Tim Groot Kormelink

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU

Building on research on nudging as well as democratic news recommender design, this preregistered study employed a mixed-methods design to explore how interface nudges and article positioning affect news selection. Specifically, we tested whether a position nudge as well as three different types of interface nudges(e.g., popularity cues and social...

This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repea...

Getting users to pay for news remains a key challenge in journalism. With advertising revenues dwindling, news organizations have become increasingly dependent on reader revenue. This paper explores reasons news users have for not paying for (print and digital) news. 68 participants tried a free three-week newspaper trial subscription and afterward...

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...

This paper explores how young people used and experienced news during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 22 in-depth interviews with Dutch young people (19-36), we found four successive phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. First, before the virus reached the Netherlands, they saw it as “a pro...

This article aims to provide a resource for journalism researchers looking to use a qualitative approach to study news use. It seeks to go beyond justifying qualitative methods vis-à-vis quantitative methods and to be more reflective and critical regarding the limitations and possibilities of the qualitative interview. Making the case for taking ex...

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 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...

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...

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...