Journal of Communication, December 2003
694
What Do Americans Really Want to Know?
Tracking the Behavior of News Readers on
the Internet
By David Tewksbury
Evaluations of the health of contemporary political systems typically include some
discussion of the modes through which people acquire public affairs information.
In response to survey questions, Americans often profess an interest in current
events news, but assessments of citizens’ political knowledge often find them want-
ing. Unfortunately, the limitations of previously available research methods have
left researchers with an incomplete understanding of news audiences and their
exposure patterns. Widespread adoption of the Internet for news reading may change
that situation. The World Wide Web provides audiences with substantially more
control over the news selection process than they enjoyed with the traditional me-
dia. With that enhanced control, it appears online readers are particularly likely to
pursue their own interests, and they are less likely to follow the cues of news editors
and producers. The present study takes advantage of this attribute of online news
presentation to examine the topics people select at Web-based news outlets. In gen-
eral, online news audiences choose to read public affairs news less frequently than
survey research suggests. This result has implications for the long-term health of
democratic nations.
An enduring concern of mass communication researchers is the identification of
the news topics that interest audiences (e.g., Price & Czilli, 1996; Stone, 1987).
Identifying these topics has obvious utility for both media organizations and for
researchers examining the processes through which citizens acquire public affairs
and other information (e.g., Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Delli
Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Price & Zaller, 1993). For a number of historical and
practical reasons, the vast majority of the quantitative work in this area has exam-
ined newspaper readership as opposed to the use of television and other elec-
tronic news sources (Stone, 1987). The academic arm of this research has most
often employed newspaper reader surveys (e.g., Burgoon, Burgoon, & Wilkinson,
Copyright © 2003 International Communication Association
David Tewksbury (PhD, University of Michigan) is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech
Communication and Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The author thanks Larry Oathout for his assistance in coding the data used in this project. Funding for
this study was provided by the UIUC Campus Research Board.

Internet News Reading
695
1983; Jeffres & Atkin, 1996) with a supplemental focus on group discussions (e.g.,
Clark, 1979) and experiments (e.g., Rarick, 1967).
The difficulty with much of the research in this area is that people are rather
poor at reporting their own habits. News readers may vaguely recall hearing about
a topic—perhaps from a friend—and so they may erroneously tell survey re-
searchers that they read a story about the topic. Likewise, people may not be able
to recall reading an article they scanned or a headline they quickly read. Observ-
ing readers going through a newspaper may allow researchers to more accurately
rate interest in specific news areas, but this sort of research is artificial by necessity,
with readers engaging the newspaper out of their element and potentially subject to
Hawthorne and other disruptive effects. The upshot of all this is that communication
researchers have an incomplete picture of how people receive the news.
However, new technologies are changing the nature of news reading and pro-
viding new opportunities for studying that behavior. The interactive nature of the
Internet allows people to efficiently select the news that interests them. Online
news users are not bound by the linear format of electronic and even (to a some
extent) print news media. Coupled with the expanded volume of news content
available at most news sites on the World Wide Web, the interactivity of the me-
dium should lead to greater selectivity on the part of news audiences (Chaffee &
Metzger, 2001; Tewksbury & Althaus, 2000). At the same time, the Internet is also
a powerful research tool, one that allows researchers to observe news reading
behavior more reliably and less obtrusively than had been possible before. This
study will take advantage of these two attributes of the medium to examine what
online news audiences seek from the news. The results of that study should
inform both research on news consumption and ongoing evaluations of the
political commitment and competence of the American public (e.g., Kuklinski
& Quirk, 2001).
Viewing News on the Internet
Early proponents of new communication technologies (e.g., Abramson, Arterton,
& Orren, 1988) argued that the new media would raise the quality of democracies
by removing many of the barriers between audiences and information. The chief
mechanisms for democratization would be the wide availability of information in
the new media and audiences’ consequently decreased reliance on centralized
content producers (Corrado, 1996). As the Internet and its popular audience have
developed over the past decade, these predictions have been challenged. In par-
ticular, early findings suggest that Internet audiences still heavily rely on the tradi-
tional news organizations for current events information when they go online
(Margolis & Resnick, 2000).
One bit of evidence that points in this direction is the observation that World
Wide Web use often clusters around a few sites. With millions of sites to choose
from on the Web, the average at-home Internet user goes online 22 times in a
month but visits only about 48 different sites in that month (Nielsen//NetRatings,
2002). Further, the 10 most popular properties on the Web—a property refers to
a collection of sites under a brand such as Yahoo!, AOL Time Warner, or Disney—
receive visits from between 14% and 63% of all users every month (Nielsen//NetRatings,