Rapid technological changes and availability of news anywhere and at any moment have changed how people seek out news. Increasingly, consumers no longer take deliberate actions to read the news, instead stumbling upon news online. While the emergence of serendipitous news discovery online has been recognized in the literature, there is a limited understanding about how people experience this behavior. Based on the mixed method study that investigated online news reading behavior of residents in a Midwestern U.S. town, we explore how people accidentally discover news when engaged in various online activities. Employing the grounded theory approach, we define Incidental Exposure to Online News (IEON) as individual's memorable experiences of chance encounters with interesting, useful, or surprising news while using the Internet for news browsing or for non-news-related online activities, such as checking email or visiting social networking sites. The book presents a conceptual framework of IEON that advances research and an understanding of serendipitous news discovery from people's holistic experiences of news consumption in their everyday lives. The proposed IEON Process Model identifies key steps in an IEON experience that could help news reporters and developers of online news platforms create innovative storytelling and design strategies to catch consumers' attention during their online activities. Finally, this book raises important methodological questions for further investigation: how should serendipitous news discovery be studied, measured, and observed, and what are the essential elements that differentiate this behavior from other types of online news consumption and information behaviors?

Autorentext

Dr. Borchuluun Yadamsuren is an instructor at Columbia College in Columbia Missouri. Her research focuses on the information behavior of news consumers, serendipitous information discovery, gaming, and human computer interaction. As a part of her postdoctoral fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, she created the MU Tiger Challenge social game to expose college students to news via serendipitous discovery. With the project, she conducted an experimental study to induce serendipity in social game environment. This game project was highlighted in the book Digital Innovations for Mass Communications: Engaging the User. Yadamsuren received her Ph.D. in information science and M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri. She earned her M.S. in computer science from the Mongolian Technical University and B.S. in computer science from the Novosibirsk State Technical University in Russia.Dr. Sanda Erdelez (@iesanda) is a Professor at the University of Missouri iSchool (Schoolof Information Science and Learning Technologies) in Columbia, Missouri, where she is also the founding director of the MU Information Experience Laboratory. She received her LL.B. and LL.M from the University of Osijek Law School in Croatia and a Ph.D. in information transfer from Syracuse University. Her research interests include human information behavior, human-computer interaction, and usability evaluation in online environments. She has been internationally recognized for her pioneering research of information encountering. She is the co-editor of Theories of Information, a classic reading in human information behavior research and the author of numerous peer reviewed articles. Dr. Erdelez received the 2015 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Information Behavior Research from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG USE and was inducted into the SIG USE Academy of Fellows.