The type of news that interests me most on a national or international level would probably have to be hard news, because there always seems to be more significance added to them than other news stories. Investigative and crime stories are what interest me most within this genre because it always grabs my attention with the kind of crimes committed, how criminals are caught, and the amount of digging reporters must do to seek the truth behind situations or events, such as a robbery or company embezzlement. On the state level, again, I am more interested in the hard news, such as what congress and the governor are doing for Wisconsin in general, because I want to know how issues within the state are being resolved. On the local level, I am really interested in and enjoy soft news, specifically education, because I have always been interested in what the school districts do to help out those within their district and what they do to help further their school progress. The only time I ever follow up on a story is if it is continuing an investigative piece or, as of right now, if it is COVID-19 related, because I want to know how those situations are being handled and resolved.

            If something from my hometown ended up on 27 News, I might follow up with it to see what is going on, otherwise if nothing shows up except in the local paper, I tend to ignore it because nothing that important seems to be occurring. When I go directly to a news site by typing in the address, the sites I tend to visit are 27 News and ABC News, because 27 News covers both local and state news whereas ABC News covers stronger crime and investigative stories. ABC News is my favorite news site, because there are a lot more stories occurring and I can find videos as well as articles depending on what I feel like reading or watching.

            Google is and has always been the search engine I use, because I can always find a lot of neat and interesting material on there. When consuming news on Google, I usually read text accompanied with watching some videos. Other than that, I do not view a whole lot of photo slide shows or interact with graphics due to lack of interest. As for listening to audio reports, I will listen to them if they happen to come on as I’m waiting for the music to start up again on the radio, but otherwise I mainly read and watch the news. My favorite format for getting news is watching it on television, either in the morning or at night, because it is more convenient for me to make time for something that is already scheduled than it is for me to make time for something that can be accessed any time during the day. However, I never had an interest in e-mailing or submitting content to a news site, or even interacting with the news by posting a comment, because I feel that news organizations already get a lot of content submitted to them on a daily, if not, hourly basis.

            Although I use e-mail and YouTube a lot, I do not refer to social media for news, because I feel that I can gain a lot more credible and significant information from reading about it on an organization’s website, or by watching it on the morning or nightly news channels. Friends or people who I rely on to lead me to stories that interest me are my siblings and close friends, because they are always trying to find different news sources that will lead them to the full picture. But I do not use Twitter or any other social media platform for finding news, because again, I am never quite certain how credible the posts are. I also I do not read blogs or listen to podcasts, because I never had an interest in blogs or knew exactly how to find a podcast on an organization’s website. The steps I take to make sure the news I read online is reliable and accurate is that I cross reference the different sites I look at to make sure that the information I find is credible and accurate, though I have not found a fake story yet that I thought was legitimate.