EPJ Data Sci. (2020) 9: 10
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00228-9

Regular article

News and the city: understanding online press consumption patterns through mobile data

¹ Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
² Data Science Institute, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile
³ Telefónica R&D, Santiago, Chile
⁴ ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

^* e-mail: salvatore.vilella@unito.it

Received: 22 July 2019
Accepted: 21 April 2020
Published online: 29 April 2020

Abstract

The always increasing mobile connectivity affects every aspect of our daily lives, including how and when we keep ourselves informed and consult news media. By studying a DPI (deep packet inspection) dataset, provided by one of the major Chilean telecommunication companies, we investigate how different cohorts of the population of Santiago De Chile consume news media content through their smartphones. We find that some socio-demographic attributes are highly associated to specific news media consumption patterns. In particular, education and age play a significant role in shaping the consumers behaviour even in the digital context, in agreement with a large body of literature on off-line media distribution channels.