REBECCA E SPITZER

I’ve finally closed down my survey of Wellesley students on their news consumption habits, after working on the survey for a month and distributing it for a month. It’s exciting to have results, and, what’s more, they’re fairly in line with my hypothesis. Fun!

I surveyed 203 students, across all class years and majors. The primary characteristic I’m using to group respondents is their perceived level of news consumption, and we have a fairly logical spread to pull from: 38% of students are low news consumers, 50% are moderate news consumers, and 13% are high news consumers. Part of me expected more students in a collegiate environment to consider themselves high news consumers, especially with the huge numbers of political science and economics majors at Wellesley, but enough people fall into the moderate category to make up for it.

Continuing forwards, highlighting interesting initial summaries: 92% of students consume news online, through newspaper websites, blogs. etc. A respectable 58% read print sources, 54% watch television news, and 52% consume news through their social networks. 79% receive news through word of mouth. When I asked for a primary method of news consumption, however, 65% of students cited online sources and blogs, which is huge. 16% fell to word of mouth, and only 3% responded with print sources. We already knew this (or thought we knew this) but the data wholly supports our assumption that news consumption has moved online.

Another interesting response comes from a question about people’s thoughts while reading the news – I offered the following options:

– How the story affects you personally
- How the story relates to your work
- How the story affects the world at large
- Recent conversations with peers on the subject
- How you could integrate the story into conversation
- Whether the story is in agreement with your previously held opinions
- Who else might be interested in the story

Respondents could pick more than one response, of course, but one response clearly won out above the others: how the story affects the world at large (84%). I’m pretty proud (and a little surprised) that that won out; perhaps our generation is a little less self-obsessed than everyone seems to believe. Other big hitters included personal effect (59%), recent conversations (53%), agreement with the story (54%), and who to share the news with (47%). Considering that those all point to news consumption facilitating a greater conversation with peers, it’s another pretty exciting response.

A final response that I find exciting, and perhaps my favorite: more than half of respondents believe that news “comes to them” (53%), as opposed to their having to search it out (47%). The distinction between 53 and 47 percent isn’t huge, but it’s pretty apparent that five or ten years ago, very few people would have agreed that news “comes to them.” It’s online social networking at work!

There is a lot more data, especially from a long series of situational questions about where students heard a specific story and whether they verified, shared, or explored the story further, but the analysis has yet to be done.