ABSTRACT. Sparks claims that popular journalism is headed in directions where even the urge to extrapolate from the individual experience to the social totality is declining. Martin maintains that "news" often is more like entertainment than information or education. Shoemaker points out that news is a social construct, a thing, a commodity, whereas newsworthiness is a cognitive construct, a mental judgment. Stempel et al. stress that those who use the Internet as a source of news are clearly information seekers.