The move to high-choice media environments has sparked fears over audience fragmentation. We analyze news audiences across media platforms (print, television, and online) in 6 countries, going beyond platform-specific, single-country studies. We find surprisingly high levels of news audience duplication, but also that cross-platform audiences vary from country to country, with fragmentation higher in Denmark and the United Kingdom than in Spain and the United States. We find no support for the idea that online audiences are more fragmented than offline audiences, countering fears associated with audience segmentation and filter bubbles. Because all communication exists in the context of its audience, our analysis has implications across the field, underlining the importance of research into how trends play out in different contexts.

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Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication

Consequences of modernity in contemporary legal theory

Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević

In From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.

From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television

This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the world's 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity, highlighting the role of cultural structures in shaping global media use.

How Do Global Audiences Take Shape? The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use

This article explores the relationship between the media-use patterns of European audiences and the institutional contexts of digital media systems in a multilevel, crossnational comparative research design. A theoretical model is proposed for describing contemporary digital media systems, applied through cluster analysis to a set of 22 European countries. Four digital mediascapes/media system clusters are identified. Regression analysis shows the influence of macro-level media systems on micro-level audience preferences for different media. The media system clusters are related to data on media use from the nine countries in the “audiences across media” study. The findings strongly support the explanatory power of structural aspects at the macroinstitutional level for audience choices in terms of both legacy and Internet-based media.

Digital Mediascapes, Institutional Frameworks, and Audience Practices Across Europe

All the most important theoretical models developed for comparing media systems stress the importance of the structural aspect in defining the main dimensions that shape the media field. In this text we focus on audience behaviour in media systems as an aspect of agency, understood in sociological terms as part of the structuration process, and we expand the boundaries of media systems theory by including phenomena related to media use. We apply a cluster analysis to structural variables of media systems and to audience practices in terms of media use in order to find out how similar or different are media structures and practices in different European countries, in relation to Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) theoretical model of media systems. The study finds that European audience practices show a clear North/South, rather than the expected East/West, differentiation. The expectation that all post-socialist European countries belong to the same model is also not supported in relation to structural media variables; some post-socialist countries are more similar to countries in the other two models of media systems in their structural aspects. The study interestingly re-groups European countries into three distinctive structural models which differ somewhat from the original Hallin and Mancini (2004) classification.

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Audiences as a Source of Agency in Media Systems: Post-socialist Europe in Comparative Perspective

This article builds a theoretical model for comparative analysis of media culture based on the notion of genre, and applies it to a comparative analysis of television as a cultural form in socialist and post-socialist Croatia. The paper explores how the shares and generic composition of program modes of information, entertainment and fiction change in time, and how the contribution of different genres to program flow and modes varies with the changes of political, economic and technological context. Longitudinal trends in television flows are comparatively evaluated in relation to trends in genre developments in Europe and their relationship to the changes in the cultural role of television. The results show a decrease in the information and an increase in the fiction mode between socialism and democracy, with some similarities of the Croatian and western television culture in relation to genre and mode composition and flow, albeit with a belated introduction of neo television genres. Notwithstanding the limited freedom of expression and ideological content, which necessarily influenced socialist media culture, television as a cultural form in Croatia developed in concert with the global program flows. The article is based on original content analysis of television schedules where the unit of analysis is a televisions program listing. The analogue television universe is represented by longitudinal data for 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. The stratified systematic sample (N=3934) for each chosen year consists of two constructed weeks from a universe of all listed programs broadcast on all free to air television channels with a national reach license.

Comparing Socialist and Post-Socialist Television Culture. Fifty Years of Television in Croatia

Journalism is known to be culturally specific in historical terms, while cross-country studies have demonstrated differences in journalistic milieus in different political regimes. This article app...

Mediatization of journalism: Influence of the media system and media organization on journalistic practices in European digital mediascapes:

The purpose of this article is to determine the position of trust in media in relation to trust in other political institutions in Croatia. The main assumption is that institutional trust is a multidimensional phenomenon, which is as such evaluated by citizens who are able to distinguish different institutions and evaluate them according to individual performance. Furthermore, the article aims to define the determinants of each underlying dimension of institutional trust. The study draws from data gathered within the project Trust in Media 2009, on a nationally representative sample for Croatia (n=1000). First, dimensions of trust were defined by the method of principal components (Varimax). The results confirmed the multidimensionality of institutional trust. Five dimensions (sub-scales) of institutional trust were extracted: trust in party and business elite, trust in state institutions, trust in cultural elite, trust in EU and trust in media. Results did not confirm the hypothesis on trust in media as a completely independent dimension of institutional trust. Second, inter-correlation and regression analysis was applied in order to determine trust in different dimensions of institutional trust. Frequency of media use proved to be the best predictor of institutional trust. Frequency of television viewing has a positive effect on trust in state institutions, while there was no evidence of the effect of reading daily newspapers on trust.

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Antonija Čuvalo

Papers

Digital Mediascapes, Institutional Frameworks, and Audience Practices Across Europe

Audiences as a Source of Agency in Media Systems: Post-socialist Europe in Comparative Perspective

Comparing Socialist and Post-Socialist Television Culture. Fifty Years of Television in Croatia

Mediatization of journalism: Influence of the media system and media organization on journalistic practices in European digital mediascapes:

Institutional trust in the Croatian post-socialist context