Do novel routines stick after the pandemic?:The formation of news habits during COVID-19

Over half of our news use is comprised of habits: routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life. Conversely, citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines rarely form novel patterns of news use. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being, especially in real-life situations. Previous research suggests that considerable life changes and disruptions in daily routines can give rise to the adaptation or formation of habits. This paper asks how and to what extent citizens created novel patterns of news use or adapted existing news routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecting insights from social psychology to journalism and audience studies, it analyzes which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation. Employing a questionnaire with open-ended questions with 1293 Dutch news users, we identified 5 groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the COVID-19 pandemic: news avoiders, followers turned avoiders, stable news users, frequent news users and news junkies. In-depth follow-up interviews with these users (N = 22) show that differences in users’ everyday context, social cues, levels of stress and anxiety, and affective cues may explain these different behaviors

The Trust Gap:Young People's Tactics for Assessing the Reliability of Political News

In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges such conceptualizations of media trust rooted in rationality and deliberateness. Based on two series of semistructured interviews with fifty-five young people from ten nationalities living in the Netherlands, conducted in 2016 and 2017, we develop a taxonomy of people's tactics when assessing the reliability of news. We explore what this means for how they value news and how such judgments, drawing on explicit and tacit knowledge, impact their news use. Rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news, including affective and intuitive tactics rooted in tacit knowledge. Consequently, we argue that to fully understand how users deal with the complexity of trust in digital environments, we should not start from ideals of informed citizenship, but from people's actual practices and experiences instead

The ongoing relevance of local journalism and public broadcasters:Motivations for news repertoires in the Netherlands

The average Dutch news user can choose from an overwhelming number of sources to find, consume and engage with news. This increase in media choice and the growing possibilities for users to navigate all these options may make people’s news consumption more fragmented and individualized, calling into question whether it is still possible to discern any common patterns of news use. This article explores and maps news media repertoires in The Netherlands, analyzing the value of specific compositions of different platforms, genres and outlets from the point-of-view of the Dutch news user. Employing Q methodology, it identifies five distinct patterns of news media use: 1) regionally-oriented 2) backgroundoriented 3) digital 4) laid-back and 5) nationally-oriented news use. It finds that while ongoing circulation drops and budget cuts at regional news media may suggest differently, most participants still strongly value the local press for its high perceived relevance and impact on everyday life. Furthermore, the news users in this study considered public service television news bulletins as playing a large role in daily life across all five media repertoires, suggesting a continuing connective role of public TV broadcasters

Trust and Fear in the Newsroom:How Emotions Drive the Exchange of Innovative Ideas

This article analyses the social processes that stimulate the exchange of new ideas in newsrooms. New ideas are vital for legacy media news organisations to innovate and fundamentally reinvent themselves, which is crucial for their survival. Ample research in other disciplines has shown that perceptions of "trust" and "fear" are strong drivers for sharing (or not sharing) creative ideas at work. However, what fosters the sharing and developing of new ideas has been strikingly under-researched in journalism studies. To fill this research gap we ask: how do perceptions of trust and fear in the newsroom stimulate (or not) the sharing and developing of new ideas? Data have been gathered in the newsrooms of two Dutch newspapers, using qualitative interviews and non-participant observation. To enable new idea sharing to benefit all, people need to experience both trust in their peers and in their management. Results show that only newsroom elites perceive both types of trust and, hence, feel free to share their new ideas with management. This means that within newsrooms in transformation the innovative potential of the majority of people is not utilised as they fear to share their creative or new ideas upwards in the hierarchy