Impact of Popularity Indications
on Readers’ Selective Exposure
to Online News
Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Nikhil Sharma,
Derek L. Hansen, and Scott Alter
Selecting news online may differ from traditional news choices, as most
formal importance indicators in traditional media do not convert di-
rectly to online news. However, online portals feature news recom-
mendations based on collaborative filtering. To investigate how recom-
mendations affect information choices, 93 participants browsed online
news that featured explicit (average rating) or implicit (times viewed)
recommendations or no recommendations (control group) while news
exposure was logged. Participants picked more articles if the portal fea-
tured explicit recommendations, and stronger explicit recommenda-
tions instigated longer exposure to associated articles. Implicit recom-
mendations produced a curvilinear effect with longer exposure for low
and high numbers.
The Internet has greatly contributed to the so-called information tide (Graber, 1984)
that news consumers face. Using the World Wide Web to access news has become
commonplace, with nearly two thirds of the people who “get news” using online
sources at least some of the time (Fallows, 2004). Thus, communication scholars need
to address new phenomena in news consumption that are unique to information re-
trieval from the World Wide Web. Initial explorations into how news consumers per-
ceive print and online news have revealed that the audience applies largely parallel
criteria to both outlets (Sundar, 1999). However, with regard to issue perceptions and
learning from news, differences between print and online news did emerge. For ex-
© 2005 Broadcast Education Association Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 49(3), 2005, pp. 296–313
296
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/September 2005
Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick (Ph.D., University of Music & Drama, Hanover, Germany) is an Assistant Profes-
sor at the School of Communication, Ohio State University. Her research addresses media effects and message
selection in entertainment media and news.
Nikhil Sharma (B.A., Chandigarh College of Architecture, India) is a doctoral student at the School of Informa-
tion, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His research interests include collaborative sensemaking and infor-
mation reuse.
Derek L. Hansen (B.A., Brigham Young University) is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information, Uni-
versity of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His research interests include health communication and computer-sup-
ported cooperative work.
Scott Alter (B.S., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). His undergraduate concentration was communication
studies, and his research examines factors of selective exposure to information.

ample, Althaus and Tewksbury (2002) demonstrated reduced agenda-setting effects
for online news readers compared to readers of the print news version. Furthermore,
Eveland and Dunwoody (2002) showed that reading Web news produces smaller
learning effects than print news. The authors of both studies attributed these differ-
ences to increased selectivity in online news consumption. Hence, the well-estab-
lished phenomenon of selectivity in media consumption (Klapper, 1960) also seems
relevant for online media. This highlights the importance of determining which fac-
tors influence selective exposure to online news.
Interestingly, online news platforms offer their users filtering techniques to access
the abundant information selectively. Two broad classes of selection devices can be
differentiated (Cosley, Lam, Albert, Konstan, & Riedl, 2003): content-based, in
which the reader may enter keywords or section preferences to create customized
newspaper versions (as in many so-called Daily Me projects in the 1990s); and col-
laborative filtering, in which previous readers’ opinions on content are employed
(see Lasica, 2002a, 2000b). The latter approach can be seen in various popular on-
line portals from which many people retrieve news (e.g., Yahoo! News and Google
News) and also in online versions of established news media (e.g., USAToday.com
and CNN.com). Because news consumption is often considered important for sur-
veying and interpreting the social environment (Lippmann, 1922; McCombs &
Shaw, 1972; Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992; Noelle-Neumann, 1974, 1977), it is in-
triguing that online news platforms now incorporate collaborative filtering cues,
such as most e-mailed, number of page views, and average (avg.) rating associated
with specific articles. The social functions of news may be even more salient when
cues of collaborative filtering are present and indicate what other news readers ap-
preciate and consume.
It is plausible that user-based recommendations of news have strong impacts on se-
lective exposure to news. Various possible impacts of this kind are investigated in this
study. We will review differences of print and online news that are relevant in this
context, address how online news platforms offer new features to “tame the informa-
tion tide” (Graber, 1984), and state research questions for the subsequent empirical
investigation.
News Selections in Traditional Versus Online
News Presentations
News editors apply a relatively standardized set of criteria when selecting informa-
tion for publication or broadcast in news outlets (e.g., Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Gans,
1979; White, 1950) and, furthermore, emphasize certain news reports by prominent
presentation, for example, on the front page, with illustration, or as the first item in a
newscast. For traditional news platforms, such formal indicators of newsworthiness
have been demonstrated to guide information selections of news consumers (e.g.,
Garcia & Stark, 1991; Graber, 1984; McCombs & Mauro, 1977; Wolf & Grotta, 1985;
Knobloch-Westerwick et al./POPULARITY INDICATIONS AND NEWS EXPOSURE 297