ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an audience's sense of control is a novel affordance of smartphones when they look for news, based on the ability to personalise and customise their news feed, and sign up for push notifications or alerts to news on specific topic and from particular news organisations. Readers with smartphones and access to the Internet can get the news they want, when they want and where they want. News overload is the same but related specifically to the amount of news reaching people via digital means, alongside an expanding volume on traditional media. People feel overload from news in social media, but not from news in traditional media and two ways to counter this are news avoidance and social filtering. In an effort to reduce the cognitive load of choosing each time people seek out news, they return to sources with which they have agreed in the past.
