Comparing European citizens' news media repertoires across nations: A second-order factor analysis approach to explore cross-national patterns

A shift towards a more global audience culture is currently being pushed by the increasingly widespread digital, mobile and social media used for news consumption and internationalization of the news markets. However, while living in an increasingly globalized newsscape, audience members are still situated in a local community, and relate to a (oftentimes linguistically anchored) regional and national context for news consumption. To some extent, therefore, news consumption repertoires, can be argued to ‘territorialized’ in such a way that they come to systematically vary from country to country. This study reports from an empirical investigation across nine European countries of how nationally
anchored news consumption repertoires are both shaped by the national cultures and by trans-border processes, exploring to what extent we can speak about transnational news repertoires. Methodologically, the study performs a second-order Q-methodological factor analysis of the national news repertoires mapped in the country-specific analyses reported in this special issue.