Consumption of public affairs online

People remember more public affairs and other types information from newspapers more than any other medium. However, research is unclear to what affect the presentation of information online will have on news users. The fear with the move online is that people will only read news that directly interests them, rather than news that affects the nation and the world. Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor, has argued that the internet may be become an echo chamber because people will only seek information that aligns with their interests. In the past, newspapers provided cues as to what issues were considered important. In the online realm, there may be fewer cues because the vast amount of information available on a home page and because people arrive to the online publication by going through other routes than the home page such as search engines, RSS feeds, and blogs.

An interesting survey by De Waal and Shoenback in Mass Communication & Society found that online news readers were just as familiar with public affairs topics as newspaper readers. The authors suggest that people may run inadvertently accross a diversity of topics through other means such as news aggregators (e.g., Yahoo News, Google News). The authors also argue that print newspapers need to begin differianting their product from their online one, perhaps by focusing on indepth coverage of public affairs topics. Writing for two different publication types would be difficult for journalists to do the because of downsizing and lack of resources. The need to create efficient content is one reason behind the lack of variability between offline and online publication types.

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