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.
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Notes
- 1.
These three newsrooms were deliberately selected because they were local and highly proactive in audience collaboration. Initially, we selected the two Dutch newsrooms using the Hearken-tool. Secondly, for the sake of comparison, we decided to include a third local newsroom that was active around audience collaboration by making use of other methods.
- 2.
One of those reporters at Omroep West was also ‘Hearken coordinator’.
- 3.
The fieldnotes of the Facebook Live meetings were not directly included in the data analysis, but as contextual information they have contributed to the interpretation of the interview data.
- 4.
- 5.
Not to confuse with recency, which is more about temporal aspects of newsnewss.
- 6.
In Dutch, the words newsworthiness and curiosity are more alike, namely “nieuwswaardig” and “nieuwsgierig”.
- 7.
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Boesman, J., Costera Meijer, I., Kuipers, M. (2021). “We Would Never Have Made That Story”: How Public-Powered Stories Challenge Local Journalists’ Ideas of Newsworthiness. In: Temmerman, M., Mast, J. (eds) News Values from an Audience Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_8
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