How People Integrate News into Their Everyday Routines: A Context-Centered Approach to News Habits

Abstract

This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repeated use were concurrent rewards; embedment into existing routines; and visual reminders. Obstacles were lack of steady routines; strong existing habits; perceived effort; disillusionment; and accessibility. Findings point to the importance of visibility: participants – even those with positive initial experiences – tended to forget their subscription. Visual cues were needed to remind participants to read their subscription: app icons, open browser tabs, social media posts, push notifications, and the print newspaper. Proactive implementation of these cues suggests participants themselves were also aware of their propensity to forget the subscription. Existing (news) habits either helped anchor use of the subscription or blocked it by being automatically cued up by context features. Results also point to a mental hurdle: having to muster up the cognitive and motivational energy to start reading the news. Finally, findings suggest that concurrently experienced rewards may be more conducive to news habit formation than retrospectively experienced rewards.