A new paper signed by Marco Gambaro of Milan State University, Valentino Larsines of the London School of Economics, Riccardo Buglisi of the University of Pavia and Jim Snyder of Harvard University, to understand how Italians listen or let go of the six major evening news.
Italians love hard news and research
SCARICA IL PAPER DAL TITOLO “Exposed demand on hard vs. Soft news: Evidence from watching Italian TV”
Research Marco Gambaro of Milan State University, Valentino Larsines of the London School of Economics, Riccardo Buglisi of the University of Pavia and Jim Snyder of Harvard University.
News viewers tend to change channels more during soft news During that hard newsAnd this tendency to abandon the program grows as the news progresses.
The probability that a viewer will see a newscast is related to the total consumption of television. The same demographic variables that make it possible to predict daily television consumption also tend to predict news viewing.
Although television remains the main source of information, most Italians do not watch the news every day.
These are some of the results paper Recently completed by Marco Gambaro from Milan State University, Valentino Larsinez From the London School of Economics, Riccardo Bugliese from University of Pavia H Jim Snyder Harvard university.
Italians and news
The research looks at audience ratings and dropouts from the six major evening news programmes, according to types of news broadcasts. Auditel’s raw, minute-by-minute data from January 2009 to December 2010 is used for audience rankings, while each evening’s broadcast is encoded with news starting with data from the Pavia Observatory. Altogether about 77 million notes are available.
Auditel data makes it possible to passively study individual detected behaviors. Much of the work on news consumption relies on data from respondents. There is a tendency in both the United States and Italy to overestimate the consumption of television news.
Comparing the data of Itanes (Italian National Elections Study) with Auditel polls, it is clear that 80% of Italians declare that they watch TV news every day, while those who watch at least 5 minutes of news every day at any time are less than 3%.
This difference cannot be attributed to the diversity of methodologies where the answers to the question on which newscasts are watched correspond to the actual behaviors shown by the participants in the Auditel sample.
Show news
Television consumption is associated with demographic variables such as age, education, and gender. Younger and more educated people watch less television.
The same variables allow for prediction of news consumption, ranging from 16 minutes per day for graduates to 34 minutes for those with an elementary school degree, or from 39 minutes for those 70-years-old to 12 minutes for 30-year-olds.
The share of time devoted to news in relation to total television viewing is around 10-11% and is consistent among different demographic subgroups except for age where it decreases with age.
At some point you change the channel
In the first 5 minutes of news, serious news (politics, economics, foreign) makes up more than 50% of the broadcast, while soft news (sports, entertainment, fashion, celebrities) is less than 10% at the beginning and grows even more than 50% by the end . So it is also important to study the moment viewers change the channel.
It is a generally accepted fact in political analysis that the best educated and the richest are the best educated. But the analysis shows that less educated people follow more news reports than the most educated and most daily minutes of difficult news.
In the paper’s central econometric model, the decision to change the channel is related to the fact that at that moment hard, soft, or “exciting” news is transmitted.
