What have you learned about your own media use and how you access news content?

Reflecting on your research from the summer and from the BBC news app: what have you learned about your own media use and how you access news content?

As somebody who very rarely reads/watches the news through means other than social media. My findings over the summer really demonstrated to me how social media platforms can target the news and viewpoints individuals are interested in and make sure that they only see these types of posts.

Most of what is considered “mainstream news” that I read is from the Daily Mail and the BBC’s Facebook pages. Although I consider both these sources reliable, they do often have “click-baiting” headlines to exaggerate the story and increase the chance of readers clicking the link, ultimately earning the corporation’s ad revenue. The rest of my news intake either comes from posts shared on Facebook or Twitter, videos posted about certain subjects on YouTube or from the android news app Flipboard that gives me a highlights notification daily, however unless I am specifically interested I very rarely read past the headline.

Over the summer holidays I followed the news loosely, my main interests being in the growing tensions between North Korea, America and Japan. I tended to read the entire article on posts about this but ignored the waffle and repetition Daily Mail put in their online articles to try and increase readership times. As the summer developed I became interested in the McGregor – Mayweather fight and began reading the daily rumours and articles on the subject, this lead to some issues of bogus articles claiming the fight was cancelled as one of the fighters had been found to be taking a supplement. However most of these articles were actually just to advertise the supplement by highlighting the “massive gains” and “minimal effort” they required.

While reading my daily news posts, for about a week the top headline I kept receiving was “Big Ben won’t sound for four years!” which suggested to me that there must not be any real news to report if that was the most important story three days running, this demonstrated to me just how much content aggregator’s and author’s algorithms are capable of working out which stories will get their sites the most viewership as after clicking on the app I could see stories that were much more meaningful and important to me, they just weren’t being selected for the apps notification as they weren’t deemed as “read worthy” or appealing to Flipboard’s consumers.

Another issue I have with online news distribution is the reliability of the sources, a lot of the posts I see on my Facebook timeline are either sponsored posts from miniscule news networks I’ve never heard of or from pages such as Lad Bible and UniLad who don’t even bother to cite their sources 90% of the time. Even big name companies such as the BBC, Daily Mail Online and The Guardian use click baiting titles and often questionable article content that often seems like a bent version of the truth. Due to this, I struggle to trust the majority of posts I read online especially with the idea that an algorithm is learning more and more about me to only display me posts I’ll be interested in. The idea of this does cause some concern in my opinion as it seems already there are less and less people with different opinions to me online.