Coping with Covid: Exploring reconfigurations of Flemish news repertoires in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

As we are now rounding up our second year with COVID-19, studies have provided insight into the pandemic's impact on news practices around the world. However, most of these accounts describe data from the early months of the outbreak. Further research is needed to explore the shapes that news repertoires might have settled into in the wake of the pandemic. By comparing data from a Latent Class Analysis of news repertoires using the Digital News Report 2020 and 2021, this paper contributes to extant knowledge of the pandemic's impact on news use in Flanders. We find that users were significantly more likely to adopt Casual rather than Limited news repertoires in 2021, pointing to a potential growth in news habits of users with a previously limited repertoire.