The 360º News Experience: Audience Connections With the Ubiquitous News Organization.

News networks expend a substantial amount of resource in providing access to their content through multiple gateways, yet little academic research informs this process. Extant research continues to discriminate between news content, the medium on which the news is presented or accessed, and the effects of the content, rather than focus on the totality of the multimodal news experience. The current research extends propositions from uses and gratifications, the technology acceptance model, and the expectancy-value perspective and attempts to explain audience connections to the 360º or multimodal content provider (news organization). The findings suggest a strong connection between surveillance gratifications and ritualistic media use on attitudes or perceptual orientations towards the news organization; this in turn mediates and best predicts satisfaction with the 360º news experience. The overall findings also suggest a branding effect or an extension of the audience's television news perceptions to the multimodal content provided by the news organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]