The News and the Kindle DX

I've been playing a few days with the Kindle DX, the new larger Kindle from Amazon especially designed for students and newspaper readers. No, I didn't buy one. I'm one of three faculty with a grant that purchased some to study whether the gizmos have a chance to help newspapers.

I like the thing.

I've been reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is nice since the AJC quit distributing it's dead-tree version to the Athens market a few months ago.

We'll be handing the tablets to people with a subscription to the AJC to study how appealing real people find this way of reading the news. In fact I emailed three major players at the AJC to see if they'd like to participate -- given we're studying their newspaper and they might find the results kinda important -- and I didn't get a single response. Not even a "no thanks." And they wonder why they're struggling. Sheesh.

Now that I've nailed the navigation, I really kinda like it for reading the newspaper. Not as much as I like printed paper, but it's okay. Bad side: only one update a day. Good side: I really don't want to look at my Kindle all day long. And I've yet to read a book on one, so I can't say much about that experience.

Will the Kindle save newspapers? I'm guessing not, but for a small, select audience -- one that loves reading and perhaps travels and needs to take one slim piece of hardware rather than lug a bunch of paperbacks -- this has promise of at least helping, of creating a small revenue stream. The bad news for papers is Amazon often asks for 70 percent or more of the small subscription fee.

How does this fit with what people know? Obviously, any increase in news consumption is good, and for me the Kindle has made available a lot of state news I missed, mainly because I'm not so much a fan of reading a web site for news beyond a check for updates. No, the Kindle is for people who immerse themselves in the reading experience, which leads to far more knowledge about public affairs than mere exposure to television. But for the Kindle to succeed people will need to see that it is good not just for news (which won't be enough of a draw) but also for other stuff, like books and magazines and whatever else they can squeeze into the thing.

But yeah, I kinda like it. Then again, I didn't have to spent over $400 to play with it.

Trusted News Sources

A June Gallup poll includes numbers in trust in newspapers and television news from 2006 through 2009. The findings?

• Trust in Television News has dropped slowly from 71 percent giving some positive comment to 64 percent in the latest survey.
• Trust in Newspapers has inched down but well within the margin of error, from 70 percent to 68 percent.

Meaning what?

A Pew Center report (scroll down a bit to "falling favorability" for the table) looks from 1985 to 2007. It's more specific (cable news, broadcast tv news, etc.). Most media outlets drop here, from newspapers to local tv news. The biggest drops are by national newspapers and cable news.

How do we reconcile the two? In part they ask somewhat different questions, in part the Pew breaks TV news down to its various parts such as cable (CNN, Fox, etc.), in part it may even be time (Pew goes from 1985 to 2007, Gallup from 2006 to 2009). Maybe something has changed recently, a frustration with cable TV news now become somewhat more partisan due to a fragmenting audience -- that's a pretty good bet, but it hard to say, and I didn't have time to scour Pew for newer media favorability numbers.

And then there's the question as to whether "believability" or "credibility" or "favorability" matter for news organizations. As a former journalist I used to believe that if I wasn't pissing someone off, I wasn't doing my job right. And I tell my own reporting students that if they want to be loved, be a kindergarten teacher, not a journalist. Those who dislike the news the most are often those who consume it the greatest, a love-hate relationship that at times makes absolutely no sense, at least on the surface.

Voting and Knowledge Down Under

Australia has compulsory voting, but fewer than 60% of 18 year olds are actually enrolled to vote. In a move that turns political participation and knowledge slightly on its head, the idea here is that by getting young people to vote, they'll learn more about politics. It's "Enroll to Vote" week. A story discusses the problem and the week and raises some interesting chick-and-egg questions about what people know versus participation in the political process.

The report recommended taking school elections more seriously, encouraging parents to engage young people in the political process, and focusing more attention on creating interesting politics and government subjects in schools.

This is an age-old discussion in the U.S. as well, especially with No Child Left Untested. Math and reading are vital, but falling out of curricula throughout the U.S. are those old civics classes, the ones designed to teach students not only the basics of government but -- more important -- why it matters. I'm Just a Bill on Capital Hill, sadly gone -- yet it still lives on YouTube. Too bad it doesn't live in classrooms any more.

But on a more serious note, the idea that forced participation will lead to greater knowledge -- there is some theoretical support for this. Tentative, more theoretical than perhaps practical, but I suspect in reality some aspect of forced voting will lead to an increase in knowledge. Modest, perhaps, but let's face it, compulsory voting kinda misses the point of participating in a democratic process. Maybe for some, not voting is a form of protest (though that's lazy thinking and often someone trying to sound smarter than they really are).

Public Trust in the News

Interesting report out, sponsored by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, that looks at the public trust in journalism. Summary here, full report here.

Those studied do not think journalists are dishonest so much as they find the product of journalism dishonest in that it's either confusing or fails to ring true when it describes the world in which they live. People could find more "useful, reliable, or amusing information elsewhere" (to quote the executive summary).

In place of individual medium loyalties (newspaper, TV news, etc.), people instead describe a "crowded media environment" that ranges from the silly to the serious. The three concepts of useful, reliable, and amusing show up in comments by real people, in one form or another. People, confronted with all this information, aren't sure who to believe. Adding my own here, I suspect that's one of the reasons we find people who claim to help it all make sense, from Jon Stewart to Rush Limbaugh, are quite successful today. They'll make sense of it all for you, even if one might quibble with the way, the fairness, of the sense they make.

There's a bit of political knowledge aspects here if you read carefully. Many people were confused in the U.S. presidential election. They simply don't know the backstory and often news accounts are written (or produced) with that assumption in mind. I've seen this myself as my teenage son struggles with a printed news story. The inverted pyramid simply confuses him because he's not starting with the prior knowledge necessary to make sense of a summary lede, which focuses on the latest information on top. Political knowledge suffers. People get frustrated. They look elsewhere for "sense making," often places where sense and sensible are not necessarily the same thing (i.e., Sean Hannity). And yet, and yet.

There's a lot here to digest and what I see reminds me of some other recent work. More on this report later, I hope.

Cognitive Flexibility and the News

I've been reading a chapter from a new book entitled Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Media that has some lessons about how people learn from news stories. The chapter, "The Web News Story and Cognitive Flexibility" by Lowrey and Choi, is a bit complicated but essentially it tests a linear format of news telling against a general non-linear story and one that is informed by cognitive flexibility theory.

Lemme steal from the method section to describe this version.

"The CFT news report contained five brief news stories, each approximately 200 to 250 words in length, and included brief "perspective" paragraphs (each between 30 to 100 words) that could be linked from the main story." In other words, flexible learning. This idea and theory comes apparently from education and the idea is that it will improve learning by giving people multiple ways of getting into a piece of writing and by allowing them to shift among bits and pieces.

Did it work? Sorta kinda, but it all really depends on prior knowledge. No surprise there. Prior knowledge (or schematic structure, or awareness, or a host of other labels we put on the concept of what people know prior to exposure to some stimuli) always makes a big difference. And it does here too.

People "liked" the CFT version better, but no difference was seen in credibility. Most of all, a series of interaction effects are seen with prior knowledge. The authors argue those with higher prior knowledge "take control of the reading experience." The CFT has no magical power. It was no better and no worse in recognition of information. So people may like it a bit more, but they apparently don't learn any more from it.

Full disclosure: author Wilson Lowrey received his PhD from UGA, where I teach.

What Canadian Youth Know

Stumbled across this editorial about Canada's youth and what they know. The graph that caught my eye follows:

Teenagers have received a bad rap for their political knowledge when actually they probably know more than their parents. Bonin and other youth have access to the Internet and in addition with expansion of airlines, are able to travel to other cultures. Nowadays, youth are able to go beyond only dreaming of far away places and can actually access information immediately online (italics added).

Mostly, young people don't so much know stuff as they are now better equipped to find stuff out. In other words, ask them a political question and the response might be: "I don't know, but I know how to find out."

Whether that's a form of knowledge is a matter of some debate and academic inquiry. Is knowing how to find out a piece of information the same as actually knowing it? I don't think so, not at least in that piece of information's utility. In other words, merely knowing how to find a piece of information does me little good in processing the news, of gleaning some useful information from what I read or hear on TV. Whether Google is changing the way we think, that's a topic covered quite nicely in an Atlantic piece some months ago (that it's making us stupid) and again recently (it's making us smarter). But all in all, knowing how to looking something up (online or otherwise) helps us little in making sense of the world as a story flits across the screen.

It's a topic I'd love to examine further, if my hunch is right that young people indeed take this approach. I'm just not quite sure how to attack the research question.

A Freakonomic Look at Safety

Interesting blog today at the NYTimes site by the Freakonomics guy who turns his attention to perceived risk and accidents. What people know is often so screwed up by perception, in this case a single rail accident that gets so much attention compared to the huge number of small car accidents that do not, thus making people think rail might be more dangerous than it really is.

Nothing new here, if you've read the risk perception research, and yet interesting nonetheless.