An Article a Day: Towards Personal Informatics for Healthy News Consumption.

Technological logs can enable us to self-reflect on our habits through data. Avid news consumers, who read many articles and take an interest in news media, may have a pronounced interest in tracking their news habits. From a lens of personal informatics, we asked twelve participants about their goals when consuming news. We visualized participant news consumption data in a dashboard to elicit self-reflections and desired actions. We find that avid news consumers are motivated by a desire to feel informed without sacrificing their mental health, dual goals which a news consumption self-tracking tool may help to achieve. However, misalignment between perceived news habits and trace data may lead to negative ruminations for users if their logged data reveals they read less serious news, less often, or less in-depth than their preference. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future development of personal informatics news consumption tools.