Changing News Use

Unchanged News Experiences?

Irene Costera Meijer, Tim Groot Kormelink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000281255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Changing News Use pulls from empirical research to introduce and describe
how changing news user patterns and journalism practices have been
mutually disruptive, exploring what journalists and the news media can
learn from these changes.

Based on 15 years of audience research, the authors provide an in-depth
description of what people do with news and how this has diversified
over time, from reading, watching, and listening to a broader spectrum
of user practices including checking, scrolling, tagging, and avoiding.
By emphasizing people's own experience of journalism, this book also
investigates what two prominent audience measurements – clicking and
spending time – mean from a user perspective. The book outlines ways to
overcome the dilemma of providing what people apparently want (attentiongrabbing
news features) and delivering what people apparently need (what
journalists see as important information), suggesting alternative ways to
investigate and become sensitive to the practices, preferences, and pleasures
of audiences and discussing what these research findings might mean for
everyday journalism practice.

The book is a valuable and timely resource for academics and researchers
interested in the fields of journalism studies, sociology, digital media, and
communication.

1 Introduction

Changing news use, unchanged news experiences?

If media change so quickly, isn’t your research always outdated?

This is the question we invariably get asked when we tell people that we study the impact of digitalization on news use. It is an understandable question: since Irene began studying news use in 2004 and Tim joined her in 2012, the devices and platforms people use for news have shifted and increased dramatically. Getting access to news has become easier than ever before; you do not necessarily have to pay for it, you can choose your own time and place, and it is only one click away. Furthermore, many people now rely on an ever-expanding number of social media (and their particular logics) to become informed, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. At the same time, traditional forms of news consumption took a hit: newspaper circulation numbers and linear television ratings have been falling across the board (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, & Nielsen, 2019). Our conversation partners reason, if the devices and platforms people rely on change and multiply, surely this means that news use has revolutionized as well?

One part of the answer is yes. The devices and platforms people use do not only change fast; they also change differently in different countries (Elvestad & Shaker, 2017). This has been well documented by the Reuters Institute of the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report, which since 2010 has tracked how people across the globe use news. Surveying over 75,000 people in 38 countries, it is “the most comprehensive ongoing comparative study of news consumption in the world” (Nielsen, 2019, p. 5). This raises the questions: What is there left to add about changing news use? How can we compete with such an overwhelming amount of quantitative and qualitative data?

We argue, however, that we don’t compete: we answer different questions and we answer them with different approaches and methods. First, although we are interested in changing news use, our emphasis is less on news consumption itself (e.g. frequency and time spent) than on people’s experience of their news use. After all, the object – news use – does not exist independently of its experience, and to make sense of experience, context and language matter. For instance, although many people encounter news on Facebook, this does not necessarily tell us something about (as we will show in the following chapters) how they actually engage with it and what it means to them. Second, our large-scale qualitative research enables us an exceptional level of depth, allowing for layered results, uncovering complexity, and paradoxes. This large amount of data (see the Appendix for an overview) enabled us to triangulate but also to crystallize research results (Costera Meijer, 2016). In contrast to triangulation, the goal of crystallization is “not to provide researchers with a more valid singular truth, but to open up a more complex, in-depth, but still thoroughly partial understanding of the issue” (Tracy, 2010, p. 844). And finally, our methodological pluralism is aimed at capturing and making sense of news use holistically: people’s multi-dimensional experience, including “embodied, practical, emotional, spatial, social, linguistic, and temporal aspects” (Wertz et al., 2011, p. 127). Our phenomenological approach to news use enables us to “meaningfully illuminate the person’s world, including experiences in the same or other persons’ mental lives” (Wertz et al., 2011, p. 126, emphasis original).

Combined, our approach enables a second answer to the question that opened this chapter: it’s complicated. What we argue throughout this book is that while news user practices are continuously diversifying (see Chapter 2), many underlying patterns of news experience – how people appreciate news – are surprisingly durable. Case in point is the surprise on our first year Media and Journalism students’ faces when they realize how much they recognize themselves in the pre-social media, pre-smartphone experiences of young people (aged 15–25) described 15 years ago in Irene’s 2006 book De Toekomst van het Nieuws (The Future of News). Although what counts as news has since broadened and the range of platforms and devices has multiplied and diversified, our current students still share a “world” with a previous generation, a world which can be characterized by a particular user attitude and an explanation about why and how they do or do not use particular news. The main attitude in 2004–2005 was that news was considered very important but not always interesting, which was offered as the main reason they did not use it often. The subtext was that being young meant enjoying oneself, and enjoyment and news consumption didn’t and (paradoxically) also shouldn’t go together: when asked if they wanted news to become more entertaining, young people were very much against this. Making news more popular would, in their eyes, affect journalism’s reliability, which in turn would undermine their intention to use it. What they did use were more popular newsy programs, but they did not consider these programs real, serious news. They used them for entertainment purposes. This so-called double viewing paradox (see Costera Meijer, 2006, 2007, 2008) is still present in the personal world of our current students. Indeed, even the importance both 2004 and 2020 journalism students attach to journalism – so much so that they want to make a living out of it – is not necessarily reflected in the amount of news they consume.

A similarly stable aspect of young people’s world is their need for connection. Although the Dutch platforms and devices used by the 2004–2005 students (MSN, dial-up modems, Hyves¹) generate laughter and nostalgia among the 2020 students, both groups want, above all, to feel connected – and news plays a role in this. For journalism to be used, being informative is not enough; even more important is that it gives rise to conversations so that it ties in with people’s communication patterns. This relatively unchanged news experience of young people (2004–2020) illustrates the main point of this book: while the media landscape may indeed be ever changing and people’s practices are diversifying, insights based on a continuous stream of audience research illustrate that the way news functions in people’s lives and how they experience it, including their needs and pleasures, are more stable than is often assumed.

Professional attention to changing news use

Until the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, journalists often considered reckoning with audiences’ preferences unnecessary and, indeed, uncouth, because it conflicted with their editorial independence (Coddington, 2015; Costera Meijer, 2001; Schlesinger, 1978). In “deciding what’s news,” journalists stated they relied primarily on their instinct, their nose for news (Gans, 1979). Fast-forward some decades and the separation between editorial rooms and business activities has all but disintegrated (Cornia, Sehl, & Nielsen, 2020). One of the perhaps unexpected by-products of the digitalization of journalism is that being responsive to audiences by editorial departments has fairly quickly become part of journalists’ routines (Tandoc, 2019). Having to deal with a constant influx of audience metrics is seen as “a prerequisite for organizational adaptation to an increasingly challenging environment” (Cornia et al., 2020, pp. 172–173). Since audience metrics have become pervasive forces for commercial and public service media, paying attention to the usage patterns of audiences has become crucial for the survival of journalism (Myllylahti, 2019). Research also shows that even if they do not explicitly have to maximize users’ attention by generating as many clicks, attention minutes, or shares as possible, journalists are still drawn to them (Hanusch, 2017; Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013; Usher, 2013). Some journalists tend to take these figures as representative of user preferences and proudly show their most read, viewed, and shared items (Boesman & Costera Meijer, 2018). And vice versa, although they may recognize the limitations of metrics, journalists can become demoralized about the worth of their work when it does not do “well” (Cohen, 2019).

Initially, metrics like clicks seemed to confirm some of the worst assumptions journalists entertained about their audiences. Long convinced that the general public is mostly interested in insignificant matters – as illustrated by a TV producer who argued that “they only want to know how the astronauts shit while they are in space” (Gans, 1979, p. 235) – clicking patterns seemed to indicate that people are more interested in so-called junk news than in public interest news (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2013; Welbers et al., 2016), illustrating a gap between journalists’ dedication to providing serious, important news and audiences’ interests in trivial, fun news. However, as Cherubini and Nielsen concluded in 2016 (p. 7), “an earlier period of skepticism seems to have given way to interest in how data and metrics can help newsrooms reach their target audiences and do better journalism.” In Chapters 3 and 4 we will provide more in-depth knowledge about the meaning of clicks and time spent from a user perspective. This knowledge might help journalists to better combine the information from audience metrics with their professional intuition (Zamith, 2018). Also, recent evidence pointing to quantified audiences as an increasingly important element within the formation of citizen-oriented as well as consumer-oriented role orientations (Belair-Gagnon, Zamith, & Holton, 2020) underlines the importance of more in-depth understandings of how to read audience metrics from a user perspective.

While journalists appear to become more enthusiastic about audience metrics as a form of audience feedback they can use to improve the quality of their work (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2020), some users develop counter-reactions against the commercial exploitation and manipulation of their time and attention. They lament superficial, inaccurate, and sensationalist news designed to make them click (Nielsen & Graves, 2017). They install ad blockers, use applications to limit their screen use, or opt for a digital detox (Bauwens, Thorbjornsson, & Verstrynge, 2019; Neverla & Trümper, 2019; Syvertsen, 2017; Syvertsen & Enli, 2019). Some who experience news overload or who feel that news negatively influences their quality of life even choose to avoid news altogether (Brennen, 2019; Park, 2019; Woodstock, 2014). It seems, then, that while journalists are becoming more responsive to their audiences, users don’t necessarily appreciate how this audience responsiveness manifests.

We argue that a genuine audience turn is needed that replaces “how to reach people” with “how to be of service to them.” A genuine audience turn means moving beyond the excesses and simplified logics of the attention economy and finding alternative ways to investigate and become sensitive to the practices, preferences, and pleasures of audiences. What they appreciate may not always be derived from the content of journalism but resides in the experience it invokes in the user. As we will argue in the final chapter of this book, it may be time to replace audience responsiveness with audience sensitivity.

Theoretical framework: practices and pleasures

Because audience metrics may misrepresent what news audiences appreciate about news (as we will show in Chapters 3 and 4), it is important to investigate news user practices and pleasures with different research methods and in more detail. This may provide a more layered picture of people’s news use, allowing room for ambivalence and paradoxes. For the studies that form the heart of this book, we benefited from the phenomenological principles of practice theory as background for our studies, because it enables media scholars to “recognise the variety, importance and complexity of the many new things we are doing with digital media” (Cammaerts & Couldry, 2016). Practice theory can help to make sense of whatever people are doing with news while being alert to material, technological, and sensory aspects of media use. In our research we investigate user practices through the language and discourses people employ for their everyday actions with media, platforms, and devices (e.g. via think-aloud protocols, day-in-the-life method), even when (initially) they do not have words for these actions (e.g. via video-ethnography, mood boards). This use of more naturalistic sources of data (Potter & Hepburn, 2005) enabled us to move beyond the more functionalistic uses and gratifications of news media (Blumler & Katz, 1974; Ruggiero, 2000). The concept of “requisite variety” (Ashby, 1991; Gallagher, Kaiser, Simon, Beath, & Goles, 2010) is used as starting point, referring to choosing a varied set of methods (quantitative and qualitative) to match the complexity of the investigated phenomenon. Honoring the complexity of news user practices also requires us to allow doubt into the research process in combination with the use of research strategies like triangulation, crystallization, and thick description (Costera Meijer, 2016).

Practices

Following Couldry (2011), we will investigate people’s everyday experiences with news, rather than their opinions. How news use is changing cuts, in the words of Couldry (2011, p. 217), “across how people actually understand the practices in which they are engaged. And it insists we look very closely at the categorizations of practice that people themselves make, ‘in practice’ as it were.” Taking a phenomenological approach translates into asking open questions about what people are doing with news and how they categorize this themselves (cf. Wertz et al., 2011). Such an approach is valuable because it avoids preconceptions ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: changing news use, unchanged news experiences?
• 2 Scrolling, triangulating, tagging, and abstaining: the diversification of news use between 2004 and 2020
• 3 What clicking actually means
• 4 A user perspective on time spent: temporal experiences of everyday news use
• 5 Material and sensory dimensions of everyday news use
• 6 How to deal with news user practices, preferences, and pleasures? From audience responsiveness to audience sensitivity
• References
• Appendix: overview of incorporated research projects 2004–2020
• Index