  Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news
usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups,millennials and
boomers,that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based
on self reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the
generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and
preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses
of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range
of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort's
usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a
smaller than commonly assumed generational gap in online news usage, with
characteristics that manifest the multifarious effects of the infrastructural
aspect of the media environment, alongside those of preferences.
