ABSTRACT
This chapter further explores the distinct user practice of “clicking,” introduced in Chapter 2. Both scholars and news professionals have tended to take clicking patterns at face value by assuming a close correspondence between clicking behavior and audience interests. Since “most-viewed lists” are often dominated by news about entertainment, crime, and sports, it is assumed that news users are more interested in “junk” than in “public affairs” news (politics, economics, international relationships). This chapter problematizes this relationship between clicks and audience interests. Instead of looking at clicks themselves, we observed how news users browse news in everyday settings and asked them what moves them to click or not to click. We found 30 distinct considerations users have for clicking or not clicking, classified into three categories: cognitive (e.g. recognizing the headline as a new perspective, just an opinion, or informationally complete), affective (e.g. experiencing the headline as disheartening or bemusing), and pragmatic (e.g. not clicking because it “costs” data, not wanting to interrupt the flow of news use). The results suggest that clicks are a flawed instrument to measure interest, not in the least because an absence of clicking does not mean people lack interest in this news.
