“Yes, I Saw It – But Didn’t Read It…” A Cross-Country Study, Exploring Relationships between Incidental News Exposure and News Use across Platforms

Today, people are increasingly exposed to news on various channels without actively seeking it. However, less is known about the link between the so-called incidental news exposure (INE) and actual news consumption. Using a two-wave panel data from 18 countries around the world, we study the so-far under researched relation between INE and news consumption across various platforms over time. In doing so, we control for key micro-level variables such as news use, political interest and trust in media as well as macro-level variables, including internet connectivity, GDP, press freedom and literacy rate. The analyses yield an optimistic picture, showing that INE plays a bridging function across countries, leading to actual news consumption on traditional, online and social media platforms. However, trust in news and political interest do not seem to play key moderating roles. Instead, individual analyses per country imply that the link between INE and actual news use is more apparent for online and social media news platforms, and particularly in countries where general social media usage has been reported to be considerably high (e.g., Brazil, Philippines, Taiwan, UK and USA).

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Digital Journalism: Nadine Strauß, Brigitte Huber & Homero Gil de Zúñiga (2020) “Yes, I Saw It – But Didn’t Read It…” A Cross-Country Study, Exploring Relationships between Incidental News Exposure and News Use across Platforms, Digital Journalism, 8:9, 1181-1205, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2020.1832130 It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Work Title “Yes, I Saw It – But Didn’t Read It…” A Cross-Country Study, Exploring Relationships between Incidental News Exposure and News Use across Platforms
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Nadine Strauß
  2. Brigitte Huber
  3. Homero Gil de Zúñiga
License CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Digital Journalism
Publication Date October 15, 2020
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1832130
Deposited November 12, 2021

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  • Added Creator Brigitte Huber
  • Added Creator Homero Gil de Zúñiga
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