Understanding changing news environments: a comparative analysis of national landscapes of news media consumption

In today's cross-media news environment it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to get a hold of people's news consumption repertoires. An abundance of information, cast in different formats, is constantly disseminated through a myriad of channels. This apparent ubiquity and pervasiveness entails a major challenge for audience researchers to fully grasp emerging differences in people's means to keep in touch with current affairs. In an attempt to address this issue, we adopt an audience perspective, inquiring why people consider their media consumption worthwhile according to their sense of their information needs, seen through the lens of everyday life circumstances and the opportunities and constraints these offer. In this paper, we present a mixed method framework that furnishes a clear view on the dynamics of cross-media news consumption, framing it within the context of the everyday. More specifically, we employ a Q-methodology to quantitatively infer patterns of news media consumption, both in Denmark (2009) and Flanders, Belgium (2011). A joint Q-sample, incorporating cue cards of 25 prominent news media, is used during 70 face-to-face interviews. The Q-analysis, which is especially suitable to identify meaningful patterns in small samples, allows us to separately group Danes as well as Flemings with very similar news media repertoires. The contents of these patterns are analyzed and compared, taking into account the time perspective, and each region's specificities in terms of news media constellations and histories. The Danish study, performed in 2009, already revealed a fine-grained seven-factor structure, with for instance strong divisions between traditionally oriented news consumers, as opposed to digital consumers. Moreover, differences were found in terms of depth of information and accessibility. A preliminary analysis of the Flemish sample, gathered in 2011, points into the same direction, although the prominence of the relatively recently emerged social and mobile media are striking. Still, because this Q method was fit into a larger interview, participants Q-sorts were further probed, allowing a thorough contextualization of the results. More specifically, we tapped into the everyday in an attempt to get a hold of people's rationales for compiling the cross-media repertoires they do. As such, we transcend the exact manifestations of news repertoires and dig deeper in the orientations towards news consumption. Finally, during the discussion of the results, we reflect upon the use of Q-methodology as a structuring element during face-to-face interviews. Moreover, we address the benefits, but also the pitfalls in employing it in cross-national media research like this. We found that devising a joint Q-sample is a powerful tool for direct comparison, helping researchers to get a systematic overview of patterns within data and direct further, qualitative analysis Nonetheless, we experience that results should be treated very cautiously, meticulously taking into account each media system's specificities because this influences how a Q-solution should be interpreted