Five Types of Media Usage Repertoires in Croatia

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Dina Vozab, who combines the concepts of high-choice media environments in the current media ecology, of the news repertoires that news users develop in such high-choice environments, and of the effects of media use across multiple platforms on political participation. She examines this in the context of Croatia, whose media system is characterised as peripheral in the European context, and remains comparatively underresearched. What types of news repertoires exist here, and what is their effect on political participation?

This was analysed using a representative survey of Croatian news users, and found the existence of five typical news repertoires: news avoiders focussing only on television; traditional media omnivores with a strong local focus; pure tradititionalists focussing only on legacy media, especially newspapers; globalised omnivores consuming domestic and international media, including social media; and light digital users substituting domestic and international digital media for domestic traditional media. The greatest distinctions here are wealth and education; heavy users tend to score better on both counts.

Such repertoires are correlated with political participation practices such as voting, signing petitions, participation in offline protests, digital participation, and civic engagement. There are few significant general media effects on such forms of participation; public television use is most important as a driver of conventional forms of participation, while commercial television is associated with a ‘media malaise’ effect. Digital media news consumption and higher multiplatform news use is important mainly for digital participation.