Relevance as a Mechanism in Evaluating News-Ness among American Teens and Adults

AbstractDefinitions of news are increasingly fraught in today's media environment, making audience assessments of news-ness – the degree to which something is considered news – particularly important. Drawing from literature on representation in news and news-ness, we explore how seeing news that features a similar age group affects ratings of news-ness. We also argue that relevance offers as a psychological mechanism to explain how audiences make assessments about news-ness. Using two experiments among teens and adults in the United States, our results confirm that proximity (in terms of age) of the groups represented in news affects audience evaluations of news-ness, with relevance acting as a mediator to linking proximity and news-ness. These results are replicated across issues and among American teens and adults. We discuss the importance of representation and relevance as strategic initiatives to involve people in news.Keywords: News-nessnews valuesjournalismrelevanceteenagers Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In addition, participants were randomly assigned to see the headline formatted to appear as if it is from their website versus shared by their account on Twitter. We control for that manipulation in all subsequent analyses; in no case does it intersect with our experimental manipulations here.2 Despite lower levels of polarization, Democrats rate the AP much higher in terms of accuracy than Republicans. The AP however receives relatively accuracy ratings from Republicans as compared to other sources trusted by Democrats. Given the levels of partisan polarization surrounding news sources in the United States, it is nearly impossible to pick a truly neutral source. As the focus of this article is on manipulations of relevance and the source cue is held constant, we believe this choice should not influence our results – although this is a valuable question for future research. Those interested in how source cues influence news-ness should review previous work by Edgerly and Vraga (Citation2020b) which explores this question in detail.3 We maintain the single item (relevance) used by Edgerly et al. (Citation2016) and add a second measure (meaning) from existing work (e.g., Um and Kim Citation2016) to improve variance and reliability. Unfortunately, given space limitations, we could only include two items for measuring relevance.4 Supplemental analyses were performed to ensure that platform did not interact with the analyses reported here. In no case was the three-way interaction between featured age, topic domain, and platform significant, although there is a significant main effect of platform on perceived relevance, with participants rating all the news items as more relevant when viewed on the AP's website (M=3.70, S.E.=.08) as compared to the Twitter feed (M=3.48, S.E.=.08). These analyses are available in our supplemental appendix.5 Indirect effects are considered significant when the confidence interval (i.e., the LLCI and the ULCI) does not include 0.6 In line with the teen data, participants were randomly assigned to see the headline formatted to appear as if it is from their website versus shared by their account on Twitter. We continue to control for that manipulation in all subsequent analyses.7 This study was originally designed for teens, so we present the teen data first. The experimental design is identical between the teen and adult data, with small changes in the wording of the key outcomes (as noted below).8 Standardization was required for this index of news-ness, as the first item (categorizing the post from "definitely not news" to "definitely news") was measured on a five-point scale in the adult sample only, rather than seven-point scale used by the rest of the items.9 Instead – and in contrast to what happened among teens – there is an interaction between featured age and topic domain, b=-.81, S.E.=.27, p<.01. Further analysis suggests that the student debt headlines is rated as significantly lower in terms of perceived relevance across age groups (M=3.54) compared to the other three headlines (M=4.10-4.27). We reflect more on this limitation in our discussion.10 Specifically, PROCESS allows us to maintain the full variation in age in our analyses. The Johnson-Neyman technique thus allows us to statistically identify the "regions of significance" wherein our independent variable (featured) is significantly related to our dependent variables (perceived relevance) depending on the level of our moderator (age). As such, the groups identified emerge from the data, rather than a priori assumptions about groups; see Hayes (Citation2017, 253–256) for more details on this technique. We later use the pick-a-point approach to visualize these effects, but all analyses are performed using the full measure of age.