In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires, write Jesper Strömbäck, of University of Gothenburg, Kajsa Falasca, of Mid Sweden University, and Sanne Kruikemeier, of University of Amsterdam. The article explores how people compose these individual news repertoires and the effects of different news repertoires on political participation.

The study is based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election. The article identifies five news repertoires; labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers.

The results indicate that there is a positive relationship between social media news repertoire and both offline and online participation. Thus, social media has the potential to increase political participation. The study also suggest that the social network characteristics or “network media logic” are more mobilizing than traditional online or offline news.

The article “The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation” was published by Political Communication and it is available here. (abstract public)

Picture: voting by Liberal Democrats, licence: CC BY-ND 2.0