研究人员和从业者越来越认为，新闻业必须改善与受众的关系，以增加人们消费和支持新闻的可能性。在本文中,我们认为，这一假设忽略了结构和个人层面因素在塑造新闻受众行为中的重要性。借鉴吉登斯的结构化理论，我们建议，当涉及到人们花在新闻上的时间时，消费者的选择更多地取决于生活环境，而不是新闻偏好。为了说明这一点，我们利用了这么多人的生活环境发生变化时收集的采访和受众分析数据的组合：COVID-19大流行的开始。我们发现，在大流行的前几个月，人们消耗的新闻比平时多，因为(1)由于就地避难订单等原因，他们有更多的时间在手上，裁员,转向在家工作，(2)他们对了解冠状病毒的传播和风险以及正在采取的预防措施更感兴趣。我们得出的结论是，记者应该接受“新闻谦逊”，“从而承认并接受他们对接收工作的控制比他们希望相信的要少得多。
Researchers and practitioners increasingly believe that journalism must improve its relationship with audiences to increase the likelihood that people will consume and support news. In this paper, we argue that this assumption overlooks the importance of structural- and individual-level factors in shaping news audience behavior. Drawing on Giddens\' theory of structuration, we suggest that, when it comes to the amount of time that people devote to news, consumers\' choices are guided more by life circumstances than by news preferences. To illustrate this point, we draw on a combination of interview and audience analytics data collected when so many people\'s life circumstances changed: the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that people consumed more news during the early months of the pandemic than normal because (1) they had more time on their hands due to things like shelter-in-place orders, layoffs, and shifts to working from home and (2) they were more interested in understanding the coronavirus\' spread and risks as well as the preventative measures being pursued. We conclude that journalists should embrace \"journalistic humility,\" thereby acknowledging and accepting that they have much less control over the reception of their work than they would like to believe.
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