Princeton University, Princeton, USA.
New York University, New York, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Nov 13;14(1):27780. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-77303-y.
A growing concern is that as local newspapers disappear, communities lose trusted gatekeepers and develop information voids, creating openings for misinformation to thrive. Previous work has not evaluated whether residents of news deserts have developed different information acquisition habits. We fill this gap by directly comparing information consumption and referral patterns inside and outside of news deserts in a novel dataset of engagement with online media by millions of users on the Edge browser. We find little evidence that those in news deserts consume more low-quality sites or are more likely to be referred to low-quality sites from search engines or social media. We find some evidence that those in news deserts do consume more national news than locations with local media outlets. These results contribute to our understanding of how the loss of local newspapers has impacted online information acquisition.
人们越来越担心的是，随着地方报纸的消失，社区失去了可信赖的把关人，出现了信息空白，为错误信息的传播创造了机会。之前的研究尚未评估新闻荒漠地区的居民是否已经形成了不同的信息获取习惯。我们通过直接比较新闻荒漠内外的信息消费和推荐模式，填补了这一空白。我们在 Edge 浏览器的一个新的在线媒体参与的数据集上进行了研究，该数据集涉及数百万用户。我们发现几乎没有证据表明新闻荒漠地区的居民会更多地访问低质量网站，或者更有可能从搜索引擎或社交媒体上被推荐到低质量网站。我们发现一些证据表明，新闻荒漠地区的居民比有地方媒体的地区更关注国家新闻。这些结果有助于我们了解地方报纸的消失对在线信息获取产生了怎样的影响。
