Mobile news consumption and political news interest: A time budget perspective

This study explores mobile news consumption from a time budget perspective. Time constraint is a major factor influencing people’s news consumption, but it has not been examined specifically in the previous studies. Because mobile media can exploit the time gaps when other media are inappropriate or inconvenient to use, they have a unique capacity to increase the available time for news consumption. Data for the empirical analysis were collected in a random sample mail survey with 253 respondents in the Midwest United States from September to November 2012. The results indicated that mobile news users have significantly longer work time and shorter disposable time (tighter time budget) than non-users; people with tight time budget are more likely to have more mobile news applications and spend more time on mobile news than are people with loose time budget; and people who are interested in political news spend more time on mobile news than do people who are not.