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Moving beyond "Just the Facts"

The Influence of Online News on the Content and Structure of Public Affairs Knowledge

School of Journalism and Communication at The Ohio State University

Krisztina Marton

School of Journalism and Communication and graduate research associate at the Center for Survey Research at The Ohio State University

Mihye Seo

School of Journalism and Communication at The Ohio State University

The increasing use of online news, particularly by young Americans, pointsto the importance of understanding what users learn from this form of news and whether features of online news encourage or discourage various types of learning. This experimental study demonstrates that online news that takes advantage of one of the key characteristics of the Web—the use of in-text hyperlinks—may actually discourage learning of the facts that make up many news stories. But this same linking structure apparently encourages those who commonly use the Web to have more densely interconnected knowledge structures for public affairs topics. However, those who rarely use the Webfor news do not gain such advantages and may even suffer disadvantages. These findings point to limitations in most past online news learning research, which has been limited to "just the facts" in its measurement of learning from the news.

Key Words: schema • expertise • sophistication • WWW • Internet • learning

Communication Research, Vol. 31, No. 1, 82-108 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0093650203260203


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