The Effects of Scrolling Headlines v. Reading Stories on Public Opinion

• In Event: Non-Stop: Platform Affordances, Diffusion, and the News

Abstract

One affordance of online news, and news portals in particular, is the enhanced “scrollability” of news. A 2014 study by the American Press Institute finds that 1 in 6 adults do not read beyond the headline. The consequences of this affordance - and its ability to enhance attention to headlines over stories - is poorly understood in general and specifically as it pertains to election news coverage.

In a saturated media environment, news producers compete for scarce attention to generate revenue. Emotional, hyperbolic, and negative headlines are designed to grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to click on the story. However, the headline does not always line up with the substance of the story. In fact, stories featuring positive content have negative headlines 31% of the time (Reis, et al, 2015) leading those who read only the headline to have a different take-away than those who read the article.

In a media environment where headlines are crafted to attract attention, and where a majority only read the headline, what are the consequences of headline scrolling on public levels of trust, fear, and concern during an election? How do scrollers compare to those who click?

To test these questions, we use an innovative dataset gathered from a news portal study conducted in the lead up to the 2016 election from May 29 to June 5, 2016. Subjects were recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 1,395) and asked to a use a news portal made to mimic Google News for one week that tracked which stories subjects encountered and clicked. The stories used in the portal were pulled directly from Google News using a PHP script that checked RSS feeds of Google News every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day. At the end of the week, subjects were asked to complete a post-test within 36 hours of the close of the portal (final N = 897).

In this paper, we will first examine the headline content subjects encountered to better understand the characteristics of headlines clicked or not clicked. Second, we will sort users by their portal behaviors, “clickers” or “scrollers,” developing profiles of the average user type. Finally, leveraging the fact that these two groups naturally encounter distinct information environments, we will use a matching design to compare scrollers and clickers for differential levels of trust in media, trust in government, overall concern, and political knowledge – all known factors that impact political behavior in an election.

Authors

• Jessica T. Feezell, University of New Mexico

• Kathleen Searles, Louisiana State University

• Joshua P. Darr, Louisiana State University

• Raymond James Pingree, Louisiana State University

• Mingxiao Sui, Ferrum College

• Brian Watson