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Abstract
Today’s online news environment has made it easy to select outlets covering the topics one is interested in and the political viewpoints one shares. Previous research often examined either the diversity of news content or the audience’s choices. This study of online news use in Austria does both to assess audience selectivity systematically. It first investigates the topics and bias of news sites based on a content analysis (N = 2069), before survey data (N = 2829) are used to investigate how far online news users select outlets that match their preferences. Content differences exist to some extent, but people hardly match them with their personal preferences. We conclude that, across the population, there is a substantive interest in general-interest digital journalism. In contrast to what selective exposure research suggests, factors other than interests and orientation might guide the choice for a specific news site.
Notes
1. We used the websites’ main RSS feed and not special-interest feeds that some websites additionally offer, such as feeds focused on economic issues, for example. By this approach, we grab the front-page items that users of the outlets are most likely to be exposed to.
2. One might object that some highbrow outlets are only accessible for specific groups and that directly linking user interests to media choices is too simplistic. To put it bluntly, someone with a high interest in politics but a bad education simply may have difficulties in using some of the sources. We tested this by a logistic regression of interest in politics, education and the interaction term on usage of standard.at and presse.at. Although the effect of interest in politics on the choice to use these outlets was slightly reduced by inserting the education variable, the interaction term remained clearly insignificant. This means that the relationship between interest in politics and the decision to use a specific outlet is not moderated by education, or, in other words, a lower education does not hinder those who are interested in politics in using one of these sources.
3. In the analysis of content differences presented in Table , the outlets were exclusive, i.e., each article could be attributed to one and only one outlet. This is not the case with the analysis of users presented here: the users of one outlet can use another outlet as well. This means we cannot conduct the same ANOVA as in Table . However, we still can test whether the thematic preferences between the users of different outlets differ significantly with a simple formula: assuming normal distributions, two means differ significantly (p < 0.05) if the difference between the means is larger than 1.96 times the square root of the sum of the squares of the standard errors. If we insert the values from Table into this formula, we see that 4.44 [which is the mean interest of the readers of standard.at] minus 3.95 [the mean interest of the readers of gmx.at] equals 0.49, which is larger than 1.96 √(0.062 [square SE standard.at] + 0.072 [square SE gmx.at]) = 0.18.
4. Percentages were calculated with Monte Carlo simulations using the Clarify-package in combination with Stata’s logit-command (King, Tomz, and Wittenberg Citation2000). This procedure estimates the probability of a binary outcome (in this case, reading krone.at) for different values of one independent variable (in this case, political orientation being 1 (most left) versus 11 (most right), while all other independent variables are set to their mean.