Reading a Snippet on a News Aggregator vs. Clicking through the Full Story: Roles of Perceived News Importance, News Efficacy, and News-Finds-Me Perception

This study examines whether reading a news snippet on a news aggregator leads to reading the original story linked to the news producer. A panel survey of 1,628 adults of South Korea in 2018 and 2019 shows that over time scanning a news snippet on an aggregator has a positive, although marginal, association with click-through of the full story on the news site. Further, perceived news importance and news efficacy positively moderate the association, by increasing the probability of click-through. To the contrary, the news-finds-me perception negatively moderates the association, by decreasing the probability of click-through of the linked full story. Over time, snippet scanning is not significantly related to an increase of consumption of news from news organizations, while click-through has a positive link to an increase.