune out. A 26-year-old male: “My parents are quite old and are in a risk group because of their body weight as well. So yes, I’ve been worried about them. […] So I think, in the beginning, that I was checking the NOS [public broadcaster] website so often, that there's also a desire […] that by knowing as much as possible, you get a sense of control over the situation.” Yet, after a few weeks, he had started limiting his news intake: “At some point, you’ve been scared enough.”

Quitting or decreasing exposure to COVID-19 related news did typically not have one clear reason or cause, but can be characterized as a gradual shift, where perceptions of encountering similar news stories over and over again wore down users’ motivation to stay up-to-date. Compared to the previous cluster, the emotional costs of following news were also experienced as higher. They experienced negativity not just due to fears about their own life and that of their beloved, but also worried about the increasing polarization of public debate. Followers turned avoiders were critical about media coverage fostering differences in viewpoints about the government's response to the pandemic. A 71-year-old female argued experts invited in current affairs shows were making “too firm” claims and a 26-year-old male said he sometimes questioned their competence. Yet, both still felt a clear pull towards news. Compared to the news avoiders, this group had a stronger curiosity about current affairs. Moreover, they encountered more news unintentionally, for instance due to algorithmic suggestions by Google News, Facebook and Twitter.

Similar to news avoiders, the news habits of followers turned avoiders were situated in a relatively stable everyday context. This group noted that after their initial anxiety and worry, news about the virus did not seem as urgent anymore as the pandemic progressed. This sense was strengthened by the way friends and family dealt with the virus. A 71-year-old female: “When I looked at my children, they weren't panicking or whatever, they dealt with it calmly. […] So in that sense, life has sort of slowly moved on. And most people we know responded in the same way as we did. Who also thought: we’ve seen enough news, it's fine now.” Finally, the gradual re-opening of society after the first wave allowed both interviewees to tentatively resume their social and work life, albeit with distance measures in place. Thus, participants said to spend less time with media and to engage in a more diverse range of activities in their spare time again.

Stable News Users

This third cluster was characterized by the relative stability of their news routines. While their news habits were very diverse, stable news users saw little difference between how they used news during the pandemic and during other breaking events. While most of them were still obligated to work or study from home, otherwise, their everyday life had remained mostly stable and the virus itself had little impact on their daily routines. Moreover, like news avoiders, none of them mentioned infections or deaths within their social networks. Unlike the first two clusters, however, they were less affected by COVID19 news fatigue.

While stable news users did regularly consume news, they were not very engaged with journalism. They mostly monitored the news for coronavirus-related information that was of direct relevance, such as new anti-corona measures. Consequently, this group primarily expressed a need for practical information (“how we should deal with it”, a 54-year-old male, and “the measures and whether these have been effective”, 26-year-old male), as opposed to “personal stories” (22-year-old female) about the impact of the virus. Moreover, interviewees said to miss interpretation and context. A 37-year-old male: “About the number of hospital admissions, excess mortality, that kind of data - then the context of, hey, what's that like in a normal situation, what was it like last year? […] For example, you don't read anywhere about the number of people who recovered or the number of negative tests, so people who were tested but didn't have corona. And I think that- well, that context, interpreting that data- can help you to watch the news in a less negative and anxious [way].”

Of all clusters, this group displayed most dissatisfaction about journalism. An example is a 26-year-old male, who argued: “There's actually very little dissent given. It's primarily ‘well so many victims’ and yeah, I don't know … I feel the mainstream media might only give you one perspective. And that it might be a bit more diverse.” When asked to elaborate, however, he found it difficult to explain what information or viewpoints exactly he was missing. A 63-year-old female questioned the urgency of the coronavirus: “Because of the regular flu, there are also quite a number of deaths. But then you’re actually not hearing much about it. So if it's really that bad?” The stability stable news users experienced in their daily lives seemed to provide space to rational-critically reflect on the performance of news media.

Frequent News Users

For frequent news users, the pandemic had caused a spike in news usage in search for reassurance in uncertain times. This had a strong, long-lasting impact on their daily routines. At the time of the in-depth interviews, while participants’ children were back to school, most still worked from home and engaged in considerably less social or sports activities in their spare time. Many respondents felt isolated and were worried about the health of those around them, creating an everyday context sustaining their new news habits.

Unlike the previous groups, the coronavirus was a frequent topic of conversation amongst friends, family and colleagues. More generally, frequent news users saw journalism as having a socially-integrative function in their everyday life: “a window to the world outdoors,” as a 45-year-old male named it. Thus, compared to the other groups, this cluster encountered more social cues sustaining their habit of frequently consuming news. Moreover, frequent news users considered COVID-19 more personally relevant. The most extreme example was a 56-year-old female, whose mother-in-law passed away because of the coronavirus. With her husband working in elderly care, she had experienced the impact of COVID-19 around her: “We’ve seen enough. And what a horrible death it is, because they are so short of breath.”

Next to the health risks for themselves and their beloved, participants also worried about the spread of false information, the compliance of fellow citizens with anti-corona measures and the growing distrust in journalism. An 80-year-old female: “I still hear some people saying that it's all nonsense. […] As if those people just died, you know? […] And I notice that people, on the street, when—they moved aside in the beginning when you went for a walk. Now they’re just walking.” Consequently, interviewees such as a 45-year-old male critiqued what he perceived as too much attention for protest movements: “Right now there's a strong—there's a focus on the rebellion of groups protesting against the measures and them being compulsory, like Viruswaanzin [protest movement targeting coronavirus restrictions] and there are some others. […] I’m exaggerating it a bit, those riots, but it was in the news a lot, pushing news away.”

Frequent news users resembled the group of followers turned avoiders in their ambivalent attitude towards COVID-19 related news. As a 56-year-old female explained: I’m getting tired of talking about it, sometimes. But on the other hand, it's also very positive: it keeps you on edge. Participants stressed how for them, because of work or because they considered themselves part of the demographic most at risk, it was vital not to get infected. While this group followed the news to decrease their anxiety about the coronavirus, in practice, this had the opposite effect. For example, a 45-year-old male expressed the hope that he could consume less news in the future, because it gave him trouble sleeping. Despite its evident negative side-effects; however, they kept checking the news, although often at a lower frequency than during the first months of the pandemic. As a 44-year-old male mentioned: “You want a solution, that we can move forward. So still, you check whether there are any developments that day.” A 45-year-old male had found a middle ground between his need for comfort and his curiosity by watching the children's news together with his kids: “They are still delivering the message, but I notice that the children's news is more positive.”

News Junkies

Finally, news junkies showed a strong and durable uptake in news consumption. Despite COVID-19 fatigue, this group had sustained their pandemic-induced news habits and said to spend about as much time on news as they did at the start of the crisis. News junkies distinguished themselves from the other clusters in terms of their high frequency of use, the large number of titles and platforms consulted and their frequent engagement in active news practices, such as searching for more information or verifying news. Just like frequent news users, this group regularly followed news to get a grip on the pandemic and to make “an assessment where the major risks are” (52-year-old female).

These participants had a strong sense of compulsion to follow the news. Like the previous cluster, COVID-19 had a strong and longer-lasting effect on their daily routines, with grown children moving in back home, having to work from home, or still only leaving the house for grocery shopping and limiting social activities out of fear to get infected. One interviewee in this cluster lost her mother to the coronavirus. Another, a 58-year-old female, lived in Italy at the time COVID-19 arrived in Europe: “My job fully collapsed. I used to work 40–50 hours a week and nothing is left of that, so that was all very severe. So I’ve thrown myself on my phone, and especially the news about it.” While she noted she had “deliberately tried to wind it down,” she found it hard to do so. “It's quite difficult, because it's kind of addictive. But I don't feel like being on my phone all the time, and with things that I cannot control.”

People in this group considered themselves to be engaged citizens and generally thought it was important to follow the news, not just in relation to the virus, but more generally. Unlike stable news users just wanting personally relevant, basic facts, this group valued context and background information in news reporting in order to satisfy their curiosity and make more informed decisions. In the follow-up interviews, they emphasized traditional views on news consumption as an important part of informed citizenship, stressing the need to “form opinions about the world” (58-year-old female) and to consume a diverse range of media that highlight different perspectives on news (27-year-old female). In this regard, participants were positive about how news reporting had diversified after the first uncertain stage of the pandemic and covered more topics again. As a 59-year-old male complained: “In the beginning, 90–95% of the topics addressed COVID-19 or related issues—it's as if nothing [was] happening in the rest of the world anymore.”

Conclusion

At the start of the pandemic the need for information was high and people en masse turned to news media for information, as could be expected based on previous research (Ghersetti and Westlund 2016). All groups except from the stable news users passed the first two stages of habit formation (Lally and Gardner 2013) in which people decide to take action and also actively change their news use. However, there are clear differences in the third and fourth stage when news practices are repeated over time, develop into routines and automaticity is reached. The frequent news users and news junkies did form durable new habits which resulted in increased media and news use. They perceived rewards because COVID-19 information had practical value in their personal lives, news facilitated conversations and social relations, and it allowed them to relate to civic issues and public debate. However, news avoiders and followers turned avoiders did not perceive enduring rewards. They lapsed back into familiar patterns of news use after they got accustomed to the lockdown and felt better informed about the virus. They differed with respect to after how long this happened. Where the first group almost immediately returned to their old habits, the latter did at first regularly and repeatedly use more news, but then stopped. For them being informed first felt rewarding, but this turned into a negative thing when it felt like information overload. This interrupted initial habit formation before it stuck. For stable news users, finally, even a crisis as disruptive as the pandemic hardly changed their news habits at all.

What are then the affective, social and contextual cues that stimulate or hinder news habit formation? We conclude that four variables explain if new habits are formed or not. Our research first confirms that the stability of the everyday lives of the respondents is indeed a strong predictor for habit formation. Groups that felt that the pandemic only had a limited effect on their daily routines, in particular stable news users and news avoiders, did not develop new habits or quickly returned to pre-pandemic patterns of news use. The groups that started to follow more news, and turned this into a habit, experienced severe changes in their daily lives. This new context fostered new habits. Generational effects play in here: people who were retired felt, in general, less impact in their daily lives than those with work and children.

A second strong predictor are the social cues to which people are exposed. Those groups in which people exchanged a lot of opinions and information with others felt more inclined to closely follow the news, especially when their contacts were also concerned about the pandemic and encountered strong personal effects. In the social networks of stable news users and news avoiders there was little concern about the virus which makes that they felt less inclined to follow journalism, which was enforced by their negative feelings about the news as repetitive, confusing or sensationalist.

This is related to a third variable: the level of stress people encountered as a result of the pandemic. We observe different patterns here. For followers turned avoiders the stress they experienced from more intensively following the news, lead to a return to their old habits. For frequent news users and news junkies increased stress levels resulted in a bigger intake of news. The last group was reflexive about the addictive effects this had and possible negative effects on their wellbeing. Some of them shared that therefore they actually wanted to quit this newly developed habit again. Recent research during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that people who perceive media use negatively indeed have a higher risk on developing distress and anxiety (Levaot, Greene, and Palgi 2021).

Fourth, affective cues boost habit formation, both negatively and positively. For some, dissatisfaction with journalism led to avoiding it, while others felt emotionally involved, not just with the news itself but also more generally with the role journalism has in democracy.

This paper provides the first research into how news habits develop in a real-life and disruptive crisis. Our results contribute to understanding the dimensions and reasons behind habitual news use, something that is often assumed in journalism research but is yet understudied. We build upon research from psychology on habit formation in general, mostly studied in the context of health interventions and in an experimental setting. Our study confirms insights from this research in a real-life environment. We account for the limitations of our approach, though. Our data are self-reported and respondents sometimes indicated that they found it difficult to reflect on their (unconscious) habits and thus might subsequently rationalize them. Moreover, and different from experimental research, it is given our method impossible to measure and quantify changes in habits. We therefore recommend follow-up studies to further explore news habit formation, especially in relation to stress and anxiety as cues. Nevertheless, we found clear patterns in our study that offer a starting point for such future research.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dutch news organizations DPG Media, NDC mediagroep, KRO-NCRV and AVROTROS for their help with participant recruitment for the first study in this project, by distributing our questionnaire via their websites, Facebook pages and newsletters. In particular, we are grateful to Niels Rutjes, Erik van Gruijthuijsen, Jan van Dun, Petra Moonen and Marieke Woltil for their support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Appendix—Open questions questionnaire

Respondents were asked to reply to the following open questions, providing them with ample opportunity to explain or elaborate on their answer. Many respondents offered indeed lengthy answers:

1. What are the most important changes in your daily life since the corona crisis? Describe your situation now and the situation before the crisis.

2. Has your media use changed since the corona crisis? Did you for example start using different media (such as websites, apps, social media), devices (such as television, radio or smartphone) or media content (such as specific programs, websites or newspapers)? If so, describe these changes below.

3. Did how often or how long you are using media change since the corona crisis, in comparison to the time period before? If so, describe these changes below.

4. Did you develop new digital skills or knowledge since the corona crisis? If so, which and how did you learn these?

5. Do you expect your media use will change again when the corona crisis has ended? Why or why not? In what way?

6. Do you follow the latest news about the corona crisis? If so, how and how often?

7. Do you feel you are up-to-date about the coronavirus situation? Are you satisfied with the quality of news and the amount of news that you are receiving?

8. Has your news use changed, if you compare it to the time period before the corona crisis? If so, how?

9. Did you start paying more for news and journalism since the corona crisis? If so, why and what for?

10. Do you encounter fake news about the corona crisis? If so, can you give an example of such a fake news story and how you recognized it was fake?

11. Is there anything else that you would like to mention about changes in your media use during the corona crisis? If so, write your comments below.