Weiss, A. (2013). Exploring News Apps and Location-Based Services on the Smartphone. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 435-456.
Maybe the location-based capability creates a noise that distracts the audience; for example, when you are traveling, and happen to stop in a city for a short time, maybe never even leaving the airport, you probably aren't that interested in the local news of the place. So, if you have the location features turned on, and start getting piped many links about Anyplace, USA, that you are just passing through, that can be a distraction. I noticed this on a trip to Canada I took recently, for example, when I just was in a city for a conference for a couple of days, but a few of my news feeds were geolocated, so I started getting flooded with stories about local politicians and sports teams and such, not high-level stories of regional and national interest but more like local gossip, which I really did not care that much about. So that was a case in which the locative features actually worked against my interests.
One benefit could be that it saves your battery and date. Let's be real, all these location based apps are constantly tracking you down and using your battery and data. Another benefit is it can't keep track of where you've been, and any addresses you type in or navigate to.
I have "location services" turned off 99.99% of the time. The benefits are privacy, reducing bandwidth consumption, and self-efficacy in my content choices.
When I use news apps, it is easy to select stories from the regions in which I am interested. This often does NOT include local news, so I do not want the apps to force me to see their guess as to what news I want based on where I happen to be at the moment.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Social Science
- Media
- Journalism