How Recipients Compose Their News Sources Online: Utilizing Tracking Data to Investigate Digital News Media Repertoires

Today’s high-choice media environment offers various opportunities for interest-driven news exposure, resulting in highly diverse and fragmented news usage patterns, especially in the digital media environment. Media repertoires provide a suitable theoretical framework for considering these circumstances and investigating the entirety and interrelatedness of individuals’ news sources, rather than focusing on singular news offerings. We explore media repertoires focusing on news by relying on behavioral tracking data from 805 German respondents over eleven weeks (November 2022–January 2023). Conducting a latent class analysis based on news usage frequencies across seventeen news categories, we identified eight digital news media repertoires with distinct usage patterns. Repertoire comparisons via analysis of variance (ANOVA) further revealed differences in the news topics used, users’ diversity of news outlets, news concentration, and news usage duration. Implications for future research on investigating media repertoire compositions are discussed.