Blacks more likely to follow up on digital news than whites

When getting news online, black online news consumers are much more likely than white consumers to follow up on these stories with an action. A real-time study asked more than 2,000 online news consumers twice a day over the course of a week (Feb. 24-March 1, 2016) whether they got news online in the past two hours and, if so, what their experience was with that news. Those who did get news online were asked whether they took one of six types of follow-up actions: speaking with someone either in person or over the phone; searching for additional information; posting, sharing or commenting on a social networking site; sending an article to someone by email or text message; bookmarking or saving the news for later; and commenting on a news organization’s webpage.

Black online news consumers took at least one of these actions two-thirds (66%) of the time on average. That is 17 percentage points higher than whites (49%). By comparison, online news consumers overall took a follow-up action 52% of the time. Blacks were more likely than whites to act upon online news in two particular ways: speaking with someone offline and saving news for later.