Day One: It started with a simple assignment — keep a log of all the news you consume in one day from the moment you wake up until the moment you put your cell phone down on the bedside night stand.
The nine of us in the Reynolds School of Journalism graduate program were given a week to complete the assignment, which also required keeping detailed notes about the time of consumption, duration of engagement, the source of content, and a brief summary of each topic consumed. During Tuesday’s class we would analyze our results.
For many in the class, including myself, the assignment was welcomed relief from the weekly readings and essays. But as Tuesday’s class came and went, I noticed something in the analysis of our results that bugged me for two reasons. The first was because I couldn’t seem to leave simple enough alone. Graduate school is challenging enough without assigning myself my own homework.
But there was a question asked of us Tuesday regarding the source of our news that I didn’t think got to the heart of the issue: “How much of our news came from traditional, brick-and-mortar institutions (i.e. The New York Times or the local/regional newspaper) vs. independent sources such as The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed or Circa?”
Of the nine of us in the class, five (including myself) said the majority of the news they recorded came from institutional sources. In my case, it was 60 percent, which would have been higher if I had not counted as ‘news’ things like checking my Yahoo! fantasy football app for player updates (I did my news journal on Saturday when I usually tinker with my lineup for the last time).
The nine of us hardly qualify as a representative sample, but as I looked at the timelines each of us had written on whiteboards around the room, a more important question about how each of us got to those institutional sources was more revealing. The majority of those institutional news stories were accessed through sites like Twitter, Facebook and the Huffington Post, places that curate content from around the web. No one got their news directly from the source.
The following day I tracked my news consumption habits again, but this time I also combed through the first 20 stories in my Facebook feed to see what was being put there for me.
To begin with my online news consumption Tuesday, 63 percent of the stories I read were accessed from Twitter and Facebook. But the content actually originated from sources such as NPR, NY Times, ProPublica, and Education Week. The only news I got directly from the source was from the Weather Channel’s app and the Associated Press app on my iPhone.
Of the first 20 stories in my newsfeed at 8:53 a.m. Tuesday, 14 contained links to other news websites. Six of the stories came from various NPR accounts I follow.
In a recent Poynter Institute article about Facebook algorithms and news consumption, journalists at the Online News Association conference in Chicago asked Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Liz Heron, if the social media site decides what news users see in their feed? The answer was no, Facebook does not control it. We, the users, do.
Which led me to wonder: Was more than half my news feed’s first 20 stories from NPR because NPR just posted more often than anything else in my feed? Perhaps. But, I intentionally didn’t reorganize my feed to “Most Recent,” so that doesn’t seem like a satisfying answer.
What seems more likely is that the more I click on NPR articles from my news feed, the more frequently that Facebook is including NPR articles right back in to my news feed. Even more discouraging is that only one of those NPR articles was hard news (Ebola). The rest were easily digestible stories such as the woman who lied about her age on Facebook because her birth year was beyond what Facebook made available to new users.
To return to the Poynter article above, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal sums up my fear about the results of the subconscious decisions I make every time I access Facebook: “If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?”
It’s a tricky set of questions to concerns that neither Heron nor Madrigal address properly. It isn’t simply a question of whether or not Facebook gets to decide what matters. One way to think about it is that Facebook is enabling users to shy away from important, hard-news content through algorithms that adjust the content based on prior activity. But, Madrigal is also wrong to solely blame Facebook because it is also the user, like me, who is not paying as much attention to my own activity as I thought I was.
It is easy to see from two days of news journals that I seek out hard news. But, in the case of sites such as Facebook and Twitter, two of the predominant resources I use for news access, how much hard news am I missing out on because I unwittingly let Facebook hold my hand along the way?
And so it is that I have given myself my own graduate school assignment where none was required. My intention is to spend one week only accessing news from sites that curate the news for me. During the second week, I will only access the news from the institutions themselves. As frequently as I can I will document the results here in an attempt to better understand the impact curation has on my news consumption, as well as to explore and write about different ways news sites balance curation with direct contact with their users.
Ultimately, the goal will be to become more responsible for my own news literacy than Facebook or Madrigal give me credit for.
