Cross-European News Repertoires

• In Event: Consumption of News as Democratic Resources: Cross Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

The project “Consumption of News as Democratic Resources – Cross Cultural Perspectives” relies on a backbone of 12 country studies, where each applies a tailor-made Q-methodological analysis of news repertoires. In addition to the national news repertoires, the project also innovatively conducts a cross-national second-order factor analysis of the 44 national factor repertoires.
Second-order factor analysis is useful in this study, because our objective is to explore deeper levels of shared configurations in news preferences across Europe, while at the same time respecting the results found in each country. Thus we are interested in analyzing supra-national European repertoires, but want to establish an analysis with a culturally sensitive approach. Therefore the analytical technique used the national results (that is, the factor arrays) as Q sorts, and produced a second analysis aiming at explaining deeper rooted repertoires common to the country specific repertoires in our results.
This results in a supra-national, European set of news consumption repertoires. Six repertoires with a characteristic combination of news media sources were found, among which two significant patterns of news media consumption are revealed. The first of these repertoires tends to be found among people above 60 years with a preference for reading free and local dailies print and watching news on commercial bulletin television broadcasts. The second most significant repertoire involves news consumption via Facebook, radio channels and tabloid newspapers, and is found mainly among people younger than 34. The paper will present the six second-order repertoires and reflect critically on the strengths and weaknesses of this analytical technique.

Authors

• Christian Kobbernagel, Roskilde U

• Kristin Van Damme, Center for Journalism Studies (Ghent U)

• Kim Christian Schroder, Roskilde U