Week 2: Refining The Problems

After we chose our domain: News consumption, we dug deep into the subject. We conducted 3 interviews with field experts and 4 interviews with potential end-users, to better understand the main problems.

The interviews were conducted with various experts, both from media organizations and academic researchers: Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Head of The Center of Internet Psychology (CIP); Tal Schneider, Journalist at Globes; Prof. Karine Nahon, information scientist in the area of information, technology and society. These were the main points:

• There are more ways today to consume news - you can get the news from TV, social media, radio, podcasts and more. Today the mass media is more diverse, more liberal, more audiences are now addressed.

• Fake news is a major threat. The media organizations want to reach their audience as fast as possible, which leaves no time for fact-checking in many cases.

• The experts we interviewed had disagreements on the question - does our environment affect our agenda? Prof. Hamburger claims the media and social networks affect agenda more than your social environment; Prof. Nahon claims that it is not common to see that an individual's agenda is far off from his environment.

We also had interviews with potential end-users, between the ages of 18-24. we wanted to understand what is their experience with contemporary news consumption.

We found out that there is a lack of awareness of ideological bias among many users the interviewed, they consume news and adapting their views upon it. Most of the users consume their news from the big media organizations (Ynet, N12, etc) and don't its credibility. The users are comfortable consuming news passively, app push notifications, any news content that appears on their social network feed. Also, they stated that they think it's important for them to have a political agenda, and some of them did not form it yet.