Getting hooked on news: uses and gratifications and the formation of news habits among college students in an internet environment.

The question of how people select among media news sources has long been of interest to both political scientists (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2000; McLeod, Scheufele, & Moy, 1999; Moy, Pfau, & Kahlor, 1999; Scheufele, 2000; Shah, Kwak, & Holbert, 2001) and to uses and gratifications researchers (Henke, 1985; O'Keefe & Spetnagel, 1973; Parker & Plank, 2000; Vincent & Basil, 1997). Factors leading to the choice between media types, especially between print and television news sources, have been of particular interest (Becker & Dunwoody, 1982; Culbertson & Stempel, 1986; Holbert, 2005) owing to profound differences in the nature of news coverage between the two types of media (Bogart, 1985; Larson, 1998; Project for Excellence in Journalism [PEJ], 1998) and their differential effects on their audiences (Chaffee & Wilson, 1977; Culbertson, 1992; Culbertson, Evarts, Richard, Karin, & Stempel, 1994).

Following the uses and gratifications tradition, audiences actively select among news sources based on their ability to gratify their needs for information, entertainment, social interaction, and escapism (e.g., Henke, 1985; Lin, 1993; McDonald, 1990; Parker & Plank, 2000; Vincent & Basil, 1997). The uses and gratifications approach stems from Lasswell's functionalism of the 1940s (Lasswell, 1948). It attempts to explain why people use various forms of media (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1999) and what their motivations are when selecting among media channels and their contents (Ruggiero, 2000). All forms of news media are said to be selected by those with surveillance needs seeking in-depth information and local news, whereas the gratification of surveillance needs has been closely associated with the print media, and television is preferred by those with entertainment and escapism needs (Henke, 1985; O'Keefe & Spetnagel, 1973; Vincent & Basil, 1997). Recent research extended uses and gratifications to the "new medium" of the Internet (e.g., Papacharissi & Rubin, 2000) and offered new conceptualizations of media attendance that become salient in a media environment that includes interactive options (LaRose & Eastin, 2004). Therefore, a rapidly changing media environment and new theoretical approaches to the problem of media attendance pose challenges to the existing view of news consumption.

The New Media News Environment

Indeed, the dichotomy between print and television is perhaps no longer a useful one in a highly competitive new media environment that includes the Internet, multiple 24/7 cable news channels, televised news magazines, talk radio, and even comedic news programs (Pew Research Center, 2004a). At their best, prime-time network television news magazines and network news channels deliver at least some of the in-depth coverage and commentary that was formerly the exclusive domain of print (PEJ, 1998). At their worst, print news outlets imitate the "if it bleeds, it leads," soft news and news byte style often associated with broadcast news (Overholser, 2000). On the Internet can be found the full text of daily newspapers prepared by the best professional journalists and editors from the world over, in addition to unfiltered news items delivered by search engines, and unvarnished rumor and speculation in blogs (Palser, 2002) and news chat rooms (Lynch, 1998). It is thus no longer necessarily the case that the serious news consumer will turn the pages of a newspaper and the more casual consumer will turn on the TV. And, where does the Internet fit in that dichotomy?

Forming News Habits

The extremely varied media environment that now confronts the news consumer might be thought to stimulate active selection of news sources more than ever, simply by virtue of presenting so many new choices, most of which are accessible at all times of the day and night. However, a new theory of media attendance (LaRose & Eastin, 2004) has been proposed that suggests exactly the opposite: When confronted by a myriad of media choices, the consumer lapses into habitual patterns of media consumption in order to conserve mental resources, rather than repeatedly engaging in active selection.

Building on earlier explorations of the role of habit in media usage behavior (Rosenstein & Grant, 1997; Stone & Stone, 1990), the model proposes that active selection processes of the sort assumed by uses and gratifications researchers operate primarily in the early stages of media selection. Once news consumers learn that they can get their "daily news fix" better from The New York Times (or from The Daily Show on Comedy Central) than from the CBS Evening News, they quickly stop agonizing over the news selection decision from day to day and moment to moment, as the uses and gratifications paradigm insists they should. Instead, they fall into a pattern of repeated media behavior that is not subjected to active self-observation, a media habit.

Over time, habit strength builds, perhaps aided by the process of classical conditioning in which news consumers return to their preferred news source to relieve their vague sense of unease about not knowing what is "going on" in the world. Habits persist until there is a change in their other daily routines, for example, when young people leave home to go to college or when a change in information needs occurs, perhaps occasioned by a major news event such as the Iraq War, or by a maturational change (e.g., by progressing from a college freshman to college senior; Vincent & Basil, 1997). If a uses and gratifications researcher were to ask whether current news consumption behavior fulfills a need "to find out about daily life," for example, respondents might with some effort recall a day in the distant past in which they last actively considered their news media options. Or, if they cannot remember that day at all they may come up with a post hoc rationalization for the researcher: They are rational people, that sounds like a reasonable explanation for news consumption, so they agree with it. However, that response would likely produce only weak correlations with media consumption, consistent with findings of uses and gratifications research (e.g., Vincent & Basil, 1997). The truer answer might often be that they no longer actively think about their news media options very much at all.

The automaticity (cf. Bargh & Gollwitzer, 1994) of habitual media consumption behavior distinguishes this phenomenon from so-called ritualistic gratifications (Rubin, 1984) in that the latter still assumes active information processing (e.g., to gratify needs to pass the time) is taking place. The formation of media habits is intertwined with the development of media addictions, more properly called media dependencies, or problematic media use (LaRose & Eastin, 2004; LaRose, Lin, & Eastin, 2003). The process is conceptualized in relation to the self-regulatory mechanism of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1991), involving self-observation of behavior, judging behavior in relation to personal or social norms, and applying self-reactive incentives to regulate one's own media consumption. This formulation thus revisits an early conceptualization of habit in the uses and gratifications tradition, in which habit was a distinct construct from gratifications sought/gratifications obtained (cf. Palmgreen, Wenner, & Rosengren, 1985, p. 17).

Habitual media behaviors may be initiated as actively planned and actively reasoned choices as the uses and gratification model would have it. However, with repetition, media behaviors become less subject to active self-observation as the media consumer conserves mental energy for other, more pressing, daily concerns. As long as media consumers judge their overall consumption levels to be within acceptable levels and the context of media usage remains relatively unchanged, they may cease to give active consideration to their consumption patterns and will not apply self-reactive incentives (such as feelings of guilt) in attempts to modify their patterns of usage.

Habitual media consumption covers a wide range of overall usage levels and is not necessarily associated with excessive amounts of consumption. Someone who turns on a morning news program for 5 minutes every day engages in habitual behavior just as does someone who watches 5 hours of CNN every night. There is not necessarily anything dysfunctional about either pattern of behavior. Indeed, to the extent that news consumption plays an important role in the lives of individuals and the functioning of society, news habits may be regarded as "good" habits that should be cultivated.

Still, media habits can become problematic if the pattern of usage itself causes dysphoric moods. For example, anxious or depressed moods might be stimulated by the nature of the news coverage itself (Mundorf, Drew, Zillmann, & Weaver, 1990) or from negative personal consequences of media consumption, such as major disruptions of important relationships, school, or work activities. If the news consumer then resorts to further news media coverage to alleviate negative affect, usage may become a conditioned response, and a downward spiral of increasing dysphoria followed by increasing media consumption may result. Thus arrives a theoretical construction of what is popularly known as the "news junkie" phenomenon: people who are seemingly obsessed with the news. Cases in which news consumption becomes a true dependency would be rare and are the province of clinical psychologists rather than media researchers. However, deficiencies in self-regulatory mechanisms are quite common and have been shown to explain media consumption behavior across a wide range of consumption levels (LaRose & Eastin, 2004; LaRose et al., 2003).