Where did you come from, where did you go? News trajectories in Germany and Switzerland

The article examines news trajectories used by individuals to access mainstream journalistic media in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland during the first peak of COVID-19 in Europe. It discusses the role of individual characteristics related to sociodemographics, political, and media attitudes in predisposition towards specific modes of news access. For this aim, it combines survey data with data on individuals’ engagement with news automatically tracked in spring 2020. The findings of the article highlight the prevalence of accessing news via search engines (search trajectory) and by directly going to news websites (routine trajectory). The study also demonstrates the important role of political and media attitudes in the prevalence of specific modes of news access, which, however, differs between the countries, thus emphasizing the importance of conducting more comparative research using tracking data.