Mobile News Apps Research Articles

User-Centered Design Strategies for Age-Friendly Mobile News Apps

With the increasing elderly population, catering to the digital news needs of the elderly has become increasingly crucial. This study employs factor analysis to explore the requirements and challenges of elderly individuals when using mobile news applications, aiming to provide strategies and directions for age-friendly design of mobile news applications. The research first summarizes a series of key factors that influence elderly users when using mobile news applications, categorizing them into three primary factors: usability and navigation, visual presentation and readability, and interaction and touch controls. Further entropy weight analysis reveals that the usability and navigation factor holds the highest priority for improvement, followed by visual presentation and readability, and lastly, interaction and touch controls. Based on these findings, we propose a series of age-friendly design strategies, including rational interface layout, clear text and images, and user-friendly interaction controls. These strategies not only enhance the digital news experience for elderly users but also offer valuable guidance and innovation for the field of mobile application design.

A Motivational Perspective on College Students' Intention to Adopt Mobile News Apps

A Motivational Perspective on College Students' Intention to Adopt Mobile News Apps

Predictors of Mobile News Consumption through News Applications (Apps): The Impacts of Audience Characteristics, Media Usage, and Motivations

This study investigates news audiences’ platform preferences, usage patterns, and factors affecting their mobile news consumption through news apps. Four explanatory factors, news app users’ demographics, news media usage, perceptions, and motivations, are proposed to predict adoption intention. By surveying 698 mobile news app users in the US, this study’s findings indicate that user perceptions of news apps (i.e., perceived ease of use, compatibility, relative content advantage, and observability) and instrumental motivations of news consumption (i.e., information-seeking and opinion needs) best predict news consumers’ willingness to continue using mobile news apps. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed to offer new insights into mobile news audience behavior and inform current digital publishers on cross-media strategies in the highly competitive mobile news market.

Being Exposed to News: A Review of Instant Notifications of Mobile News Apps

Gündelik yaşamın pek çok alanında kullanılan mobil cihazlar, çeşitli uygulamalar aracılığıyla kullanıcının deneyim ve tercihlerine ilişkin verilerin toplanmasında etkin olan araçlardır. İçerik üreticileri tarafından zaman ve mekân sınırı olmaksızın kullanıcıya içerikleri iletme olanağı sunan mobil cihazlar, zamanla kullanıcıların habere eriştiği ana mecralar haline gelmiştir. Günümüzde, başlıca haber kaynağının çevrimiçi kaynaklar olduğu Türkiye’de, temel gelir modeli reklama dayalı olan dijital ana akım haber medyası, kullanıcı etkileşim oranları ve trafiklerini yüksek tutmak için tüm mecraları etkin şekilde kullanmaya yönelmiştir. Google Haberler, Flipboard, Bundle gibi, farklı kaynaklardan haberleri derleyip kişiselleştirme algoritmalarıyla kullanıcılara sunan haber uygulamalarından faydalanan medya kuruluşları, kendi uygulamalarını da geliştirmiştir. Bu çalışmada, Similarweb “Haber” ve “Medya” kategorisinde, aylık ziyaret sayısına göre üst sıralarda gelen Sözcü, Hürriyet, Sabah ve Habertürk’ün mobil uygulamaları incelenmiştir. Hâlihazırda mülkiyet yoğunlaşması olan Türkiye’deki medya endüstrisinde mevcut güç ilişkilerinin dijital medya ortamında da sürdüğü varsayımından hareket eden bu araştırmada; anlık bildirim (push notification) yoğunluklarının gündeme göre ve uygulamalar arasında farklılaştığı görülmüş, uygulamalarda çokça hatayla karşılaşıldığı ve bildirim yoğunluğunun kullanıcı deneyimine zarar verdiği sonucuna varılmıştır. Anlık bildirimlerde politika haberleri ağırlıktayken, öne çıkarılan aktörler Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan ile bakanlar olmuştur. Çalışmanın sonucunda mobil uygulama bildirimlerinin ana akım medyanın içeriklerini, kullanıcının gündelik yaşam temposunda dikkatini yönelttiği yere taşıma olanağı sağladığı görülmüş; telefonların ekranlarının, anlık bildirimler aracılığıyla toplumdaki egemenlerin ve siyasal iktidar temsilcilerinin mesajlarının öne çıkarıldığı alanlar olarak konumlandırıldığı ortaya konulmuştur.

Research on the Neural Mechanism of Subconscious Evaluation of Mobile Interfaces in Smart Apps

Following the development of mobile internet and smart devices, designing smart product interfaces is positively significant to enhance user experience and improving the quality of life. Users automatically produce implicit evaluations when they encounter or use the interfaces of smart devices. However, what happens in our brain after receiving the visual information? How do we process visual information? How do the interface design features affect the subconscious evaluation process? To answer these questions, the current study aims to investigate the neural mechanism of users’ subconscious evaluation process of mobile interfaces in smart apps by using event-related potentials (ERPs) technology. ERPs results showed that P1, N1, and N2 can reflect participants’ subconscious evaluation of mobile interfaces in smart apps. In conclusion, participants could evaluate the more obvious layout feature but ignore the less obvious color feature of mobile news app interfaces automatically. Moreover, both the right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses were observed in the current study. These findings enrich the design of mobile interfaces and user cognition theory. Besides, the present study established a feasible technological method for the acquisition of users’ implicit needs and provides a data foundation for smart service. In addition, it can help app designers to identify users’ implicit needs and compare the alternative prototype in the development stage of mobile interfaces.

Determinants of Continuous Use Intention of News Apps in India: Towards an Integrated Model

We assessed the determinants of continuous use intention (CUI) of News Apps in India by integrating models, UTAUT2 and IS Success Model. The study considered personalization as the moderator for UTAUT2 variables to determine key factors for CUI of news apps. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 309 active news app users and structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypotheses. The findings from direct hypotheses testing revealed that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, habit, information quality, system quality, and service quality have a positive effect on CUI of news apps. The testing of moderating hypothesis indicated that personalization has a moderating effect on performance expectancy and habit with CUI of news apps. The moderate or low level of personalization would enhance performance expectancy and the habit of users to use mobile news apps. The higher personalization negatively affects the relationship between performance expectancy, habit, and CUI and poses a serious threat to the habit and the perceived usefulness of news apps. Outcomes of this research are expected to help app developers in designing apps efficiently and engaging with users.

Impact of fake news, message and spam spread through social media on people decision making ability

In the early days of the Internet, people argued that the Internet would enable greater transparency of information, which would increase the quality of democracies. The availability of information from various news sources would enable people to find their own information from non-traditional news outlets, and this decreased reliance on a narrow set of traditional news sources would improve democracy. Some might argue that there has been a decrease in the quality of democracy due to pervasive fake news on social media. A recent editorial in Science calls on the scientific community to help reporters and the general public to better identify and avoid fake news Social media is different from other media providing news (e.g., TV news, news websites, and mobile phone news apps) because users do not choose the source of articles that they see on social media. Instead, proprietary algorithms provide targeted information with little transparency. With other news media, users pick the source first, and do so with a familiarity of the nature of the source. With social media such as Facebook, articles from a wide variety of sources appear on users’ newsfeeds. News articles are intermixed with sponsored articles (i.e., paid advertisements) and posts from family and friends. All of these may be intentionally or unintentionally true or false, but some are explicitly designed to influence People. About 23% of social media users report that they have accidently or intentionally shared fake news. Over 60% say that fake news leaves them confused about current events.

Resource Exchanges Between Mobile News Apps and Third-Parties

This article presents a longitudinal analysis of the resource exchanges between news organizations and third-parties in the use of mobile news apps. As user data constitute a critical strategic resource in the digital economy, third-party capture of user data challenges the governance of news organizations. Analyzing the prevalence and distribution of resource exchanges, the article maps connections between an international sample of mobile news apps (n = 24) and external third-parties in 2016, 2017, and 2021. Consistent with earlier studies, the analysis shows that all news organizations engage in resource exchanges, but also that while the extent varies between organizations, the extent and complexity of the general network increases over time. Furthermore, an ownership analysis of the third-parties reveals the network dominance of Google. These findings contribute to the understanding of the digital transformation of news organizations and of the digital economy of the news industry, emphasizing the network power of third-parties and discussing the organizational, democratic, and privacy-related implications of resource exchanges in the digital news industry.

Effects of visual complexity on user search behavior and satisfaction: an eye-tracking study of mobile news apps

Effects of visual complexity on user search behavior and satisfaction: an eye-tracking study of mobile news apps

The reasons for the decline in popularity and prospects for the development of linear television

The author analyses what is happening to modern television news. While the Internet becomes more and more popular, driven by video-sharing sites and special mobile news apps, television viewing declines. The main part of the audience of modern TV-news programs consists now of older people, the new generation of viewers refuses to watch TV, preferring to learn the information about the world from the network. TV-managers are trying to find new ways to offer consumers the actual information, new formats of news, to reach younger audiences, as well as to discover a new philosophy of their own existence in a rapidly changing environment. The purpose of the author of the article - is to map recent changes in traditional television viewing, and to initiate discussion on one of the most controversial issues of the practice of development of modern mass communication channels: how will news broadcasting look in 10 or 20 years and whether anything can replace it. The relevance of this topic is high due to the rapid development of the Internet space as an alternative source to other media channels.

Predicting University Students' Adoption of Mobile News Applications

India is amongst the fastest growing markets for smartphones in the world which are driven by a young population. This study seeks to understand the intention to use mobile news applications by students in India. To address this broad objective, an extended technology adoption model has been proposed with the inclusion of news motivation and perceived hedonic value and tested on 384 students at a university in India. Structural equation modeling results reveal that student mobile news app adoption intention is not dependent on the perceived hedonic value; however, this relationship is mediated by attitude. News motivation predicts adoption intention, which indicates that news app adoption is largely seen as utilitarian, this is also proven by the fact that perceived usefulness significantly predicts adoption intention.

Effects of mobile news interface design features on users’ gaze behaviours and behavioural performance: evidence from China

ABSTRACT The increasing growth in the use of mobile news apps has raised questions on how their interface design features affect users’ gaze behaviours and behavioural performance. To tackle these issues, two experiments (visual browse and search tasks) were designed to investigate the impact of interface design features (colour and layout) on users’ gaze behaviours (fixation count, fixation time ratio and first fixation duration) and behavioural performance (task completion time and search accuracy) with a portable eye tracker. Twenty-four participants were recruited to browse and search for news in different mobile news interfaces with Chinese language. The results showed that mobile news apps with white interfaces attracted more attention and participants needed more time to comprehend the information of white interfaces in the visual browse task. Furthermore, participants achieved higher search efficiency in the visual search task by using interfaces with red keyword and LT-RP (Left Text-Right Picture). In addition, it is noticeable that participants paid more attention to the text than the pictures of mobile news interfaces, and most participants first looked at text and later observed pictures. The findings provide valuable and interesting insights for better understanding users’ gaze behaviours and behavioural performance of mobile news apps.

Role of Personalization in Continuous Use Intention of Mobile News Apps in India: Extending the UTAUT2 Model

The aim of this study was to empirically examine the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) model by adding “personalization” as one of the antecedents, as well as a moderator to determine the key factors for the continuous use intention of mobile news applications (apps). For this study, an online and manual sample survey of 309 respondents, who had used the news app earlier, was collected and analyzed, using quantitative methods such as explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and Hayes process for finding moderating effects among variables. The findings of the direct effect demonstrated that performance expectancy (PE) has the most influential effect on continuous use intention, followed by habit (HT), hedonic motivation (HM), and facilitating conditions (FC). Furthermore, the outcome of tests for the moderating effect of personalization between UTAUT2 constructs and continuous use intention (CUI) showed that personalization has a significant moderating effect on performance expectancy and habit. Therefore, this research establishes the key role of PE, HT, HM, and FC as main factors that trigger the users’ continuous use intention of news apps and provides an integrated framework to assess the moderating effect of personalization on technology acceptance. The findings of the research expand the existing literature on news applications and provide foundation for future research studies in the area of mobile news apps.

Media Leaders Mining Based on Android News Apps

With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, the mobile news apps have become the most important way for the public to obtain news. As a new media carrier and communication platform,the mobile news apps can promote the rapid dissemination of information and the rapid spread of influence. Some media have a major influence on the direction of other media reports and the behavioral decisions of the public. These media can be regarded as media leaders. Media leaders are very important in the dissemination of news. By identifying media leaders, companies or governments can promote sales or guide public opinion separately. This article believes that media leaders mainly achieve their own influence by publishing news, so this article uses the news published by the mobile news apps as an entry point. This paper firstly solves the problem of data crawling in mobile news apps, and proposes a data crawling method based on reverse analysis, and obtains the data source. Then, reconstruct the reprinting path of the news, and carry out accurate traceability. Finally, cluster the news based on LDA, and propose an algorithm for mining media leaders from three aspects: influence, activity and preference. Experimental studies of data sets have shown that our algorithms can effectively identify media leaders.

Media Leaders Mining Based on Android News Apps

<p align="justify">With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, the mobile news apps have become the most important way for the public to obtain news. As a new media carrier and communication platform,the mobile news apps can promote the rapid dissemination of information and the rapid spread of influence. Some media have a major influence on the direction of other media reports and the behavioral decisions of the public. These media can be regarded as media leaders. Media leaders are very important in the dissemination of news. By identifying media leaders, companies or governments can promote sales or guide public opinion separately. This article believes that media leaders mainly achieve their own influence by publishing news, so this article uses the news published by the mobile news apps as an entry point. This paper firstly solves the problem of data crawling in mobile news apps, and proposes a data crawling method based on reverse analysis, and obtains the data source. Then, reconstruct the reprinting path of the news, and carry out accurate traceability. Finally, cluster the news based on LDA, and propose an algorithm for mining media leaders from three aspects: influence, activity and preference. Experimental studies of data sets have shown that our algorithms can effectively identify media leaders.</p>

Mobile news apps as sites of transnational ethnic mediascapes

ABSTRACTMobile news apps have become increasingly popular all around the world due to the proliferation of mobile communication technologies. Many news apps are transnational in nature, and their users practice what Richard Falk calls ‘globalization from below’ (2014) with their use of transnational ethnic media outlets. By exploring some publicly available data on the top mobile news apps in five countries, I argue in this paper that these apps offer important theoretical insight into the nature of global ethnoscapes as they show audience’s news preferences in relation to language use, nationality, and news organisations, which assist in making their users reterritorialized ‘transnations’. The theoretical implications are discussed regarding the cultural practices of transmigrants, whether be first or subsequent generation immigrants.

Exploring readers’ evaluations of native advertisements in a mobile news app

ABSTRACTMobile news consumption is rising quickly, just as the appearance of native advertisements on mobile news platforms, yet little is known about readers’ mobile native advertising recognition and perceptions. This qualitative study, therefore, explores how readers recognise and perceive in-feed native advertisements in a mobile news app. Usability tests combined with interviews with 24 users of a national news app showed that in the mobile environment, readers are generally able to recognise native advertisements. The findings suggest four key factors that influence readers’ evaluations: (1) perceived utility, (2) source credibility of the advertiser, (3) perceived control, and (4) recognisability. The results suggest that besides readers’ advertising recognition, the advertisements’ content and context play an important role in explaining readers’ perceptions of native advertising.

Users Intention for Continuous Usage of Mobile News Apps: the Roles of Quality, Switching Costs, and Personalization

Mobile news apps have emerged as a significant means for learning about latest news and trends. However, in light of numerous news apps and information overload, motivating users to adopt one app is a major concern for both the industry and academia. Therefore, considering the attributes of mobile news and the debate on switching costs in the Internet context, based on the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), this study suggests that switching costs still exist and have a significant moderating effect on user satisfaction and continuous usage of mobile news apps. Furthermore, the different influences of information quality, system quality and service quality on continuance intention, user satisfaction and switching costs are discussed, showing that quality of information has a significant impact on users’ continuous usage of mobile news apps through increasing perceived usefulness, whereas personalized service quality have stronger effects through increasing user satisfaction and switching costs.

The Paper Janus: How exceptionalism based on regaining influence and doing new media help a Chinese mobile news app negotiate censorship for better journalism

Amid fleeing audience from the state legacy news media to the varied and vociferous new media, the Chinese government launched a mobile news app The Paper ( Pengpai) in 2014 in Shanghai as a pilot test of digital journalism to “regain lost influence.” This seemingly against-the-tide expensive news project makes one wonder: How did The Paper come about and what is its nature? As a government-funded digital media, what old and new strategies have its journalists used in its marketing and content-making to achieve the designated goal of regaining lost influence/win public trust? Through in-depth interviews, this article finds the following: (1) The Paper is a product of patron-clientelism based on a consensus among imperatives of the legitimacy-seeking Party, Confucian-minded and job-losing journalists, and the quality-information-hungry public; (2) as it operates, The Paper has learned to speak both digitally and differently; (3) much like a Janus, its news executives initially used different narratives to the Party and the public to curry favor from both; (4) The Paper used both old and new strategies to negotiate with the censors, most notably two new exceptionalist discourses of “regaining influence” and “doing new media.” The author suggests that, using this exceptionalism trope, The Paper and a score of its clones across China have led Chinese journalism into a phase of “influence-seeking Communist new media-ism (2014–now),” during which Chinese journalists, while honing their digital abilities to propagandize China, have produced some quality digital journalism in public interest with the Party paying the bill.

Digital Platforms and Differential Gains

The relationship of digital media platforms and public participation in election campaigns was investigated through an original survey of randomly selected registered voters. The goal was to produce a better understanding of how exposure and attention to political news on different digital platforms were associated with participatory behaviors and to test whether the association of participation and digital news was moderated by online political expression as predicted by the differential gains model of political engagement. Among platforms, news websites, Facebook, and Twitter produced the strongest positive relationship with online expression, while news websites and mobile news apps were the strongest predictors of off-line participation. Online expression was significantly related to participation, and enhanced digital news use’s association with participation across platforms. These results hold practical implications for journalists to better understand how to allocate resources across digital platforms, anticipate audience interest, and engage with digital news users during election campaigns.