The shifting cross-media news landscape: Challenges for news producers

The article offers new insights for democracy and for news producers by mapping the use and users of today’s cross-media news landscape, as the everyday consumption of news across the range of available news media and formats is shifting as a result of transformations of technology, culture and lifestyles. Theoretically the study is anchored in Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, and its recent reconceptualizations in theories of ‘cultural citizenship’, 'civic agency' and 'public connection'. The project operationalizes these theories through the concept of users' perceived “worthwhileness” of news media, a user-anchored concept which incorporates the different functionalities of the situational cross-media use of news by citizen/consumers in everyday life. Empirically the article presents the findings of a large-scale survey that traces the imminent challenges facing players in the news market, as a consequence of accelerating divisions between 'overview' and 'depth' news media (across print, broadcasting and the internet). The project is carried out in a partnership of university-based researchers and analysts from one of the major newspaper publishers in Denmark, and presents the first user-based analysis of the relative position of each individual news medium in the entire news media matrix.