"Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, ... its prevalence and effects are understudied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 7,266) with online behavioral data from the same participants (over 106M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to news about politics. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3.4 come from news and 6.6 from non-news sites. Furthermore, exposure to political content outside news domains had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources." (Abstract) more

"Our findings are based on responses to an online questionnaire completed by 69 Iranian journalists living and working outside Iran. A majority of respondents surveyed left Iran after 2005 and work as journalists for online media outlets [...] Our research indicates that Iranian journalists living a ... nd working abroad remain deeply connected to both the Iranian public and the broader Farsi-speaking diaspora, and believe their most important role is to inform both “publics” about issues not covered in the Iranian domestic news. As such, a majority of respondents surveyed are primarily employed with Farsi-language media outlets, covering Iranian current events and politics, as well as “red-line” topics that journalists inside Iran are forbidden to cover. However—and importantly—our findings show that a majority of respondents do not believe that their role is to act as activists, contributing to the civil society in Iran, but rather to inform the public with objective, fact-based reporting. Respondents in our survey strongly align themselves with public-interest journalism, in which the media’s primary role is to inform the citizenry and serve as a check on political and economic elites." (Summary of key findings, page 4-5) more

"We find that among both the general population and the technologically savvy youth, television – and especially the state-controlled broadcaster – was among the most often used news sources (with the Internet being the most important news outlet for the youth). This finding is surprising given ... that – in general – in Middle Eastern societies “traditional state control of the information media has often meant that more reliance is placed on oral and unofficial means of communications, in the mosque, the coffeehouse, or the marketplace” (Fandy, 2000, page 378). This finding is especially surprising among our technologically savvy, educated and metropolitan youth the demographics of whom overlap with the profile of those who took to the streets in the post-election protests in Iran and who might be more likely to distrust the government and its sources. These results may indicate that perhaps this young population is not uniformly politicized, mistrustful of governmental sources, or primed for revolutionary action. Several of our other findings underlie this idea. Contradicting the claims that Twitter played a central role in the uprisings in Iran and despite the evidence that 90% of Twitter users in Iran live in Tehran, Twitter was the least prevalent new media platform used by both the general population and the youth samples." (Summary, page 38) more