“We Would Never Have Made That Story”: How Public-Powered Stories Challenge Local Journalists’ Ideas of Newsworthiness

Jan Boesman, Irene Costera Meijer, Merel Kuipers

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Abstract

This chapter 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 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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNews Values from an Audience Perspective
EditorsMartina Temmerman, Jelle Mast
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Chapter8
Pages141-163
Number of pages23
ISBN (Electronic)9783030450465
ISBN (Print)9783030450458, 9783030450489
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

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