Studying incidental news: Antecedents, dynamics and implications
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of concerns about decreasing news use, a decline in interest in political news or even active avoidance or resistance of news in general, the idea of ‘incidental news’ has been seen as a possible remedy. Generally, ‘incidental news’ refers to the ways in which people encounter information about current events through media when they were not actively seeking the news. However, scholars studying incidental news through different theoretical and methodological perspectives have been arriving at differing evaluations of the significance and implications of this phenomenon – to the extent of downright contradictory findings. This introductory piece posits the aim of this special issue on Studying Incidental News: a conceptual clarification of incidental news exposure. In this issue, scholars coming from different approaches, ranging from cognitive processing, ecological models, emergent practices and a focus on platform affordances, show how different theoretical perspectives help account for various dimensions of incidental news consumption, and thus help explain the often conflicting findings that have been suggested so far.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it