This article assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on online news consumption. The findings suggest that the consumption of news on the internet has not yet differed drastically from the consumption of news in traditional media. The assessment shows that the dominant modes of inquiry have also been characterized by stability rather than change (because research has usually drawn on traditional theoretical and methodological approaches). In addition, these modes of inquiry exhibit three systematic limitations: the assumption of a division between print, broadcast, and online media; the notion that the analysis should treat media features and social practices separately; and the inclination to focus on ordinary or extraordinary patterns of phenomena but not on both at the same time. On the basis of this assessment, this article proposes an integrative research agenda that builds on this scholarship but also contributes to solve some of its main limitations.

Online News Consumption Research: An Assessment of Past Work and an Agenda for the Future

In blog we trust? Deciphering credibility of components of the internet among politically interested internet users

In contemporary high-choice media environments, the issue of media trust and its impact on people's media use has taken on new importance. At the same time, the extent to which people trust the new...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23808985.2020.1755338

News media trust and its impact on media use: toward a framework for future research

The recent trend of media convergence poses serious challenges to existing theoretical frameworks, such as uses and gratifications and the agenda-setting theories, for media choice and effects. This study adopts a repertoire approach to news consumption in the complex contemporary media environment. This approach emphasizes patterns of multiple media use, rather than single media selection, for accessing the news. A computer-aided telephone survey with representative samples from three advanced media markets in China shows that a majority of the survey respondents employ multiple media platforms for news consumption. Users' interest in and availability to news affects the size of their repertoires. Their perceptions of news source credibility influence their news media choice that results in different compositions of the repertoires. An exploratory factor analysis identifies both complementary and converging patterns of media use by the respondents. Finally, the difference in the internal architecture of ...

NEWS CONSUMPTION ACROSS MULTIPLE MEDIA PLATFORMS: A repertoire approach

Research has established that sources have the power to influence the news agenda of the media and that media can under certain circumstances act as sources for each other. This study examined the use of weblogs as sources in the traditional media and the use of sources in weblogs in general. A content analysis of 2059 articles over a six-year period from the New York Times and the Washington Post found that the newspapers increasingly legitimized weblogs as credible sources. A separate content analysis of 120 weblogs found that they heavily relied on the traditional media as sources. By allowing each other to influence their news agendas, there is indication that the traditional media and weblogs create what the researchers introduce and define as a news source cycle, in which news content can be passed back and forth from media to media.

THE SOURCE CYCLE: How traditional media and weblogs use each other as sources

The number of adults using the Internet to find and read news online is on the 
rise. One national study by the Pew Research Center reported that weekly use 
of online news tripled from 11 million to 36 million people in the United States 
between 1996 and 1998, which the center called “astonishing” (Pew Research 
Center for People & the Press, 1998). Other studies have shown similar growth in 
use of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and other online information resources 
(see, e.g., Jupiter Media Metrix, 2001; Nielsen Media Research, 1999).

Denise Marcella Casey

Papers

Online news credibility

The impact of distance learning on interpersonal communication satisfaction: A comparison of online and face-to-face community college classrooms