Grasping the Digital News User

Abstract

In recent years, people’s news consumption has become increasingly fragmented over different devices, news sources and, especially with the advent of mobile technologies, different situational contexts. This renders a growing part of our (news) media consumption very volatile, even transparent. Journalism scholars are compelled to expand the existing methodological toolset at their disposal if they hope to grasp news audiences’ changing practices. This article investigates the lines along which such a toolset should be conceived. As the digitisation of media and journalism challenges our understanding of news audiences, the article opens by paying considerable attention to the conceptual underpinning of news audiences by revisiting the notion of audience activity in the light of evolving news use practices. This reflection results in an integrated conceptualisation of the term “audience activity”, which in turn makes out a case for adopting “news users” as a more versatile concept to denote people engaging with news. Subsequently, this article addresses how such a more encompassing notion of news users can shape new topical and methodological directions in news audience studies. The article concludes by exploring the current advancements in modular online time use surveys as an illustration of a data-gathering method combining traditional techniques with digital tools to study news users as they cross different devices, platforms, sources and contexts.

Keywords:

• audience activity
• digital journalism
• methodological innovation
• news audiences
• news users
• research methods

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Within the MOTUS project (Modular Time Use Survey), three research groups within the Faculty of Social Sciences collaborate to develop a digital online and mobile diary tool that can be easily adjusted to the needs of specific research projects. The first on-going phase includes the development of the desktop tool and an accompanying large-scale study in Flanders. In a second phase, a mobile application will be developed and a panel will be set up. Finally, the architecture of the tool is open to allow for GPS coordinates, sensors or app use to be logged.