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stories of interest before news scanning is possible, offline newspapers are nevertheless
perceived as a more satisfactory source for news skimming.
Furthermore, the finding that both offline newspaper and online news sources are
comparable in their ability to contribute to audience gratifications in the areas of
entertainment and interpersonal communication is another testament to the near identical
ability of different media types to provide similar media gratifications. The present study
then expands the newspaper gratification research literature by confirming that
newspaper reading—either offline or online—can be a source for entertainment. This
entertainment utility, however, is enjoyed to a lesser extent than the interpersonal
communication utility, as suggested in the present study as well as past studies.
There are limitations to the present study findings, including the limitation of only
15 items, so limited to prevent an overly lengthy telephone survey and respondent
fatigue. Although these 15 items closely emulated the past news gratification studies—
both in terms of the number and types of measurement items used, additional insights and
stronger content validity could have been possible if extra exploratory gratification
measures had been utilized. Another limitation is that generalizations about offline media
gratifications were limited to newspapers. Since the study did not examine television
news, we can only speculate about television news gratifications based on past research.
Conclusion
The present study attempted to gather comparative data for audience gratifications
associated with online and offline news consumption at a national level. As study results
further extended the staying power of the uses and gratifications paradigm, they also
clarified the specificity of how audience gratifications extracted from different types of
Convention