ArticleScientific reports2024
An evaluation of online information acquisition in US news deserts.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A growing concern is that as local newspapers disappear, communities lose trusted gatekeepers and develop information voids, creating openings for misinformation to thrive. Previous work has not evaluated whether residents of news deserts have developed different information acquisition habits. We fill this gap by directly comparing information consumption and referral patterns inside and outside of news deserts in a novel dataset of engagement with online media by millions of users on the Edge browser. We find little evidence that those in news deserts consume more low-quality sites or are more likely to be referred to low-quality sites from search engines or social media. We find some evidence that those in news deserts do consume more national news than locations with local media outlets. These results contribute to our understanding of how the loss of local newspapers has impacted online information acquisition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.