[Paper Review] Understanding the Digital News Consumption Experience During the COVID Pandemic

Mingrui Ray Zhang, Ashley Boone+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Feb 10, 2022

Public Relations and Crisis Communication4 citations

TL;DR

This study investigates digital news consumption during the early U.S. COVID-19 pandemic through a two-week diary study with 22 participants, revealing two distinct stages: a 'seeking' phase driven by informational needs (finding, understanding, verifying news), followed by a 'sustaining' phase focused on emotional regulation and bounded consumption. The authors propose a two-stage model and six design themes to support users' informational and emotional needs during crises.

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people sought information through digital news platforms. To investigate how to design these platforms to support users' needs in a crisis, we conducted a two-week diary study with 22 participants across the United States. Participants' news-consumption experience followed two stages: in the extbf{seeking} stage, participants increased their general consumption, motivated by three common informational needs -- specifically, to find, understand and verify relevant news pieces. Participants then moved to the extbf{sustaining} stage, and coping with the news emotionally became as important as their informational needs. We elicited design ideas from participants and used these to distill six themes for creating digital news platforms that provide better informational and emotional support during a crisis. Thus, we contribute, first, a model of users' needs over time with respect to engaging with crisis news, and second, example design concepts for supporting users' needs in each of these stages.

Motivation & Objective

• Investigate how digital news consumption patterns changed during the early U.S. COVID-19 pandemic.
• Identify the core informational and emotional needs driving users’ engagement with news platforms during a crisis.
• Develop design principles and prototype concepts to support users in both information-seeking and emotional sustainability stages.
• Address the tension between user well-being and platform monetization models that encourage compulsive news checking.
• Contribute a formative two-stage model of crisis news consumption to guide future platform design in high-stress information environments.

Proposed method

• Conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 U.S. participants across high-impact pandemic regions (e.g., New York, Michigan, Washington).
• Implemented a two-week diary study where participants documented daily news consumption behaviors, emotional responses, and spontaneous design ideas.
• Collected and analyzed diary entries to identify recurring themes in user needs and behaviors across time.
• Developed prototype platform designs based on emergent themes from the diary data.
• Conducted final exit interviews to gather feedback on the design prototypes and validate user preferences.
• Used thematic analysis to derive a two-stage model of crisis news consumption: 'seeking' and 'sustaining'.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How, if at all, did people’s patterns of engaging with digital news change during the COVID-19 crisis?
• RQ2 What user needs drove these patterns of engagement?
• RQ3 What designs are likely to support these needs in crisis contexts?

Key findings

• Participants entered a 'seeking' stage marked by a 215% increase in news consumption, driven by the need to find, understand, and verify relevant information.
• The seeking stage involved increased use of diverse sources, especially local news, and a shift toward more altruistic engagement patterns such as sharing reliable information.
• Participants transitioned to a 'sustaining' stage characterized by deliberate boundary-setting, reduced consumption, and a focus on emotional regulation and actionable news.
• Emotional needs—containing crisis news, coping with anxiety, and connecting with others—became as critical as informational needs in the sustaining stage.
• Design features such as filters, map-based aggregators, and interactive visualizations were perceived as effective in supporting informational needs during the seeking phase.
• Participants expressed frustration with compulsive checking habits and criticized platforms that prioritize attention over user well-being, highlighting a conflict between emotional sustainability and monetization models.