“Here are a few highlights:

• Readers gravitate to news content that matches their politics, but to a lesser extent than you might think. Visitors to the NewsLens site who indicated strong partisanship nevertheless selected articles from outlets across the spectrum. Even when the source of the article was revealed to the user (i.e. Fox or CNN), a partisan user who clicks on 100 articles would open, on average, 36 from politically sympathetic sources, 33 from neutral sources, and 31 from adversarial sources.
• An outlet’s brand plays an outsized role in shaping judgments about the overall quality of news content, especially in the eyes of partisan news consumers. On a five-star rating scale, partisan NewsLens users give 1.37 more stars, on average, to politically sympathetic sources than adversarial ones when the source’s name was visible (the ‘natural’ experimental condition), and 0.51 more stars when the source’s name was hidden (the ‘blinded’ condition). So, while users do not significantly alter their news consumption habits based on the messenger, such awareness significantly affects how they think about the content they read, a finding that is also echoed in a new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
• The perception that a news article is ‘personally relevant’ to the reader is the biggest factor in boosting overall impressions of the article’s quality. When asked to evaluate the stories they read, NewsLens users tended to provide mostly uniform ratings across the different quality components asked about (fairness, completeness, accuracy and personal relevance). However, when researchers controlled for this tendency, the perceived personal relevance of the article (e.g., “it covers the topic in a way that matters to me”) emerged as the strongest predictor of how users would rate the overall quality of an article, including those from politically ‘adversarial’ news outlets.

There’s plenty more data in the study — including the degree of consensus among users when it comes to arriving at a community ‘score’ of a news article’s quality. Overall, the findings — which build on previous research conducted with the NewsLens platform — may not perfectly replicate the vast troves of observational news behavior data being collected by major tech companies about their users. But to the extent the findings take us one step closer to digital news behaviors in the wild, they show us a view of news audiences that is less a caricature than some pundits would suggest. These audiences are influenced by partisan predispositions, no doubt, but still likely to graze across a range of different news outlets. Users are concerned about fairness and accuracy in the news they read; yet at the end of the day, they want information that is going to matter in their everyday life.”