This is a very short book--really more of a monograph at less than 90 pages, including front pieces, table of contents, bibliography, and index. It aims to examine the patterns of how people stumble upon news while engaged in other online activities (for example, browsing Facebook).

The authors have coined the acronym IEON (“incidental exposure to online news”) and focus the book on an exploration of IEON.

The tone of the book is perhaps best captured by these lines in the introduction:

Our study employs a constructivist approach to identify the multiple realities of the phenomena of serendipitous news discovery perceived by individuals using the active interview technique to construct the meanings of this ambiguous behavior. Based on in-depth narrative interviews of 20 individuals, this research offers a rich picture of the serendipitous news discovery experience, from the roots of exposure to what is done with the actual content and news, examining behavioral, cognitive, and affective elements involved in the process.

If this doesn’t appeal to you, you can stop reading here.

Personally, I don’t like this style of writing. But tastes differ, and this book may be interesting to readers looking for deeper sociological insights.

I was more troubled by a passage early in the book. Although this book was written in 2017, the authors apologize that it is based on a data collection period that was “prior to the recent explosion in the use of tablets and other smart devices.” I could not find any direct reference to when the study actually occurred, but this apology suggests that it was before the 2010 release of the first iPad and perhaps even before the 2007 introduction of modern smartphones. It is obvious, even to me as a lay reader, that news discovery has changed radically since then. This calls into question the relevance of this entire study for anything but historic purposes.

Descriptions later in the book suggest that they tested on a sample of desktop readers of one online newspaper. The research focuses on in-depth interviews of these individuals.

I did not find any surprises in these interviews, nor do I find any major new ideas in this book. However, it may be of some interest to researchers interested in this particular period of news consumption.