Exploring Audience Perceptions of, and Preferences for, Online News Videos

Journalism professionals and media experts have traditionally used normatively formed criteria to evaluate news quality. Although the digital news media environment has enabled journalists to respond at unprecedented speed to audience consumption patterns, little academic research has systematically addressed how audiences themselves perceive and evaluate news, and even less has focused on audio-visual news. To help fill this research gap, we conducted in-depth group interviews with 22 online news video consumers in the UK to explore their perceptions of online news videos—an increasingly popular news format. Thematic analyses suggest audiences evaluate online news videos using a complex and interwoven set of criteria, which we group under four headings: antecedents of perceptions, emotional impacts, news and editorial values and production characteristics. Some of these criteria can be positioned clearly in relation to the literature on news quality in general, while our documentation of the others contributes new, format-specific knowledge. Our findings offer journalists practical insights into how audiences perceive and evaluate a host of characteristics of online news videos, while our conceptual framework provides a foundation for further academic research on audience evaluations of online news videos, and even audio-visual news more generally

“Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?”: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity

Taking seriously the global trend of selfies becoming marketable and entangled in ecologies of commerce, this article looks at Influencers who have emerged as (semi-)professional selfie-producers and for whom taking selfies is a purposively commercial, thoughtful, and subversive endeavor. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and grounded theory analysis, I examine Influencers’ engagements with selfies on Instagram and their appropriations of selfies as salable objects, as tacit labor, and as an expression of contrived authenticity and reflexivity. Through these practices, Influencers achieve “subversive frivolity,” which I define as the under-visibilized and under-estimated generative power of an object or practice arising from its (populist) discursive framing as marginal, inconsequential, and unproductive

Autoethnographic Journalism: Subjectivity and Emotionality in Audio Storytelling

There is a growing trend in journalism to focus on personal storytelling. Interviewees and journalists alike are sharing their real-life experiences, especially suited for the more intimate environments of online media. The audiences appetite for everyday life stories is driving this mode of journalism, which Rosalind Coward (Journal Pract 4(2): 224233, 2010) argues can be described as a new cultural form, a media of personal revelation. In this chapter, Lindgren examines the role of personal journalism, with a focus on audio storytelling as part of articulating identity. Using a case study, this chapter considers the many pitfalls of autobiographical storytelling, focusing on the need for carefully considered production practices as well as examining the benefits and challenges of journalists putting themselves in the frame