THE SHIFTING CROSS-MEDIA NEWS LANDSCAPE

Abstract

The article offers new insights for democracy and for news producers by mapping the use and users of today's cross-media news landscape, as the everyday consumption of news across the range of available news media and formats is shifting reflecting transformations of technology, culture and lifestyles. Theoretically the study is anchored in Habermas's notion of the public sphere, and its recent reconceptualizations in theories of “cultural citizenship”, “civic agency” and “public connection”. The project operationalizes these theories through the concept of users' perceived “worthwhileness” of news media, a user-anchored concept which incorporates the different functionalities of the situational cross-media use of news by citizen/consumers in everyday life. Empirically the article presents the findings of a large-scale survey that traces the imminent challenges facing players in the news market, as a consequence of accelerating divisions between “overview” and “depth” news media (across print, broadcasting and the Internet). The project is conducted in a partnership of university-based researchers and analysts from one of the major newspaper publishers in Denmark, and presents the first user-based analysis of the relative position of each individual news medium in the entire news media matrix.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• cross media
• news consumption
• news producers
• public connection

Notes

1. The ambition of mapping people's consumption of cross-media is one that our project shares with the Institute of Advertising Practitioners' Touchpoints marketing tool. This tool analyses “how consumers spend their time” in everyday life, with a focus on cross-media use, and is intended as a multi-media planning tool for advertisers. For instance, Touchpoints “shows the best time and the right channels to hit office workers frequently” with advertising messages and how to “penetrate the cocoon of the car” (Beeftink, 2009). Touchpoints thus gathers information about the factual aspects of people's cross-media reachability and vulnerability to strategic media campaigns, trying to find their weak spots. The worthwhileness approach, by contrast, explores people's engagement with (news) media in order to find out how news media content plays into and enriches their lives, as they make sense of themselves performing the multiple roles required by the string of scenarios they move through on a daily basis.

2. The term “worthwhileness”, being too technical and scientific, was not used in the questionnaire. We operationalized the term in various ways that will become clear from the reported findings (see the tables), so that we effectively got respondents to convey to us what media they found worthwhile, for different purposes, in everyday life.

3. The questionnaire presented a list of 16 news media and news genres and asked: “Which news media have you used (viewed, listened to, read) over the past week?”

4. The question was: “Which of the media you have mentioned is most indispensable to you?”

5. The question was: “Please choose one media type which is most important for you when you want an overview of what goes on in the community and in the country. And please choose one media type which is most important for you when you want a deeper insight into such events”.