News You Can Use
News You Can Use
How do you get the news? With the technology of today, people can get news practically minutes after it happens in a plethora of forms. Originally, the daily newspaper was one of the only ways you could get accurate news, but now you can find the news on television and on the internet as well. Because of this, you can access news at any time of the day at your leisure or convenience. A recent study has proven that people who read the news on the internet have a greater attention span than others who read print. A survey done by the Poynter Institute in Florida called the EyeTrack07 survey, determined that online readers read seventy-seven precent of what they actually chose to read, and that newspaper readers only read an average of sixty-two percent. Tabloid readers only read about 57 percent of a chosen tabloid. The study found that when people chose something particular online to read, two-thirds of them would read the entire text. It also found that people would actually rather see documentary news photographs than pictures that were staged or taken in a studio, and that people preferred to read things that were written in lists or question and answer format.
Being a busy college student, it is usually hard for me to sit down every day and watch the news on television. I do not have much interest in carrying around a big newspaper because they usually have articles in them that I would prefer not to read, and things like sports statistics and stock market quotes. When I spend most of my time at a computer anyways, either working on some type of work for school or visiting websites such as Facebook or Myspace, it is not difficult to look for news that I can use, or that I am interested in. Also, a lot of the time I am around others using their computers as well, and when any of us find an interesting news story online, we normally have the urge to share it with everyone else. One night while I was working on my computer in the lobby of the dorm building I live in, I was also with a friend named Lauren. While I was doing homework, she noticed an article online that although was not extremely informative, was definitely interesting. Lauren got my attention and told me about how Keith Richards was found to be snorting cocaine that he had mixed his fathers ashes into. It was shocking and not as important as a lot of the news going on in the world, but the point is that it was still news, and it was brought to Lauren and I through the internet.
Although some people disagree, I believe that the internet is replacing a lot of alternative methods of getting news because of its convenience and the wide variety it offers. The study found that around seventy-five percent of print readers read in a methodical way when compared to half of the online readers. They usually read straight through something from top to bottom and sometimes even re-read the material they are going through. Online readers were found to scan what they would read, no matter the format it was written in. It was discovered that when people were asked questions about news they had read, they were able to answer more questions correctly if the information was presented to them in a different way than the traditional narrative that we have all come to know. For example, if something was presented in a type of timeline or short sidebar, it was usually easier to remember. I would have to say that I agree with this study, as I get almost all of my news from the internet.
For more information on this subject, visit http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?alias=web-news-readers-have-gre&chanID=sa003 or http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=120458.