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

Teaching innovation and entrepreneurship:Journalism students as change agents?

Digitalization has been a strong driver of change in the journalism industry over the past 25 years. News organizations producing newspapers, broadcasts, magazines or digital products have faced a steep learning curve, trying to anticipate technological challenges and opportunities, as well as to adapt to the changes in news use resulting from the digital turn. The combination of journalistic work with commercial tasks is seen as jeopardizing the quality of reporting and the public interest imperatives of journalism. A common sentiment among our respondents, captured by another interviewee, is that journalism does not “really need to change”. While student survey respondents were quite open to the importance of business principles in journalism, agreeing that they should be knowledgeable about these and also could be involved in matters related to generating revenues, they did not consider themselves future entrepreneurs

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

New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns

Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines