News Consumption Across Multiple Media Platforms: A Repertoire Approach

Abstract

The recent trend of media convergence poses serious challenges to existing theoretical frameworks, such as uses and gratifications and the agenda setting theory, 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 the repertoires occasioned by the choice of media is associated with diverging news gendas among the news audience.