Political Knowledge Gaps Among News Consumers with Different News Media Repertoires Across Multiple Platforms

Authors

  • Hyunwoo Lee Korea Creative Contents Agency
  • JungAe Yang Seoul National University

Keywords:

news media repertoires, cross-platforms, knowledge gap, political knowledge, cluster analysis

Abstract

This survey research (N = 2,098) identified news media repertoires based on users’ overall news consumption patterns and then investigated how political knowledge acquisition differs across distinct repertoire groups. A cluster analysis produced three repertoire groups: news avoiders (72.7%), emerging news seekers (9.6%) who prefer newer media (i.e., Internet, mobile, and SNSs), and traditional news seekers (17.7%) who heavily rely on older media. Moreover, traditional news seekers outperformed emerging seekers as well as avoiders in the acquisition of political knowledge, and the high education group possessed more political knowledge than the low education group. Finally, the magnitude of the knowledge gap between the high and low education groups was statistically significant for both the news avoiders and traditional seekers, but not for the emerging seekers.

Author Biographies

Hyunwoo Lee, Korea Creative Contents Agency

Hyunwoo Lee (Ph.D. at Seoul National University) has started to work for the Korea Creative Contents Agency as a research fellow in July, 2013. He used to work for the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) for a year. His current research interests include media audience analysis, the quality assessment of broadcast programs and the network analysis of broadcast policy actors. He has published many research papers in Korean communication journals such as Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies and Korean Journal of Broadcasting & Telecommunication Studies.

JungAe Yang, Seoul National University

JungAe Yang (Ph.D. at Indiana University, Bloomington) is a researcher in the Institute of Communication Research at Seoul National University in Korea. Her research focuses on news media use, media format effects, and knowledge/information gaps. She is also interested in communication processes and their effects in general. Her recent work on knowledge gaps has appeared in New Media & Society (Dec., 2011). For the past three consecutive years, she received the annual top paper award conferred by major Korean communication associations.  

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Published

2014-01-30

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Section

Articles