Many smartphones users have grown weary of news alerts – the notifications regularly popping up on their screens to inform them of breaking news or other world events – according to a new analysis.
A global survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that 79% of respondents do not receive any news alerts during a typical week – and that 43% of those report having actively disabled such notifications.
Those active disablers switch off alerts “either because they feel they get too many or because they are not useful,” according to the report, published Tuesday.
“Publishers are extremely conscious of the tightrope they are walking when sending news alerts,” Nic Newman, the report’s lead researcher, wrote. “Most have strict limits on the number they send each day and clear criteria about the type of alerts as well as the best time to send them.”
The institute found that the prevalence of news alerts has increased substantially over the past decade in many countries. For example, in the United States, the proportion of people receiving news notifications on a weekly basis has grown from 6% to 23% since 2014, and from 3% to 18% in the United Kingdom over the same time period.
“Many consumers say they are becoming overwhelmed by mobile notifications of all kinds – from news aggregators as well as publishers – as well as sports scores, calendar requests, messaging groups, and social media interactions,” Newman said.
For instance, in the UK, the study showed that news aggregator apps like Google News and Apple News are used widely, though many respondents complained that such apps can send multiple alerts on the same topic.
In the US, 16% of respondents said they had received at least one news alert from CNN over the previous week, followed by Google News, with 13%, and Fox News, with 11%.
“Alerts are an easy way to keep up-to-date, as well as to widen perspectives beyond breaking news,” Newman wrote. “They are not valued, however, when they use oversensationalized headlines (clickbait) or when publishers send too many alerts that do not feel relevant.”
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