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

Intramolecular halogen-halogen bonds?

By analysing the properties of the electron density in the structurally simple perhalogenated ethanes, X3C–CY3 (X, Y = F, Cl), a previously overlooked non-covalent attraction between halogens attached to opposite carbon atoms is found. Quantum chemical calculations extrapolated towards the full solution of the Schrödinger equation reveal the complex nature of the interaction. When at least one of the halogens is a chlorine, the strength of the interaction is comparable to that of hydrogen bonds. Further analysis shows that the bond character is quite different from standard non-covalent halogen bonds and hydrogen bonds; no bond critical points are found between the halogens, and the σ-holes of the halogens are not utilised for bonding. Thus, the nature of the intramolecular halogen···halogen bonding studied here appears to be of an unusually strong van der Waals type.Peer reviewe

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

Repositioning news and public connection in everyday life:A user-oriented perspective on inclusiveness, engagement, relevance and constructiveness

News has traditionally served as a common ground, enabling people to connect to others and engage with the public issues they encounter in everyday life. This article revisits these theoretical debates about mediated public connection within the context of a digitalized news media landscape. While academic discussions surrounding these shifts are often explored in terms of normative ideals ascribed to political systems or civic cultures, we propose to reposition the debate by departing from the practices and preferences of the news user instead. Therefore, we deconstruct and translate the concept of public connection into four dimensions that emphasize people's lived experiences: inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness. Situating these in an everyday life framework, this article advances a user-based perspective that considers the role of news for people in digital societies. Accordingly, it offers a conceptual framework that aims to encapsulate how news becomes meaningful, rather than why it should be

Navigating cross-media news use:Media repertoires and the value of news in everyday life

The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres and practices in everyday life by mapping patterns of cross-media news use. Combining Q methodology with think-aloud protocols and day-in-the-life-interviews, five distinct news media repertoires are identified: 1) regionally-oriented 2) background-oriented 3) digital 4) laid-back and 5) nationally-oriented news use. Our findings indicate that users do not always use what they prefer, nor do they prefer what they use. Moreover, the boundaries they draw between news and other information are clearly shifting. Finally, our results show that in a world with a wide range of possibilities to consume news for free, paying for news can be considered an act of civic engagement. We argue that perceived news use and users’ appreciation of news should be studied in relation to each other to gain a fuller understanding of what news consumption entails in this rapidly changing media landscape