Building News Media Repertoires as Resources for Public Connection

• In Event: Socializing the News, Connecting to Public Issues? Exploring Audiences’ Media Practices in Four Countries

Abstract

In the last couple of decades there has been an unprecedented explosion of (news) media platforms and formats, as a succession of digital and social media have joined the ranks of legacy media. We live in a ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick 2013), in which people build their cross-media news repertoires from this ensemble of old and new media. Citizens’ engagement with the democratic affordances offered by this ensemble is crucial for building public connection to democratic agendas (Couldry et al. 2007). This paper reports from two international research projects which produce insights about citizen-consumers’ navigation in the news landscape and its democratic implications: 1) One study across 8 countries builds compares national typologies of news consumption based on an innovative quantitative/quantitative methodology, complementing these typological insights with questionnaire-based knowledge about public engagement and participation. 2) Findings about the news media/politics nexus from The Reuters Institute Digital News Survey 2014.

Author

• Kim Christian Schroder, Roskilde U