Mobile news alerts are becoming the norm. If you have a news app on your phone and the stock market drops, you get an alert. A court case comes to a close, your phone flashes. A storm hits somewhere far, far away, and you know in an instant.

For publishers, these kind of alerts are an unprecedented way of grabbing readers’ attention and distributing information. But, we wondered, what do readers really think?

So on Friday, we asked WIRED readers to help us out with a totally unscientific survey. We asked, and more than 600 WIRED readers answered. (And several of you wrote in.) The verdict? You don’t really like mobile news alerts, but you’ll tolerate them. Well, kind of.

Yes, But No

Most of our respondents, in fact, get news alerts, though many of you have muted them.

Julia Greenberg“Personally, I’m still an old-school RSS lover,” Kevin Hill writes to us. “What I want is all the best information, high signal and low noise, just a click away.” And news alerts? All muted, he says.Hate, Acceptance, HateMany of you hate them so much so that you’ve turned all alerts off. But even if you do get them, you don’t really like them. “News alerts such as weather and traffic [are] most valuable,” says reader Margaret T. “Everything else is secondary and maybe even alarmist with very few exceptions.” Julia GreenbergAnother reader, Eva Rinaldi, says, “I’d be fine with getting quite a lot of updates on actual new, breaking stories. But it’s important to me to not get another update on the same story until something has radically changed, and to have control over what topics I get updated on.”Okay, so what then?Many of you would prefer to never see another news alert ever. But, for others, when disaster strikes, you want to know. Julia Greenberg“I get under the hood and disable everything that might serve up annoying things,” Lorie Johnson tells WIRED. “The only urgent thing I want to know about is the weather, because during severe storm season, that really is a matter of life and death.”Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.