So, where DO we get our news…?
Recently, you were sent a link to a Google form which had been designed by the Year 12 English Studies class to determine where we as a community received our news. 330 members of our community provided a response. We would like to share some of the most notable results.
Some of the data collected exploring the way we deal with conflicting information
One of the most interesting discoveries was that different types of issues lead us to rely on different types of media. For the Pandemic, we tended to use more formal avenues of media like print, newspaper, TV and radio. For social issues like The Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, we accessed social media to gather information. As a class, we believe this is because the Black Lives Matter protests have been occurring overseas and were not given the same coverage as local issues.
When comparing our data to the Digital News Report: Australia 2016 collected by the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, we were accessing similar types of media for our age demographic. However, we had slightly lower TV usage and slightly higher radio use. Our class surmised that this is because lots of us travel to school where there are radios, but we use more streaming sources like Netflix and Stan at home rather than our TVs for news.
As a community, when we are given conflicting information, we tend to use a new source to independently check our facts. This was not surprising for our class, as we know that we are taught to be critical of the information we have been given.
We thank you for your time and your critical use of media.
Written by Crystelle S, Danielle H, Toni E, Aiesha C, Gabrielle T and Zoe V - Year 12 Students