This concludes our coverage of News Engagement Day 2016. We learned a lot about how the public gets their news, what they know about current events and why they believe news is important. Although News Engagement Day is a chance for y’all to engage with the news, it’s also a chance for us to engage with y’all! Professor McElroy’s Reporting Words class would like to extend our thanks for your participation and support. We hope you learned a little more about what’s going on in the world and enjoyed our photos, videos and more!
After the hard work and fun our News Quiz team had, it’s time to break down the numbers of what exactly we discovered from our ten selected students. Let’s meet them first.
Gender:
Year:
Major:
Now that we know about the students, let’s take a look at how they did. We’ll first look at the percentage of correct and incorrect answers for each of our six questions.
Who is the Democratic vice president nominee?
Who is the Republican vice president nominee?
What has caused protests and the response of the National Guard in Charlotte and Tulsa?
Who is the president of UT?
Who is UT’s head football coach?
What superstar Hollywood couple recently announced plans to divorce?
Q1: Who is the Democratic vice president nominee? (Tim Kaine)
Q2: Who is the Republican vice president nominee? (Mike Pence)
Q3: What has caused protests and the response of the National Guard in Charlotte and Tulsa? (Police shootings of black men)
Q4: Who is the president of UT? (Gregory Fenves)
(The correct answers win for the first time!)
Q5: Who is the UT head football coach? (Charlie Strong)
(Hopefully the team winds up with a better record than this...)
Q6: What superstar Hollywood couple recently announced plans to divorce? (Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie)
So it would seem that students have a greater knowledge of entertainment news than political news, but a sample of ten students obviously does not speak for the campus -- or the nation -- as a whole. Still, these are some interesting percentages to look at.
Finally, let’s take a look at how many questions people answered correctly.
While no one reached perfection, I’m just glad everyone answered at least one question correctly. Thank you to the News Quiz team for the video they made as well as the work they did to compile this information!
At around 4:30 p.m., 40 Daily Texan copies remain in the East Mall news box. According to our Twitter polls, about one percent of those surveyed read print news. #NewsEngagementDay #utnow16
By Alexandria & Sarah (at The University of Texas at Austin)
What was your first memorable contact with the news?
"When I was young boy in the 70s, I would always listen to a baseball game as I would fall asleep. I tried to stay up till the end, but I wouldn’t make it. Frustrated, I came downstairs one morning and said, ‘I don’t know who won the game!’
Then my father went, ‘Well, here’s the newspaper.’ He opened up the newspaper and it had the game, the score, the box score, everything… and I thought ‘Wow! This is a great invention.’" - Christopher Hart, Program Manager of the Texas Program in Sports & Media
This statistic is taken from a poll conducted under the direction of Dr. Paula Poindexter, 2013-2014 AEJMC president and journalism professor here at UT. The complete results can be found here.
(Cont’d) Our social media team gave out two surveys to gauge news engagement, and here are the results from UT students! We had 43 respondents.
85 percent of students use either Facebook or Twitter most for their news.
It seems that students don’t have a set schedule for browsing the news, as nearly half reported they do so sporadically, and the morning and evening browsers were evenly split.
Finally, nearly half of UT students polled reported that 9/11 was the first major news event they remember living through. Hurricane Katrina came in second followed by the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008. What do you think student’s responses will be to that question will be 10 years from now?
"News is keeping up with what's new, important and affecting the world in which we live." —Diana Dawson, Director of Moody College Writing Support Program
This statistic is taken from a poll conducted under the direction of Dr. Paula Poindexter, 2013-2014 AEJMC president and journalism professor here at UT. The complete results can be found here.
Our social media team gave out two surveys to gauge news engagement, and here are the results from UT students! We had 43 respondents.
Only six students said they were “extremely engaged” with news, while about 80 percent of the sample considered themselves “very” or “slightly” engaged. Compared to the average 29 percent of millenials who are “newsless,” only 7 percent of our respondents reported they were not engaged at all.
More than 40 percent of UT students said that they were most aware of political news -- would that number be different if it weren’t a presidential election year?
One thing’s for sure among students: digital is key! Approximately 83 percent of respondents said they liked to get their news digitally either online or through social media or apps.
Our social media team hit Twitter to find out how people use different social media platforms to keep up with the news. Here are their results!
Given that it is national news engagement day, 96 percent is a pretty promising number!
Eighty-five percent of respondents to the Twitter survey said they thought social media was a good way to engage in the news.
Most people who responded to this survey and use Twitter to receive their news over other social social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube.
Since today is National News Engagement Day, our social media team was interested to see how the average, non-UT student consumes news. We created a survey to answer our questions on how the average person views news.
With the election arriving in a few short weeks, it is no surprise that 40% of survey takers are most aware of politics. Following close behind is entertainment news at 24.62%. For the social media team, we were shocked to see sports place fourth on the “most aware” news. Living in the state of Texas in the middle of football season, it seems hard to believe that less people care more about other areas of news.
We also asked our survey takers the first major news event they remember. With our largest demographic being the 18-24 range, 9/11 was the most common event. In second, representing our 30+ age group, JFK’s assassination was the second most common. The second election of George W. Bush was the third most common remembered event, and fourth place was tied with the election of President Obama and the death of Elvis Presley.
“There’s so much information available 24/7 -- whether you want it or not. The way human beings organically screen the excess of information is by responding to news that affect them personally. News to me hits me in some personal way.” - Robert Zimmer, Texas Student Television Broadcast Advisor
Our photos and quotes team, Stephanie Holmes, Romina Leon and Nancy Huang interviewed these five people for News Engagement Day, asking them, “Where do you most often go to consume news?”
This statistic is taken from a poll conducted under the direction of Dr. Paula Poindexter, 2013-2014 AEJMC president and journalism professor here at UT. The complete results can be found here.
theartofmadeline
titsay
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
areudirty
pixelskylines
