“We would have never made that story”: How publicpowered stories challenge local journalists’ news values

This paper investigates how local journalists reconsider their ideas of newsworthiness while adapting an audience-driven approach to journalism. It is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 13 journalists working for three local newsrooms in the Netherlands, two of them working with Hearken and one of them working with crowdsourcing. The findings show that “public-powered” stories challenge traditional news values, in particular recency, prominence, and conflict. Audiences appear to be mainly interested in solution-oriented stories and have a preference for specific topics such as nature and local history. In dealing with participating audiences, journalists retain their gatekeeping role by sticking to recency in the prioritization of stories and by filtering audience input lacking novelty or surprise, input that does not fit the format requirements of the medium, and questions with an underlying commercial or political agenda.