A User Perspective on Time Spent: Temporal Experiences of Everyday News Use

Abstract

This paper explores what spending time means from a user perspective. Drawing from three qualitative audience studies that center around the notion of experience, it reveals three complexities regarding time spent in relation to news use. Overall, we find that time spent does not necessarily measure interest in, attention to or engagement with news. First, time spent does not reflect the quality of attention being paid. Second, there is no linear relationship between time spent and interest or engagement. More time spent on news use can be the result of little interest or engagement, and vice versa. Experienced users engage in quick news practices because they are practiced and skillful at using news: they know how to handle and navigate their devices, they can efficiently scan digital environments for new and relevant information, and they are aware of news conventions or title-specific tendencies telling them which parts of news they could skip. Third, different news devices, platforms and genres coincide with different temporal experiences of news.