Easing Political Digestion: The Effects of News Curation on Citizens’ Behavior

ABSTRACT

We focus on “curated news:” a collection of links delivered to one’s inbox, phone, or RSS feed. These digests vary in the extent to which they contextualize the information they present. Some offer headlines with links to the full article, while others summarize and interpret the story for the reader. Using a survey experiment, we vary the amount of contextualization present in a set of curated links. We find that increased curation decreases the likelihood that individuals will seek out the original source of political information, but it does lead people to recall more information about the issues being discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Curation
• experiment
• new media
• online journalism
• political learning

Notes

1. We lost slightly over 100 participants by removing individuals who were never exposed to the treatment. Because we asked about demographic characteristics at the end of the survey, we cannot pinpoint ways in which these 110 people might look systematically different from those we kept in the analysis. It’s possible that they dropped because we were paying comparatively little money for the length of the survey.

2. Unfortunately, time and resource limitations prevented us from pretesting the differences in tone, so we cannot be sure that participants interpreted tone the way that we expected.

3. Searches for “net neutrality” and “Keystone XL” in the LexisNexis Academic newspaper database between February 20, 2015, and March 23, 2015, produce approximately 774 and 748 results, respectively.

4. Specific question wording is available in Appendix 2.

5. We acknowledge that the distinction should no longer be measured only as the difference between Internet and print/television usage, but the usage of Internet-only Web sources and legacy media sources’ Web sites. However, for consistency and comparability with other surveys of media use, we wanted to maintain similar question wording.

6. Frequency of media use (Internet, newspaper, news aggregator, etc.) was measured using a four-point scale, in which 1 indicated that a respondent never used a particular type of media and 4 indicated regular use.

7. This does not necessarily reduce concerns about whether 46–92 seconds constitute an adequate amount of exposure to the treatments. However, beyond examining outcome measures such as clicking links or recalling information, we do not have an effective strategy for assessing the strength of participant engagement with the treatment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Sydnor

Emily Sydnor is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Southwestern University. Her research interests are in the effects of psychological and communication factors on perceptions of political incivility. Danielle Psimas is a 2015 graduate of the University of Virginia with bachelor of arts degrees in both government and foreign affairs. We thank the Political Psychology Working Group at the University of Virginia for their funding of and feedback on this project. We would especially like to recognize Arthur Beckman, Paul Freedman, Nicole Pankiewicz, Emily Pears, and Ariadne Vromen for their feedback and suggestions. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Political Communication pre-conference to the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting and the 2016 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting.

Danielle Psimas

Emily Sydnor is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Southwestern University. Her research interests are in the effects of psychological and communication factors on perceptions of political incivility. Danielle Psimas is a 2015 graduate of the University of Virginia with bachelor of arts degrees in both government and foreign affairs. We thank the Political Psychology Working Group at the University of Virginia for their funding of and feedback on this project. We would especially like to recognize Arthur Beckman, Paul Freedman, Nicole Pankiewicz, Emily Pears, and Ariadne Vromen for their feedback and suggestions. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Political Communication pre-conference to the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting and the 2016 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting.