Online news user journeys: The role of social media, news websites, and topics

The complexity and diversity of today’s media landscape provides many challenges for scholars studying online news consumption. Yet it is unclear how news consumers navigate online. Moving forward, we used a custom-built browser plug-in—passively tracking Dutch online news consumers 24/7—to examine how context (website) and content (news topic) features affect patterns of online news consumption. This resulted in a data set containing more than one million Web pages, from 175 websites (news websites, search engines, social media), collected over 8 months in 2017/18. We used automated content analysis to retrieve news topics, and estimated Markov chains to detect consumption patterns. Our findings indicate that news consumers often directly visit their favorite (typically mainstream) news outlet, and continue browsing within that outlet. We also found a strong preference for entertainment news over any other topic. Although social media often offer entertainment news, they are not necessarily the starting point to such news.