Research Note: Online and Print Newspapers

Abstract

Printed newspapers are known to widen the range of public topics, events and issues their audience is aware of. There are reasons to assume that their online counterparts help increase their audience’s perceived agenda to a lesser extent. The way print newspapers are structured and used is supposed to lure readers into reading stories they may not have been interested in beforehand. Online papers support more activity and control by their users; becoming aware of a narrower range of topics according to one’s individual interests is more plausible. A representative survey of almost 1000 respondents shows it is more complicated than that. Both channels in fact contribute to widening the audience agenda. But whereas online newspapers show this effect only in the highest educated group of society, print newspapers are able to expand the horizon of those whose range of interests is at most average.

Migrants, Minorities and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere

“…Additionally, in the contemporary era, newspaper articles from virtually all sources are also published online (either verbatim or in a substantially similar form), thereby extending their impact well beyond the traditional local readership. Finally, printed newspapers are better at raising the public's awareness about a range of issues compared to other media types, including TV and online publications (Schoenbach, de Waal, and Lauf 2005).…”

Challenging Selective Exposure

“…One could object that people can also be selective within a news outlet. This is true, but even if people spend more attention on those news stories that fit their opinions and interests, they cannot help being confronted by some other content as well -a form of incidental learning that also has been dubbed a "trap effect" (Schoenbach, De Waal, and Lauf 2005). Therefore, we are mainly interested in the news outlets people regularly use and restrict our analysis to the outlet level.…”

Agenda‐Setting, Priming, and Framing

“…Experimental research shows that readers of the print version of the New York Times, after five days, systemically differed from online readers of the same newspaper in what they perceived to be the most important problems facing the country (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2002). Other survey-based research finds that the more frequently individuals read print newspapers each week, the greater number of issues they mention as being the order of the day (Schoenbach, de Waal, & Lauf, 2005). The frequency of reading online newspapers, however, was not related to the range of topics perceived by individuals.…”