The Inverted Demand for Public Interest News

The U.S. news media have long been criticized for reflexive use of conflict narratives, horse-race coverage, clickbait, and similar techniques in political news reporting. Media organizations and some scholars argue that these approaches can broaden their audience by enticing relatively disinterested consumers to engage with political news. I argue that approaches instead deepen engagement from a narrow subset of the public, while failing to engage audiences that are less interested in politics. I provide empirical evidence of this dynamic with two experiments (total N = 3,818). First, in a preregistered conjoint experiment conducted with a national non-probability sample (n = 2,101), I ask respondents to make iterative news consumption decisions between pairs of headlines and find that "public interest" style headlines, which convey the public import of news stories in plain language, are preferred by less politically engaged consumers, whereas highly politically engaged consumers prefer headlines that use conflict frames, specialized political jargon, forecasting predictions, or clickbait language. Second, in a preregistered field experiment (n = 1,717) conducted in collaboration with a national news aggregator, I randomize headlines included in thrice-weekly email newsletters, I find similar results: less politically engaged consumers prefer public interest headlines, whereas their more politically engaged counterparts prefer jargon- and prediction-focused headlines. While news outlets have financial incentives to cater to the most engaged consumers, this study suggests that doing so may in fact drive away less engaged consumers, while simultaneously weakening democratic accountability mechanisms by producing news that is ultimately less informative.