Disclaimer: Due to my non-journalistic background, my media reading behavior should exhibit some substantial differences.
I usually have a good appetite for a variety of media contents. However, I am usually lazy to look through traditional news media rigorously to find good contents, so I resort to places like Facebook. Surprisingly, over eighty-six percent of posts are written by news-related accounts, which makes Facebook a source of news aggregator. The collection includes three streams of information: traditional organizations like BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times; technology-based websites like TechCrunch, Mashable, Popular Mechanics; Academic publications like Nature, Science, and Technology Review (I mainly read their daily arXiv paper selection). Another source of information on Facebook is the Chinese articles shared by friends. There are several news websites (CNN, Time, WSJ, Bloomberg) that I regularly browse through for important articles. Technology and other miscellaneous websites include those technical articles that I simply enjoy reading in my spare time. I am also subscribed to several mailing lists and I regularly receive news update links, as well as recommending Quora and LinkedIn articles.
One particular information source is PTT. This is a very popular Taiwanese bulletin board system site that has very high user traffic in the age group (~100,000 simultaneous login accounts). There are many “forum”-like boards for posting articles and commentaries. I especially like this media outlet because it is void of algorithmic manipulation, where visibility is only determined by popularity in responses. Although the end result is the sheer amount of noisy contents, I still use it as the main source of Chinese news articles.
In terms of viewing behavior over the week, I tend to read more technical articles during the week, with increasing readership on Facebook and PTT articles. My weekday reading schedule is focused on three time slots- morning, noon, and midnight. For weekends, I indulge myself to greater schedule flexibility to read whenever I feel like reading.
It may seem PTT dominates the amount of articles I read. However, there are some subtle differences in my attention of article browsing. Usually I have a much higher impression of article volume on sources like PTT and Facebook, so a good amount of title summarizations are available at first look. When I click the links, I often just want to quickly expand on the news title to have the overall picture of the story. I do it differently when browsing news and technology-related websites, heavily investing my brain power concurrently thinking and reasoning during reading.
PTT is a rich source of Chinese news articles with sparse expert response. However, due to the bulletin format, contents are easily flushed from user view. Out of 821 articles posted on February 17th, only 134 gained substantial popularity, with merely 5 articles containing interesting content.
I also experimented with my Facebook wall for the date of February 17 and collect the list of accounts whose posts appeared on the wall. I observe the total times the post appeared on my wall and how often I would prefer the link content. Based on the plot of impression number against click through probability, friends that post more often tend to deliver interesting contents. This shows Facebook knows not to bother me with users who post too often for users that are both active and informative. Not so with news accounts: my wall is bombarded with irrelevant articles. At least in my case, Facebook’s algorithm is too conservative to suggest articles on a topical basis.
