Abstract
Starting from a concept of two pursued gratifications—immediate rewards, relaxative reasons, pleasure-seeking, and the like; and delayed rewards, such as cognitive or instrumental reasons—it is suggested that these are two separate dimensions rather than a single dichotomy. These dimensions are believed to correlate quite differently with knowledge on municipal affairs as obtained from newspaper reading. Simple gratification scores are derived from a convenience sample's assessment of actual news items and an equal number of similar but unpublished items. These scores are used to predict respondents' knowledge score. Results indicate that while sheer amount of reading does not covary with knowledge of city affairs, it matters why people read their local papers. If the readers want to learn about municipal politics, they tend to be taught; consequently, if they read city affairs articles for fun, they learn rather little. Media effects seem to depend strongly on the motives of the media users—on the media gratifications pursued.
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