News Media Old and New

Abstract

This article presents and discusses three different approaches to the exploration of the cross-media challenges facing news audiences, as they seek access to, navigate in and make sense of the multitude of news sources across print, broadcasting, online and mobile media platforms. From a modernized uses and gratifications perspective, based on the notion of “worthwhileness” as the determinant of people's everyday selections from the “supermarket of news”, the article first reports from a longitudinal survey study in Denmark in which the author's foundational mapping of cross-media news consumption in pre-mobile 2008 is compared with replicating mappings carried out in 2011 and 2012, in a collaborative project between academics and news publishers. The analytical interest here focuses on the fluctuations between traditional news media and the surging digital news outlets of the internet and mobile devices. Secondly, the article summarizes the findings of a qualitative study of citizens' news repertoires, which was fortified with a quantitative factor analysis in order to find patterns in people's news consumption. Thirdly, findings are presented from a 2013 study that explored ubiquitous news consumption, asking respondents to specify the nexus of news platform and location of use.