I. Costera Meijer

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · department of Language and Communication

While loyalty has become increasingly relevant for journalism, it has rarely been examined as a single phenomenon and even less from an audience perspective. The empirical knowledge surrounding loyalty has centred on its role in trust, news choice, and the sustainability of the profession. Nonetheless, we still do not know how a relationship with j...

Scholars repeatedly argue that ‘audience engagement’ as a concept and, consequently as a practice, remain inconsistent and ambiguous. Such conceptual inconsistency is in tension with the relevance that the phenomenon of audience engagement has gained in contemporary discussions about journalism. In this article, we tackle the conceptual inconsisten...

Despite its increasing attention for audiences, journalism studies remains an inherently production-focused discipline. Consequently, studying the perspective of audiences tends to automatically start from questions relevant for and benefitting the news industry. In this introduction, we argue for a more radical audience turn that pushes journalism...

The last two decades have witnessed major disruptions to the traditional media industry as a result of technological breakthroughs. New opportunities and challenges continue to arise, most recently as a result of the rapid advance and adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. On the one hand, the broad adoption of these technologies may int...

Social network sites have been considered as important arenas for public debate, but as a large proportion of users do not actively participate, there is a need to further our understanding of a phenomenon as hidden, unnoticed and invisible as non-participation. We argue that inhibition is a valuable socio-psychological lens to study non-participat...

News organizations increasingly depend on subscriptions, donations, memberships and audience engagement figures, calling up the question of what kind of journalism audiences would find so valuable that they might be willing to pay for it, in money or attention. To answer this question, I have fleshed out the concept of Valuable Journalism by perfor...

Journalists’ increasing focus on news users is often seen as diverting the news agenda away from the core issues that are important to democracy. Hence, the practices of connecting journalists to the audience tend to be assessed as detrimental to the democratic function of journalism: informing citizens and facilitating public opinion. However, thi...

This chapter investigates how local journalists reconsider their ideas of newsworthiness while adapting an audience-driven approach to journalism. It is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 13 journalists working for three local newsrooms in the Netherlands, two of them working with Hearken and one of them working with crowdsourcing. The f...

Paying close attention to news users has become fully integrated in professional journalism. Even though this practice may still meet with resistance, becoming more audience responsive is no longer automatically condemned as the highway to popularization and sensationalism. What has changed in journalism’s ecosystem to account for this turnaround?...

This paper explores what spending time means from a user perspective. Drawing from three qualitative audience studies that center around the notion of experience, it reveals three complexities regarding time spent in relation to news use. Overall, we find that time spent does not necessarily measure interest in, attention to or engagement with news...

This article seeks to capture material and sensory dimensions of everyday news use that usually remain unexplored. To that end, we developed a two-sided-ethnography, filming people while they use news, allowing both researchers and participants to look in and reflect on their news use. Tapping into news users’ embodied, tacit knowledge, we found th...

This entry provides an overview of the relationship between audiences and journalism. Although traditionally, practitioners and journalism scholars have largely neglected audiences, digitalization has enabled and necessitated taking the audiences of journalism seriously. As advertisement revenues continue to decrease, news organizations are increas...

This paper seeks to understand how journalists deal with storytelling and truth-seeking 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 36 beat reporters and 13 journalistic storytelling experts were extensively i...

This paper explores how political information can be told in such a way that news users experience it as captivating. More specifically, it seeks to move beyond Irene Costera Meijer’s “double viewing paradox” and bridge the gap between what attracts and satisfies viewers by developing bottom–up, user-defined, quality criteria for current affairs TV...

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 click...

Given the interdisciplinary nature of digital journalism studies and the increasingly blurred boundaries of journalism, there is a need within the field of journalism studies to widen the scope of theoretical perspectives and approaches. Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age discusses new avenues in theorising journalism, and reassesses establish...

This paper aims at building a conceptual bridge called Valuable Journalism between quality journalism and users’ experience of quality. To that end a questionnaire was designed, built on previous data and triangulated with the results of three simultaneously organized qualitative audience studies. The distinct dimensions of valuable journalism, as...

Digitalization of journalism enables news organizations to monitor the behavior of online news users by using metric tools such as Google Analytics. Journalists and news executives take these data as good measurements of audiences' interest in news, but they cover only their own websites. To create a full picture of all online news consumption, res...

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. 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 (Ande...

Op zoek naar nieuwe digitale journalistieke vertelvormen experimenteren journalisten volop zoals de New York Times deed met de productie 'Snowfall' waarin het verhaal van een aantal skiërs verteld wordt terwijl ze getroffen worden door een lawine. De productie staat geheel online en bestaat uit tekst, foto's, infographics en video's. Andere interna...

Storytelling is hyped as an instrument to attract audiences, but its potential to engage simultaneously makes it a source of criticism and concern. The debate seems stuck between what the profession of journalism is supposed to be about (facts, objectivity, truth-telling), and the way these ideals are threatened by the trend of engaging users. In t...

Research on the evolution of journalism is still lacking appropriate theoretical tools to (re)conceptualise the blurring boundaries between professional news production in the media industry, the public actively engaged in using, circulating and producing information, and the diversity of social and material actors involved in these processes. This...

This paper challenges the generally taken-for-granted automatic link between media platforms, media technology and news user practices. It explores what has changed in people’s news consumption by comparing patterns in news use between 2004–2005 and 2011–2014. While new, social and mobile media technologies did not unleash a revolution in people’s...

Despite the technological possibilities for portable, personalized, and participatory news use, the public has not turned en masse from passive receivers who consume news on the producers' terms, into active users who tailor news to fit their personal preferences and practices. Unmistakably, some power has shifted from producers to users, but it is...

Studies of participatory journalism demonstrate that professional journalism can be resistant to change. Journalists and news organizations do wish to encourage audience contribution and digital innovation, but find it difficult to reconcile traditional journalistic values and practices with more participatory ones. In this study, this ‘resistance...

Many 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 wh...

In this article, we investigate the emergence of “participatory journalism” as a scholarly object in the field of journalism studies. By conducting a genealogical analysis of 119 articles on par- ticipatory journalism, published between 1995 and September 2011, we analyze the develop- ment of scholarly ways of writing and thinking about participato...

A 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 tou...

Een literatuuronderzoek naar media, seksuele ontwikkeling en diversiteit. Uitgevoerd in opdracht van: FWOS. Mevr. du Bois-Reymond. Mevr. Son-Schoones

Valuable Journalism. Looking for quality from a user perspective Valuable Journalism. Looking for quality from a user perspective This article will show why audience research is of crucial significance for the quality of both scholarship on journalism and professional journalistic practice. First, a better understanding among scholars and professio...

Media scholars and journalists expect local media to function as vital institutions for the creation and maintenance of a democratic political and public arena and a general sense of social cohesion and public connection (Aldridge, 2007; Couldry et al., 2007; Franklin, 2006; Rosenstiel et al., 2007). Taking a different angle, this paper tries to un...

Valuable Journalism. Looking for quality from a user perspective This article will show why audience research is of crucial significance for the quality of both scholarship on journalism and professional journalistic practice. First, a better understanding among scholars and professionals is needed of how today's media audience has grown more self-...

Familie, buurt, club en kerk ondersteunen traditiegetrouw mensen in hun morele overwegingen. Deze gemeenschapsbanden zijn echter aan erosie onderhevig.

In a world of increasing information supply, the nature and experience of information is bound to change. This becomes evident first among members of the new generation. If previously individuals in this age group were expected to turn to a more mainstream pattern of news consumption once they grew older, this article provides more detailed insight...

In this article, we discuss how primetime programming is unjustly the subject of the moral panic constructed around television, a moral panic that seems primarily useful to maintain the high vs low culture dichotomy. To assess the moral content of primetime television, we used a framework derived from literary culture, since narratives’ content and...

Should public broadcasters pay more attention to ratings, even if this will inevitably entail a lowering of quality? Or should they remain loyal to what they have been doing all along, focusing on their core business of quality programming, even if this means that their audience is likely to become smaller in the years ahead? The issue of ratings v...

This article opens up the language and categories used by professionals and academics when debating the quality of television news. By considering one specific news practice, that of the Dutch NOS News (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting; the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation), the author demonstrates how the ability to imagine different approaches to news a...

Nowadays, the democratic (public) potential of popular journalism is seldom denied. Generally speaking, however, journalism is celebrated when it reports current affairs but denounced when it focuses on private or emotional matters. It is common knowledge in cultural studies that underneath this split between "popular" journalism and so called "qua...

This article is a study of how producers of soap operas deal with ethnic difference. Eight repertoires were found when analysing 34 interviews. They range from the aesthetic to the moral-political. It is made clear how ethnic difference or ‘colour’ is always locally and contextually defined. Case studies of how ethnic difference is negotiated in ev...

This article explores the possibilities of advertising as a means of creating positive notions of contemporary citizenship. Whereas this may seem an unexpected turn in critical approaches to consumer or promotional culture, there are enough examples to warrant an analysis of advertising's construction of so-called civic capital. The author makes he...