Scrollability: A New Digital News Affordance

Most major platforms and news portals use the feed approach to information display, which offers people the ability to engage in continuous scrolling. This affordance, "scrollability," is an understudied feature that changes how people consume news. The endless scroll presents opportunities to monetize attention for advertisers, and a seemingly bottomless supply of headlines for news consumers. Moreover, more people report scrolling headlines than actually reading news stories. A scrollable technical environment creates circumstances that encourage headline reading, or what we call "news-scrolling," and yet we know little about the consequences of scrollability for other behaviors. In this paper we set forth an argument for increased scholarly attention to scrollability in the context of online news consumption, and articulate a theoretical framework for explaining the behaviors of news-scrollers and news-clickers.