Realizing Good Intentions? A Field Experiment of Slow News Consumption and News Fatigue

ABSTRACT

Slow news can be seen as a potential solution to one of the central problems currently pertaining to journalism, news fatigue. By publishing fewer stories and providing news curation, slow news media offer an alternative to the overwhelming supply of fast news in today's media environment. However, we lack knowledge about the antecedents and consequences of slow news consumption: who are willing to use this type of journalism and, if they are, how will it affect their news fatigue? In order to examine these questions, this study presents a longitudinal field experiment with two survey waves and tracking data of the respondents’ consumption of a free membership to a Danish slow news media. Results show that slow news is most likely to attract consumers already engaged with news and that consumption to some extent is increasing their news fatigue. Thereby, the study illustrates how the good intentions of the slow journalism movement are not easily fulfilled.

KEYWORDS:

• Slow news
• news fatigue
• news avoidance
• audience research
• media effects
• field experiment

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Zetland and Userneeds for collaborations on the data collection. In addition, the author would like to thank Lene Aarøe, Robert Klemmesen, and the Journalism Research Group at University of Southern Denmark for valuable feedback on the study.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Political Science and Public Management at the University of Southern Denmark.