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news issue (Rubin & Perse, 1987); and (6) appropriate measures of learning (Drew &
Reeves, 1980). It is worth noting that these terms are only listed on a general basis and do not necessarily comprise all, however it is clear that types of variables that influence learning through television news viewing should be rigorously considered (Brosius, 1989). Therefore this thesis will look deeper into factors that influence learning through television news viewing in three main perspectives, including news type, individual’s viewing motivation, and situational factors affecting viewers’
television viewing process.
News type. News content and the way news story is presented affect viewers’
learning (Lu, 2007). In this part news attributes and structural features used in television news stories will be further discussed.
Television news programming has been categorized in terms of hard versus soft news content (Voinché, Davie & Dinu, 2010). The two terms were used first by U.S.
journalists to classify both individual news reports and news formats (Reinemann, Stanyer, Scherr & Legnante, 2012). Despite the ubiquity of the two terms in the literature, scholars are far from reaching a consensus about how hard and soft news is to be defined (Reinemann et al., 2012). Curran and colleagues (2010) noted in their comparative study that hard news is defined as reports about politics, public
administration, the economy, science, technology and related topics. The Project for
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Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) defined hard news as a story about the government, military, domestic, and foreign affairs (Trigoboff, 2002). Soft news, on the other hand, contains a set of story characteristics, including sensationalized presentation (e.g., changes between camera positions and angles; backdrop of the set) (Browne, 1978);
human-interest themes, emphasis on dramatic subject matter (Vettehen, Nuijten &
Peeters, 2008) and the absence of a public policy component (Voinché, Davie & Dinu, 2010). Curran and colleagues (2010) stated that soft news is defined as reports about celebrities, human interest, sport and other entertainment-centered news. Many researchers even relate soft news to tabloid journalism due to its sensationalized story context (Plasser, 2005; Reinemann et al., 2012; Drew & Reeves, 1980).
Evidently, personal likings of hard or soft news vary among people (Wonneberger, Schoenbach & Meurs, 2009), in consequence, the degree of liking affects how much viewers learn and remember from the news story (Drew & Reeves, 1980). Many studies had indicated that sensational features in news stories such as violence or humor, attracts better attention of viewers (Vettehen, Nuijten & Peeters, 2008), however, does not necessarily result in equal amount of learning or recall (Lu, 2007).
This will be further discussed later in the information processing section.
News crawls as a type of television graphic, influence viewers’ perceptions on news stories as much as the news content itself, thus it is necessary to discuss the
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impact of news crawls on viewers’ learning. However, because related research does not discuss directly about news crawls and learning, there is little empirical and theoretical support for this part of the literature review. Thus related features involved in television news will be used to discuss its impact on viewers’ learning. To start off, television video (sound plus visual) and audio (sound only) modality affects learning.
Graber (1990) stated that the combination of visual and verbal information in television news have influence against learning by viewers, but if visual and verbal element is discussed separately, visual elements tend to be more memorable than verbal ones. Katz, Adoni & Parness (1977) pointed out that the recall of news items immediately following a major news broadcast is somewhat improved by seeing the news rather than hearing it. They also stated that seeing television news is relatively more helpful to improve the recall of some less attracting news subjects. Results in this particular area is not consistent, however, all is in line with better information recall accompanied by higher redundancy of image and sound (Lu, 2007).
Fox and colleagues (2004) suggested that text and animated graphics aided recognition for stories that participants rated harder to understand, such as
science-related television news stories. Edwardson, Kent & McConnell (1985) found in their studies that non-redundant crawls hindered aided recall of news stories. When there is a conflict of redundancy in the same news content, viewers tend to focus more
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on the image than the sound because images requires viewers less effort to process the information, however, this also leads to poorer memory of news content (Lang, 2000).
Other studies focused on whether news stories with or without graphic items would better enhance learning during television news viewing. The results are bipolar as well. Edwardson, Kent & McConnell (1985) suggested that news crawls help to increase recall for the topic of news content but not specific details. Gunter (1980) also found that picture-content features seem to have profound effect upon learning of
“brief” television news items. On the other hand, many researchers believe that most individuals have remarkable ability to recognize and recall visual details (Kellermann, 1985; Colombo, Bimbo & Pala, 1999), on certain circumstances as well. (1) News content with vivid information instead of pallid ones, holds viewers’ attention and is more easily to be recalled (as cited in Gass & Seiter, 2011); and (2) emotional visuals such as news stories with salient details, high stimuli content, and emotional use of words (Kellermann, 1985).
Layout and design of news story per se also contribute to viewers’ learning and information outcomes (Lu, 2007; Fan, 2008). Research had indicated that titles and captions in television news stories help to increase viewers’ memory of news content (Pipps, Walter, Endres & Tabatcher, 2009), especially with hard news or news topics which viewers often feel more unfamiliar with (Plasser, 2005). News crawls that run
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in fast and continuous pattern (about 200 words per minute) best attract viewers’
attention and receive best result in recall of information compared with blinking and fade out kind of pattern; as to layout there is no difference in viewers’ memory of information whether news crawl is on the bottom or the left side of the screen (Fan, 2008).
Although each factor seem important enough to impact on learning, it is worth noting that the interaction effect of certain factors is more likely to impact on viewers’
learning than a single factor alone, for the production of news stories today is way too fancy, viewers are not likely to encounter just one single factor that is capable to influence the viewing process (Lu, 2007). If that is that case, discussion of
redundancy of television news structural features or information overload would not even be an issue.