Audiences are Inherently Cross-Media: Audience Studies and the Cross-Media Challenge
Audiences are Inherently Cross-Media: Audience Studies and the Cross-Media Challenge

Summary/Abstract: ”Cross-media” is an epithet that has attained buzzword status across media and communication studies in recent years, while also frequently appearing as a panacea for the challenges that beset media producers from journalism to multimedia storytelling in the digital age. While cross-media challenges also face analysts and practitioners of media production, as well as scholars scrutinizing the meanings of convergence-age media content, this article concentrates on a discussion of the cross-media challenges encountered by audience researchers. It argues that a genuine audience perspective on the contemporary media culture must adopt a cross-media lens, because people in everyday life, as individuals and groups, form their identities and found their practices through being the inevitable sense-making hubs of the spokes of the mediatized culture. Audiences are inherently cross-media. The article also presents the methodological reflections and preliminary results from an ongoing study of cross-media news consumption, and briefly discusses the prospects for cross-cultural comparative audience research.

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