City Research Online

Abstract

Journalism professionals and media experts have traditionally used normatively formed criteria to evaluate news quality. Although the digital news media environment has enabled journalists to respond at unprecedented speed to audience consumption patterns, little academic research has systematically addressed how audiences themselves perceive and evaluate news, and even less has focused on audio-visual news. To help fill this research gap, we conducted in-depth group interviews with 22 online news video consumers in the UK to explore their perceptions of online news videos—an increasingly popular news format. Thematic analyses suggest audiences evaluate online news videos using a complex and interwoven set of criteria, which we group under four headings: antecedents of perceptions, emotional impacts, news and editorial values and production characteristics. Some of these criteria can be positioned clearly in relation to the literature on news quality in general, while our documentation of the others contributes new, format-specific knowledge. Our findings offer journalists practical insights into how audiences perceive and evaluate a host of characteristics of online news videos, while our conceptual framework provides a foundation for further academic research on audience evaluations of online news videos, and even audio-visual news more generally.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journalism Studies. Michael Koliska, Neil Thurman, Sally Stares & Jessica Kunert (2021) Exploring Audience Perceptions of, and Preferences for, Online News Videos, Journalism Studies, 22:9, 1161-1180. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	criteria for perception of audio-visual news, group interviews, news credibility, news perception, news quality, online news video
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Journalism School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads