Journalism

One of the main debates within journalism research during the last decade has been the role of citizens as contributors or, conversely, as threats to the practice of journalism. While participation has been explored from many different theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives, one perspective remains noticeably underexplored – the perspective of the citizens themselves. Using social contract theory as a backdrop, this study draws on a representative survey (N = 2091) and focus groups (N = 82) in Sweden. The results show that although citizens do not bring up participation as an important element of journalism, they become more skeptical the more participation affects journalism. Furthermore, they expect journalists to moderate citizen contributions according to established journalistic standards. From the perspective of social contract theory, participation in journalism appears to be more of a problem than a benefit to citizens.

We conducted an online experiment to study people’s perception of automated computer-written news. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 design, we varied the article topic (sports, finance; within-subjects) and both the articles’ actual and declared source (human-written, computer-written; between-subjects). Nine hundred eighty-six subjects rated two articles on credibility, readability, and journalistic expertise. Varying the declared source had small but consistent effects: subjects rated articles declared as human written always more favorably, regardless of the actual source. Varying the actual source had larger effects: subjects rated computer-written articles as more credible and higher in journalistic expertise but less readable. Across topics, subjects’ perceptions did not differ. The results provide conservative estimates for the favorability of computer-written news, which will further increase over time and endorse prior calls for establishing ethics of computer-written news.

This article explores the role of trust in professional and alternative media as (a) antecedents of citizen news production, and (b) moderators of the effect of citizen news production on political participation. Using two-wave panel survey data collected in the United States between December 2013 and March 2014, results show that trust in citizen media predicts people’s tendency to create news. In turn, citizen news production is a positive predictor of both offline and online participation. More importantly, trust in the media moderates the effect of citizen news production over online political participation. Overall, this article highlights the importance of trust in the media with respect to citizen news production and how it matters for democracy. Thus, this study casts a much-needed light on how media trust and citizen journalism intertwine in explaining a more engaged and participatory citizenry.

In the changing news environment, young adult audiences, often dubbed ‘the Internet generation’, have increasingly gravitated toward online sources of news and information, raising questions about the nature and amount of news consumed. This study joins many others in looking at the emerging processes of news consumption among, in this case, college students, using focus group interviews to further examine how they go about obtaining news. Drawing upon literature in the areas of news consumption, media habits, generational change and news repertoire, this study identifies an emerging three-stage process of consumption that includes the following: routine surveillance, incidental consumption, and directed consumption, each conditioned by various forms of new media use. It suggests continued research in the interaction of a changing media ecology with generational adoption of news habits and the implications of this interaction for news and news engagement.

In many communities across the United States, substantive local news is a rare commodity. For areas long stigmatized and associated with high levels of violence, crime, and poverty, negative reporting may be the only local news available. Drawing from communication infrastructure theory and literature on local news audiences and civic journalism, this study explores how a local solutions journalism project is received by members of an underrepresented and stigmatized community. Solutions journalism stories focus on responses to social problems, usually exploring problem-solving efforts that have the potential to be scaled. This case examines how participants in six focus groups with 48 African-American and Latino South Los Angeles residents responded to solutions-oriented stories produced by a local media project. Study findings illustrate how residents navigate and critically interpret local media coverage, and how their response to ‘solutions journalism’ is largely positive but tempered by concerns regarding structural inequalities.

This article problematizes the relationship between clicks and audience interests. Clicking patterns are often seen as evidence that news users are mostly interested in junk news, leading to concerns about the state of journalism and the implications for society. Asking and observing how 56 users actually browse news and what clicking and not clicking mean to them, we identified 30 distinct considerations for (not) clicking and classified them into three categories: cognitive, affective and pragmatic. The results suggest, first, that interest is too crude a term to account for the variety of people’s considerations for (not) clicking. Second, even if one aims for roughly estimating people’s news interests, clicks are a flawed instrument because a lack of clicking does not measure people’s lack of interest in news. Third, taking users’ browsing patterns seriously could help bridge the gap between what people need as citizens and what they actually consume. Finally, we argue that all metrics should be critically assessed from a user perspective rather than taken at face value.

While the issue of citizens’ declining trust in journalists has received much attention in both research and public discourse, relatively little research has examined how individuals’ evaluations of the accuracy of media coverage of events they witnessed personally may have long-term effects on the level of trust in journalists. Using the responses of Israeli adults (n = 405) to an online survey, this study explored various predictors of public trust in journalists and found that perceived correspondence between direct personal experience and news reports was the strongest predictor of trust in journalists and the only one that remained significant when controlling for all other factors. In addition, general levels of public trust in journalists were found to be in small decline. These findings suggest that declining levels of trust in journalists may be associated with actual evaluations of the quality of media performance by individuals, thus refocusing the question of trust on journalistic practice rather than on audience attributes. At the same time, the fact that personal and possibly anecdotal evidence may have significant long-term effects on audience levels of trust is potentially problematic from a democratic standpoint. We discuss the implications and limitations of our findings.

There is a growing concern in Western democracies about the decline in young people’s use of news media. Some scholars see it as a result of a diminishing interest in social issues and even of a more general deterioration in civic culture. Others claim that young people still feel socially engaged but that they turn their back to mainstream news media because they are increasingly irrelevant to them. This study focuses on the question how Dutch millennials’ social engagement relates to their news interest, their news media use and their news preferences. It concludes that the relation between young people’s social engagement and their news interest is still strong. Furthermore, it shows that social engagement is clearly related to the use of most national news media, including the use of Facebook. However, social engagement is not so much related to the use of most local/regional news media. Finally, findings show that social engagement is positively related to a citizen-oriented approach of news but not to a consumer-oriented approach. Overall, the study provides insights that can broaden our understanding of the complex relationship between news interest, news media use and news preferences of young people and their engagement with society. Next to that, it can help professional journalism to get (re)connected with the up-growing generation.

Based on a 4-year longitudinal analysis of social media and mobile phone users in a Midwest US market, this study differentiates news content engagement from news medium engagement, proposes four levels of news engagement, and compares how social media and mobile media differ in their effects on engagement in news content and news medium between the general population and college students. The analysis shows a steady decline in the interest in political news but not in other types of news. Total news consumption time gradually declined among the general population, and the gap between general population and students diminished over time. Social media use positively predicts total news consumption time. Predictors of news engagement differ for different levels of news engagement.