Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news (“firsthand news”) and discussions of news (“secondhand news”), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.

长期以来，学者们一直认为，偶然的新闻曝光（INE）是公民获取政治信息和了解时事的一种潜在有价值的方式。然而，越来越多的关于新闻回避的研究表明，许多人仍然设法消费很少的新闻，而算法管理可能会降低他们偶然接触到新闻的可能性。在本文中，我们将有关 INE、新闻回避和政治谈话的文献相互对话。然后，通过归纳分析 2016 年至 2020 年对英国、西班牙和美国的新闻回避者进行的 100 多次深度访谈，我们探讨了他们是如何偶然接触新闻的，以及他们在多大程度上认为新闻是可访问和可用的给他们。我们以受众为中心的方法强调，受访者通常没有明确区分直接接触专业新闻（“第一手新闻”）和讨论新闻（“二手新闻”），尤其是在线。当他们确实做出区分时，后者对他们来说往往更加突出。我们还发现，就像新闻消费者拥有他们习惯性地依赖的新闻来源库一样，新闻回避者也拥有一些偶然接触新闻的来源库，以便随时了解重大事件以及可能直接影响他们的任何事情。然而，这些剧目只捕捉当天最大、最耸人听闻的故事，并无助于帮助他们将所遇到的新闻背景化或理解，这使他们感觉新闻既不完全不存在，也不像学者们理论化的那样随处可见。