Why some people don't actually want impartial news
Plus: Insight on retaining news subscribers, how audiences think journalists are influenced, and political journalism changes for the better
Welcome to another edition of RQ1! For those who are new, we are Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis — two former journalists turned academics, now teaching and researching at Washington and Lee University (Mark) and the University of Oregon (Seth).
In trying to keep pace with all the new research about news and journalism, we hope to give you each month (or so) a quick breakdown of a notable piece of new research, and also to highlight other interesting work you might want to check out. We can’t cover it all, of course, so consider this a sampling of some of the most interesting findings in news research.
If you have ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply — we’d love to hear from you. And if you enjoy this, please share the newsletter with your colleagues so they can sign up. If someone has shared this email with you, then you can subscribe here:
What shapes audience attitudes about impartiality in news? Data from 40 countries
Impartiality has long been a central value — perhaps the central value — of journalism in many countries, and for decades scholars have examined how journalists work to produce neutral, balanced coverage that avoids taking sides.
But looking at it from the public’s perspective, how much does the audience really want impartial news? Or, more to the point, how might different types of news consumers — including those living in different countries, with all the political variations that go along with that — feel differently about impartiality in news?
In the social media era especially, there are some growing indications that some people (perhaps a rather sizable group, in fact) may prefer to get news that openly shares their perspectives. So, what might individual- and country-level factors suggest about such preferences, and what could those clues, in turn, indicate about how news media organizations might think about the way they do their work and connect with audiences in a time of ebbing trust in journalism around much of the world?
A team of researchers has offered a compelling view into these questions. In their recent study in the International Journal of Communication, Camila Mont'Alverne, Amy Ross A. Arguedas, Sumitra Badrinathan, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen used survey data from the 2020 Reuters Institute Digital News Report to explore audience attitudes toward impartial news across 40 countries, involving more than 80,000 respondents in all. They built their analysis around a question that asked people to identify whether they preferred “getting news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view” or “getting news from sources that share your point of view.”
Perhaps not surprising, most people still say they prefer impartial reporting. Across all countries studied, a slight majority — just over half — said they favored news from sources that had no particular point of view. In contrast, around a quarter of respondents explicitly said they preferred news that shared their own viewpoint.
But while impartiality still wins overall, it is all the nuances below the surface that deserve real attention here. The researchers identified specific groups who consistently expressed preferences for viewpoint-driven rather than impartial news. These groups include the highly politically engaged with strong partisan leanings (either left or right), younger people and those who rely on social media for news, and those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, including women and people with lower levels of education and income.
The authors suggest that each of these groups might gravitate to news that shares their perspectives for different reasons.
For example, for politically engaged people — folks who follow a lot of news, hold ardent political opinions, or actively participate in politics — impartiality might feel less satisfying because it offers less confirmation of their strongly held viewpoints. Plus, they might simply be looking to supplement a media diet that already includes a heavy dose of ‘regular’ impartial news.
Meanwhile, for younger audiences, particularly those who primarily get their news from social media, impartial journalism may seem less attractive for different reasons: It may be seen as overly formal, distant, or lacking in authenticity, especially when compared to the overt opinions and personal experiences that define the social web.
Perhaps most strikingly, the study also highlights how women and people from lower socioeconomic groups show a clear preference for viewpoint-driven news. The researchers suggest that for these audiences, the attraction to partial news might stem from longstanding frustrations with traditional media. Historically, journalism has been criticized for subtly reflecting the viewpoints and interests of more privileged social groups. Women, minorities, and economically disadvantaged communities have often felt excluded or unfairly portrayed in mainstream media coverage. Consequently, impartial news might not seem all that impartial to these groups. Instead, news that explicitly aligns with their perspectives and openly addresses their experiences could feel more relevant and trustworthy.
Beyond individual preferences, the researchers also investigated how broader national contexts shape attitudes toward impartiality. They found notable differences among countries based on three main factors: the quality of democracy, the number of news sources used, and perceived journalistic independence.
Countries with strong democratic traditions, such as Sweden and Norway, showed high levels of support for impartial news. In these nations, impartial journalism may be closely linked with democratic stability, transparency, and civic accountability. By contrast, countries deemed to be weaker democracies, such as Turkey and Kenya, showed much lower preferences for impartial news. In such places, audiences appear to view mainstream ‘impartial’ reporting with skepticism — perhaps because they suspect it’s influenced by political elites or state authorities.
The number of news brands used by the typical news consumer also seems to matter. In places where people report turning to a wide array of different news sources, such as Kenya, audiences are less interested in impartial news from any single source — perhaps because there are so many options to choose from. By contrast, in countries dominated by fewer, often publicly funded media outlets — such as the BBC in the United Kingdom — audiences strongly favor impartial reporting from these major providers. They might expect neutrality because their options for other perspectives seem limited.
Finally, the study found that the perception of journalistic independence shapes preferences as well. Countries where journalists themselves report substantial political interference — places like Malaysia and Turkey — tend to show lower preferences for impartial news. In these environments, audiences often distrust supposedly neutral news, believing it’s covertly influenced by political agendas. Instead, people seek out clearly viewpoint-driven sources that they perceive as more honest and transparent.
What to make of these findings? Despite impartiality’s enduring appeal, the research makes clear that the traditional ideal faces significant challenges — both because of individual-level differences and because of significant country-by-country distinctions. News organizations seeking to grow their audiences, particularly with younger people and socially disadvantaged groups they have struggled to reach and represent in the past, may need to think differently about what it means to build trust with a wider group of people. And journalists operating in politically polarized or authoritarian contexts must carefully consider how impartiality is perceived. If audiences suspect impartiality as a cover for hidden biases or government influence, journalists may need to emphasize transparency, explicitly demonstrating their independence and clearly communicating their editorial processes and values.
Ultimately, this research offers a call for adaptation: “Although impartiality is sometimes assumed to be a universal principle of journalism,” the authors write, “it is clearly not valued in the same way in all places, as it certainly has not historically been practiced in the same way in all places. It is up to news organizations and journalists, therefore, to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.”
Research roundup
The role of syndicated content in retaining digital newspaper subscribers: Evidence from clickstream and subscription data
Jaewon Royce Choi, Su Jung Kim, Yayu Zhou & Edward C. Malthouse
Digital Journalism
Unveiling the dynamics of newspaper circulation and subscription prices in the digital era
Kari Anne Fange & Bjørn Tore Østeraas
Journal of Media Business Studies
As revenue for many news organizations continues to shift from an advertising-based model to one oriented around subscriptions, those organizations are continually looking for better answers to the questions about how to attract and retain subscribers. What sort of content induces people to subscribe? Is that different from the content that’s most effective in retaining those subscribers? And what about price — what price point is best for drawing in subscribers while maintaining a reasonable revenue flow?
Organizations can draw data from their own subscribers to answer these questions, but two new studies use data from across multiple organizations to help provide a broader picture. The first looks at the role of syndicated content in retaining subscribers. Syndicated content — from news agencies and other content providers — has often gotten a bad rap from researchers, who have seen heavy reliance on syndication as an indicator of reduced resources and increased homogenization. And previous research has shown that syndicated content is less likely to be shared online.
Perhaps in part because of this, research has also found that publishers tend to put syndicated content outside of their paywalls in order to increase traffic. But Choi and his colleagues used clickstream data from two local US news sites to look at whether syndicated content affected regular readership and retention among people who had already subscribed.
They found some interesting differences among types of subscribers. For inactive and light readers, syndicated content was significantly more likely to make them regular readers. But it didn’t have the same effect for heavy readers, who, as the authors speculated, might be more likely to be newshounds who are already consuming that kind of news elsewhere. In fact, for heavy readers, syndicated content increased the risks of subscription cancellation. Based on this, the authors recommended segmented recommendations and newsletters based on subscriber engagement — “for instance, feeding a balanced diet of local and general news to inactive and light news readers, and more local, differentiated content to heavy readers.”
The second study looked at how price elasticity of demand has changed over time for newspaper subscriptions — in other words, have print and digital newspaper subscribers become more or less sensitive to price changes in their subscription decisions? To determine this, Fange and Østeraas used circulation and revenue data from across the Norwegian newspaper industry from 2010 to 2019.
They found that newspaper subscribers have become increasingly sensitive to price changes, and that this price sensitivity is amplified in markets where there is substantial competition. This diverged from previous research that found newspaper subscription demand to be relatively inelastic, as subscribers responded less negatively to price changes. But this study found that price has become a greater sticking point for subscribers over the years, unfortunately making economies of scale a greater competitive advantage in those markets.
Money, politics, or ethics? Perceptions of the factors influencing journalists’ work
Efrat Nechushtai & Yossi David
The International Journal of Press/Politics
Many journalists have become accustomed to what scholars call the “folk theories” behind audiences’ declining trust in the news media: That they’re blinded by personal bias or hatred for particular politicians; that they’re just trying to sensationalize stories to get clicks and sell more subscriptions; that they’re in a political or socioeconomic bubble, isolated from “ordinary people.”
Researchers have conducted numerous studies comparing audiences’ expectations and perceptions of journalism to journalists’ understanding of themselves, with a nuanced variety of results, with some studies indicating a wide gap in perceptions and others showing a bit more overlap than we might expect.
Nechushtai and David’s study compares audiences’ and journalists’ views in one particular area: journalists’ autonomy, or put negatively, the degree to which they’re influenced by various factors. They surveyed U.S. adults in 2021 about five areas of potential influence on journalists’ work, encompassing 19 total questions: political, economic, organizational, procedural (information access, time, resources, ethics, and the law), and personal networks (friends and family, and peers at journalists’ own organizations and others). They then compared the results to a 2013 survey asking U.S. journalists the same questions.
Audiences perceived all five factors as influencing journalists’ work at least at a moderate level, with procedural and organizational influences ranking the highest. Democrats were slightly more likely to see political, economic, and procedural influence, while women and younger adults were less likely to see influence from politics and personal networks.
Unsurprisingly, journalists saw themselves as much less influenced than audiences. The gap was especially strong in economic and political influences, where journalists saw relatively little influence and audiences saw quite a bit. (The authors noted, though, that a lot may have changed about audience perceptions and political forces in the eight-year gap between the two surveys, which included the entire first Trump administration.)
There was one area in which journalists saw themselves as more influenced than audiences did: procedural influences. The authors suggested that this might have simply been because audiences aren’t as familiar with the technical aspects of journalists’ daily work. The authors concluded that journalists need to be sensitive to these gaps — and the differences among their diverse audiences in perceptions about journalism — as they communicate the nature and value of their work.
How the engagement journalism movement is changing political news content: An applied-research study
Sue Robinson, Margarita Orozco, & Joshua P. Darr
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Scholars and critics have been lambasting the traditional ways of doing political journalism for decades, with its framing of politics as a horse race and its general lack of inclusion of the public’s perspective. The University of Wisconsin’s Sue Robinson has advocated for an alternative to that model: what she calls engagement journalism, which involves “collaborating with community organizations, hosting forums and other events to connect stakeholders together, mediating between opposing viewpoints, and helping communities find solutions for problems.”
These strategies, and others like them, have been proposed in many ways over the years. But the routines and conventions of traditional political journalism have proved quite stubborn despite numerous efforts at reform. In this study, Robinson and her colleagues put one significant effort to the test: A series of 21 workshops with 22 local news organizations run by Solutions Journalism Network, Hearken, and Trusting News in the runup to the 2022 U.S. midterms. Journalists were trained in the workshops to move away from horse-race framing, increase transparency, offer more solution-oriented stories, and highlight more community members’ perspectives and experiences.
The researchers’ goal was simple: Determine if that training worked. They analyzed more than 1,000 articles from 19 news organizations that participated in the training, and they saw significant changes between 2018 and 2022. The number of stories framing politics as a game or horse race fell, as organizations worked to “provide a more complicated narrative that builds knowledge in new ways.” The number of stories with transparency information was up as well, as was the number of stories that indicated an innovative means of engaging with community members’ perspectives.
Inclusion of solutions in stories was up too, though not to as a great of a degree as the other areas. (The authors suspected it was because solutions were more nebulous and harder to implement, and because the solutions workshops came last in the training schedule.) Though of course they couldn’t attribute all changes in coverage to the training workshops, they documented numerous examples of news organizations that had made substantial changes to the way they covered the campaign.
On the whole, it was extremely encouraging news for those who have been frustrated with the status quo in political journalism, and especially for those who have been working to change it. It’s rare that we see a statement so sweeping and positive in the conclusion of a study: “These data support other evidence being collected that widespread engagement training is changing the look and feel of journalism, fundamentally.”
Under-the-radar engagement: How and why news users limit their public expression
Ori Tenenboim
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
We’ve looked at news avoidance several times over the past few years at RQ1 — the notion that more people are avoiding consuming news because they find it exhausting or anxiety-inducing or infuriating. There’s been a lot of great research on news avoidance in recent years, but as Tenenboim notes in this study, a lot of that research has been focused on people who avoid consuming news.
That avoidance, though, also extends to another layer of how audiences encounter news: engagement. There are many news consumers who still consume news regularly, but they’ve stopped (or never started) sharing, commenting, liking, or reacting to news in digital spaces. News engagement has been considered increasingly important by both scholars and news organizations in a digital environment built around the audience’s potential to participate, even briefly reaching buzzword status during the 2010s. So if some audiences are pulling back on engaging with the news publicly just as they are with consuming it, it’s worth digging deeper to find out how and why.
Tenenboim interviewed 50 Canadian digital news users to get at those questions. He summed up the reasons for limiting news engagement visibility in four “P”s: protection, pointlessness, personality, and particularity. Protection refers to protection from damage to reputation, relationships, wellness, or a job. Pointlessness was Tenenboim’s term for a lack of perceived benefits and a sense of futility of engaging with people with whom we disagree. Personality refers to particular traits that might keep people from posting, like conflict avoidance. And particularity describes a desire to share news only with a particular person or small group of people.
Tenenboim’s suggestions for news organizations centered particularly on the protection and pointlessness dimensions, since those involve cost-benefit analyses that news publishers could influence. For instance, they could provide “more opportunities for meaningful conversations with journalists and involvement in news processes before publication.” With particularity, too, Tenenboim suggested creating opportunities for audiences to interact in less public spaces. “The suggested approach is to meet people where they are — figuratively and literally,” he wrote.
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