How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians. The News Study Report.

This report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gathers information and engages with news in the digital age. Included are results from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state diversity. A computational analysis was conducted of Twitter data associated with the survey respondents and a larger Twitter panel of more than 135,000 college-age persons. Findings indicated two-thirds of the survey respondents received news from at least five pathways to news during a given week with peers, social media, professors, and online newspapers most commonly used. News was overwhelming for two-thirds of the respondents (68%), so they were selective about what they read or viewed, following topics meeting their immediate needs, i.e., weather and traffic reports, news about national politics, or political memes that appealed to their appreciation of satire. Some 58% shared news on social media during the past week, often to pass on information they thought friends and followers should know. Most students defined news content broadly and no longer see news as a cohesive, authoritative report as prior generations may have defined it. Many invested time and critical thinking to assemble, compare, and interpret news across sources. Social media and the open Web make traditional standards of evaluation increasingly problematic. While most believed in the core principles of journalism, and considered news necessary in a democracy (82%), many students were dissatisfied with the quality of news available today when media and political polarization were particularly acute. Distrust of news stemmed, in part, from the rise of “fast news” — oversimplified and fragmented news snippets released throughout a day — and the “fake news” phenomenon; only 14% felt very confident they could tell “fake news” from “real news.” Six recommendations are included for educators, journalists, and librarians working to make students effective news consumers. To explore the implications of this study’s findings, concise commentaries from leading thinkers in education, libraries, media research, and journalism are included. ABOUT THE NEWS STUDY The News Study Research Report has a Creative Commons (CC) license of “CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.” This license allows others to share, copy, adapt, and build upon the survey data non-commercially, as long as the source — Project Information Literacy — is credited and users license their new creations under the identical terms. 52 THE NEWS STUDY REPORT | OCTOBER 16, 2018 The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and a grant from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the largest division of the American Library Association, have generously funded this research on students and news consumption with support from Snell Library and the College of Arts and Media Design (CAMD), both at Northeastern University, and Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Principal Investigator Alison J. Head, Ph.D., Project Information Literacy, Executive Director, alison@projectinfolit.org Co-Investigators John Wihbey, Assistant Professor, Journalism and New Media, Northeastern University, j.wihbey@northeastern.edu P. Takis Metaxas, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Science, Wellesley College, pmetaxas@wellesley.edu Margy MacMillan, Senior Researcher, Project Information Literacy, margymac@gmail.com Dan Cohen, Ph.D., Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Libraries, Northeastern University, d.cohen@northeastern.edu Research Analysts Alaina Bull, First Year Experience Librarian, The University of Washington Tacoma Erica DeFrain, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries Kirsten Hostetler, Instruction and Outreach Faculty, Central Oregon Community College Neeley Silberman, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Saint Mary’s College of California Michele Van Hoeck, Dean of Libraries, California State University Maritime Academy Computational Analysis Kenny Joseph, Ph.D., Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Lazer Lab, The Network Science Institute, Northeastern University David Nasatir, Ph.D., Visiting Professor, U.C. Berkeley, Sociology (Retired) Graphic Design and Data Analytics Steven Braun, Data Analytics and Visualization Specialist, Northeastern University Libraries, Digital Scholarship Group, Snell Library Kirsten Hostetler, Instruction and Outreach Faculty, Central Oregon Community College