0000000000719273
AUTHOR
Sebastian Stier
sj-pdf-1-nms-10.1177_1461444821989972 – Supplemental material for The overstated generational gap in online news use? A consolidated infrastructural perspective
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-nms-10.1177_1461444821989972 for The overstated generational gap in online news use? A consolidated infrastructural perspective by Frank Mangold, Sebastian Stier, Johannes Breuer and Michael Scharkow in New Media & Society
The overstated generational gap in online news use? A consolidated infrastructural perspective
Recent research by Taneja et al. suggested that digital infrastructures diminish the generational gap in news use by counteracting preference structures. We expand on this seminal work by arguing that an infrastructural perspective requires overcoming limitations of highly aggregated web tracking data used in prior research. We analyze the individual browsing histories of two representative samples of German Internet users collected in 2012 ( N = 2970) and 2018 ( N = 2045) and find robust evidence for a smaller generational gap in online news use than commonly assumed. While short news website visits mostly demonstrated infrastructural factors, longer news use episodes were shaped more by …
How social network sites and other online intermediaries increase exposure to news
Research has prominently assumed that social media and web portals that aggregate news restrict the diversity of content that users are exposed to by tailoring news diets toward the users’ preferences. In our empirical test of this argument, we apply a random-effects within–between model to two large representative datasets of individual web browsing histories. This approach allows us to better encapsulate the effects of social media and other intermediaries on news exposure. We find strong evidence that intermediaries foster more varied online news diets. The results call into question fears about the vanishing potential for incidental news exposure in digital media environments.