When studying media audiences, comparisons between countries, cultures or specific geographical regions are often valued for providing rich data, offering scholars the benefit of a wider perspective. An international comparative outlook can help understand how different media systems interrelate with cultural and social contexts, as well as show how global media technologies are used and made meaningful in local settings. However, it also comes with a multitude of challenges, which can be particularly palpable using qualitative methods, resulting partly from the often relatively small-scale samples at hand, and partly from the demand to understand complex sense-making processes and nuances in audiences’ expressions and interpretations. This chapter discusses some of the methodological complications that can arise when embarking on cross-cultural audience research, especially highlighting how researchers may need to adapt in times of crisis or unforeseen events. It draws on a qualitative research project on news consumption among young people in three different countries, Sweden, Estonia and Russia, which—based on interviews, focus groups and elements of ethnographic observation—examined how young adults (aged 18–26) conceptualise and use news in their highly digitised everyday lives. During the course of the research, two major socio-political crises, Covid-19 and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributed to the project taking a different route than originally planned, and the chapter emphasises the necessity of flexibility and reflexivity in audience research, as well as attempting to challenge more rigid ideas of how to compare media audiences across geographies and cultures.