573 research outputs found
Valuable Journalism: The search for quality from the vantage point of the user
Get PDFMany professional journalists and journalism scholars consider the increasing attention paid to audiences as one of the causes of the gradual loss of journalistic quality. They reason if ratings, circulation figures, hits and shares determine the content of journalism, the core values of journalism become jeopardized. This article argues how and why studies of journalistic quality should take the actual readers, listeners and viewers of journalistic texts seriously. It reports on a different kind of research for measuring the public's news interests and preferences; one that concentrates on value - what makes journalism precious for people and how news organizations can provide this. By zooming in on the professionals' and public's experience of quality information instead of their views on the topic, the article shows how pleasing the audience might be compatible with producing excellent journalism. © The Author(s) 2012
Tracking Digitally Consumed News
No full text<p>Poster presented at Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap 2015, 3 February 2015, Antwerp, Belgium.</p>
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<p>The digitization of journalism has increasingly enabled news organizations to monitor the behavior of online news users by using metric tools such as Google Analytics or Chartbeat.[1] Large screens in newsrooms show real-time numbers of the amount of visitors on a news website, allowing editors to adjust the contents of their websites adherently (Anderson, 2011; MacGregor, 2007; Vu, 2014). Gathering this type of data is grounded in the tradition of audience measurement devices which started in the US in the 1950s and consolidated in the 1970 when the first people meters were installed to monitor how long, when, and what programs have been watched on television (Vicente-Marino, 2013, p. 43). With the advent of online media, it has become possible to also track online news consumption starting around the year 2000 (Coffey, 2001). While metric tools gather information of individual websites, tracking of online user consumption of a group of respondent is a booming business. Even though ethical questions when monitoring users’ online behaviour remain (Lotz, 2004) and scholars question the meaning of a click – does it e.g. mean someone is interested in the news? And does a non-click also mean non-interest? (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2014, p. 10) -, several research companies developed trackers that monitor respondents online behaviour both on desktop, laptop, mobile and tablet. In the US, Nielsen created the Online Netview Panel and the Dutch companies TNS Nipo and Wakoopa offers similar tools.[2] In the Netherlands the Dutch Digital Media Measurement (DDMM) research distributes periodical overviews of the most visited websites in the Netherlands on all platforms and devices.[3]</p>
<p>However, most of this type of research creates lists of aggregated visits to websites, considering website visitors as commodity (Richardson, 2007, p. 79; Usher, 2013) in order to give advertisers detailed information on how to reach their target audience in the most efficient manner. Feedback to journalists is limited to presenting the most clicked items often leading to the critique that most news users are more interested in trivial news than in public affairs (Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, & Walter, 2011; Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013; Nederlandse Nieuwsmonitor, 2013). Given the focus on the most read articles, relatively little is known about all consumed news articles, the contents of the visited news articles, let alone the patterns of news consumption over the day. Do news users e.g. read in the morning mainly about sports, during lunch about gossip and in the evening about politics? And what is their checking round’? Do they often visit certain websites in the same order? (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2014)</p>
<p>Up until now, these types of research questions are mainly addressed by using diary methods relying on the memory of the participants (Vicente-Marino, 2013, p. 49), while tracking tools could give an objective indication of the actual visits to websites. Therefore, this poster presents the set-up of a research design that monitors the actual consumption of news websites on desktop and laptop computers by the use of a proxy installed on the devices of a group of respondents.[4] This set-up is in line with Findahl (2013) who investigated the online behaviour of an American family and Menchen-Trevino (2012) that used a special-designed proxy to monitor the exposure to political communication during the November 2010 U.S. general election campaign.</p>
<p>However, like the corporate studies such as DDMM and Nielsen, these academic studies only report the website titles that have been visited. Our set-up goes two steps further. We do not only monitor the website titles but also the actual visited URLs and we crawl all textual and visual contents of the visited websites. Since one of the problems when monitoring a person’s online behaviour is the magnitude of the data that is being collected (Batista & Silva, 2002; Manovich, 2012; Vicente-Marino, 2013, p. 43), we deploy automated content analyses techniques (Atteveldt, 2008; Bhulai, Kampstra, Kooiman, Koole, & Kok, 2012; Kleinneijenhuis & Atteveldt, 2006) to detect the topics that are being discussed in the news items. This enables us to calculate the topical online news consumption during the day.</p>
<p>Literature</p>
<p>Anderson, C. W. (2011). Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms. Journalism, 12(5), 550–566. doi:10.1177/1464884911402451</p>
<p>Atteveldt, W. van. (2008). Semantic Network Analysis: Techniques for Extracting, Representing, and Querying Media Content. BookSurge.</p>
<p>Batista, P., & Silva, M. (2002). Mining Web Access Logs of an On-line Newspape. Presented at the Proceedings of theWorkshop on Recommendation and Personalization in eCommerce of the 2nd International Conferenceon Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web Based Systems, Malaga. Retrieved from http://xldb.di.fc.ul.pt/xldb/publications/rpec02.pdf</p>
<p>Bhulai, S., Kampstra, P., Kooiman, L., Koole, G., & Kok, B. (2012). Trend visualization on Twitter: What’s hot and what’s not? (pp. 43–48). Presented at the IARIA, Barcelona.</p>
<p>Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Walter, M. (2011). Convergence Across Divergence: Understanding the Gap in the Online News Choices of Journalists and Consumers in Western Europe and Latin America. Communication Research, 38(3), 376–396. doi:10.1177/0093650210384989</p>
<p>Coffey, S. (2001). Internet Audience Measurement: A Practicioner’s View. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 1(2), 10–17.</p>
<p>Costera Meijer, I., & Groot Kormelink, T. (2014). Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking. Digital Journalism, 0(0), 1–16. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.937149</p>
<p>Findahl, O., Lagerstedt, C., & Aurelius, A. (2013). Triangulation as a way to validate and deepen the knowledge about user behavior. A comparison between questionnaires, diaries and traffic measurement. In G. Patriarche, H. Bilandzic, J. L. Jensen, & J. Juriši?, Audience Research Methodologies: Between innovation and consolidation (pp. 54–69). New York.</p>
<p>Karlsson, M., & Clerwall, C. (2013). Negotiating Professional News Judgment and “Clicks.” Nordicom Review, 34(2), 65–76. doi:10.2478/nor-2013-0054</p>
<p>Kleinneijenhuis, J., & Atteveldt, W. van. (2006). Geautomatiseerde inhoudsanalyse, met de berichtgeving over het EU-referendum als voorbeeld. In Inhoudsanalyse: theorie en praktijk (pp. 227–250). Kluwer.</p>
<p>Lotz, A., Ross, Sharon Marie. (2004). Toward Ethical Cyberspace Audience Research: Strategies for Using the Internet for Television Audience Studies. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48(3), 501–512.</p>
<p>MacGregor, P. (2007). Tracking the Online Audience. Journalism Studies, 8(2), 280–298. doi:10.1080/14616700601148879</p>
<p>Manovich, L. (2012). How to Follow Software Users? Retrieved from http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2012/04/new-article-lev-manovich-how-to-follow.html</p>
<p>Menchen-Trevino, E., & Karr, C. (2012). Researching Real-World Web Use with Roxy: Collecting Observational Web Data with Informed Consent. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(3), 254–268. doi:10.1080/19331681.2012.664966</p>
<p>Nederlandse Nieuwsmonitor. (2013). Seksmoord op horrorvakantie: de invloed van bezoekersgedrag op krantenwebsites op de nieuwsselectie van dagbladen en hun websites. Retrieved from http://www.nieuwsmonitor.net/d/244/Seksmoord_op_Horrorvakantie_pdf</p>
<p>Richardson, J. E. (2007). Analysing newspapers: an approach from critical discourse analysis. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.</p>
<p>Usher, N. (2013). Al Jazeera English Online. Understanding Web metrics and news production when a quantified audience is not a commodified audience. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 335–351. doi:10.1080/21670811.2013.801690</p>
<p>Vicente-Marino, M. (2013). Audience research methods. Facing the challenges of transforming audiences. In G. Patriarche, H. Bilandzic, J. L. Jensen, & J. Juriši?, Audience Research Methodologies: Between innovation and consolidation (pp. 37–53). New York.</p>
<p>Vu, H. T. (2014). The online audience as gatekeeper: The influence of reader metrics on news editorial selection. Journalism, 15(8), 1094–1110. doi:10.1177/1464884913504259</p>
<p>[1] http://www.google.com/analytics/ , https://chartbeat.com/</p>
<p>[2] http://en-us.nielsen.com/sitelets/cls/digital/online-netview.html, http://www.tns-nipo.com/ons-aanbod/marktonderzoek/digital/digital-analytics/ , http://wakoopa.com/</p>
<p>[3] http://www.vinex.nl/ddmm/</p>
<p>[4] This research is part of the larger project the New News Consumer in which major Dutch news outlets participate, see www.news-use.com Our partners will provide the respondents for the fieldwork guaranteeing a mixed and wide range of participants.</p
When News Hurts. The promise of participatory storytelling for urban problem neighbourhoods
Get PDFA content analysis of more than 3400 news items published in national and regional Dutch (quality) newspapers, in combination with ethnographic audience and production research, has allowed us to explain when, how and why news can hurt. A longitudinal ethnographic case study of two highly mediatized urban areas shows how residents claim to lose touch with everyday reality as a result of continuous one-dimensional and sensationalized news coverage of their neighbourhood. This case study also illuminates how participatory media enable residents to negotiate, make sense of and give meaning to alternative, more ‘realistic’ readings of everyday life. Finally, the research suggests how professional journalistic routines might have to change in order to prevent news from being unnecessarily painful: from citizen participation to citizen facilitation, from an accent on negative news and a critical tone of voice to doing justice to the multilayered reality of neighborhoods, from a focus on extraordinary events to explaining everyday occurrences
Waardevolle Journalistiek voor de regio. Onderzoek naar nieuwsbereik, nieuwswaardering en kwaliteit van regionale en lokale journalistiek
Get PDF“Don’t read me the news, tell me the story”: How news makers and storytellers negotiate journalism’s boundaries when preparing and presenting news stories
No full textThis study seeks to understand how journalists deal with story/truth-making in their daily news practice, based on in-depth interviews with 67 journalists from Belgium and the Netherlands. The findings revealed a difference between news makers and storytellers and related differences in the way journalists prepare and present news stories. In preparing stories, news makers consider pegs and predefined angles as vital, while storytellers see them as obstacles. In presenting stories, newsmakers defend many of the journalistic conventions challenged by storytellers. The findings are discussed in terms of boundary work and in the light of the ubiquity of online news
Nothing but the facts?: What journalists talk about when they talk about storytelling and truth-finding
No full textThis paper seeks to understand how journalists deal with storytelling and truth-finding in their daily news practice. While storytelling is usually studied through texts, we approached it from a practice perspective, combining data from three ethnographic studies in which 67 journalists from the Low Countries were extensively interviewed. Because of the emphasis journalists place on “finding out the truth” in public discourses, it is tempting for academics to present them as naive truth-seekers. However, by means of an interpretative repertoire analysis of their “practice” discourses, we seek to enlarge the discursive space to talk about the supposed tension between story and reality. Although departing from the idea that all news making is storytelling, the findings reveal that news making and storytelling are seen as distinct – and sometimes opposing – practices by journalists, distinctively practiced in the preparation and presentation of news stories. These practices serve as the organizing framework around which seven distinct storytelling repertoires are organized
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