Abstract

If news companies are to survive in today’s highly competitive media landscape, they need to stay worthwhile to news users. However, news companies’ quantitative audience analytics have difficulties grasping news users’ increasingly complex ways of finding and consuming news. This is especially the case for younger news users familiar with high-choice, digitized media formats. To better understand how these news users negotiate and assess news providers' worthwhileness, we conducted 20 qualitative in-depth interviews with young Danes. Our findings show that the participants distinguished between seven desired news services, and that they perceived news providers to be worthwhile if they could deliver the news services they desired for an appropriate level of personal effort. In this way, our findings suggest that an increased focus on specific desired news services can help news companies as well as scholars to more comprehensively understand the uses and preferences of younger news users. This study aims to go beyond the quantitative nature of many uses and gratifications studies, allowing for new categories to emerge – categories which, this study finds, play a very central role in how young news users navigate and assess news providers’ worthwhileness in today’s complex media landscape.

摘要

如果新闻公司要在当今竞争激烈的媒体环境中生存，就需要对新闻用户保持价值。然而，新闻公司的定量受众分析难以掌握新闻用户日益复杂的查找和消费新闻的方式。对于熟悉高选择、数字化媒体格式的年轻新闻用户来说尤其如此。为了更好地了解这些新闻用户如何协商和评估新闻提供者的价值，我们对年轻的丹麦人进行了 20 次定性的深入采访。我们的研究结果表明，参与者区分了七种所需的新闻服务，并且他们认为如果新闻提供者能够以适当的个人努力水平提供他们想要的新闻服务，那么他们就是值得的。这样，我们的研究结果表明，更加关注特定所需的新闻服务可以帮助新闻公司和学者更全面地了解年轻新闻用户的用途和偏好。这项研究旨在超越许多用途和满足研究的定量性质，允许出现新的类别——本研究发现，这些类别在年轻新闻用户如何导航和评估新闻提供者在当今复杂环境中的价值方面发挥着非常重要的作用媒体景观。