Understanding News Background Information Seeking from Readers' Perspective

Background information is very important for news reading and understanding, especially with today’s rapid new media development for news production and consumption. When researchers actively develop tools to automatically provide back-ground information for people, we still have little understanding of how people, from readers’ perspective, engage with news and what background information is needed. To address such a gap, we conducted a study with a news reading platform, observed participants’ news reading behaviors using the platform and interviewed them over the process. Our study highlighted that news reading is a learning activity between leisure and study, and their background information searching behavior is part of Gestalt knowing – to make their existing knowledge more complete, by deepening their prior understandings, broadening their horizons, filling the gaps, clearing their confusion, as well as tracking the progress of an event as a whole, so a more holistic understanding could be achieved. We end by discussing implications of our findings.