Digital news subscriptions are growing in the U.S. but are dominated by a few national news outlets. Setting aside social and economic factors, we wonder what affordances digital platforms offer that aid newsreaders in seeking, understanding and making sense of news. Based on the perspectives of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his conceptualizations of affordances, as well as Norman’s theorizing of signifiers, we conducted a dozen semi-structured interviews with digital news readers to identify a number of physical, perceived, and relational affordances. Expanding on our previous work on the subject, we compared these findings to the affordances found in print newspapers and argue that many affordances that may support understanding the news are attenuated in digital. Implications are discussed which may include increased cognitive load, a reduction in engagement, perceived value, comprehension and in the perceived value of the news.
Keywords: Affordances, media affordances, cognitive affordances, digital media, ecological psychology, news consumption