American college students today show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact don’t make fine distinctions between news and more personal information. Yet student after student, in a recent study, demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories.
How did they get the information? In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story.
This is a Wordle data visualization of the 111,109 words the students in the study wrote about their experiences of going 24 hours without media.
[Source: blogs.worldbank.org – Susan Moeller]
