News quality from the audience' perspective - An experimental series on recipients' quality evaluations and relevant impact factors

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Journalistic media presently face significant problems. Cost and time pressure in news rooms, tabloidization and increasing competition from new product formats (e.g. weblogs) can be mentioned here. At some point these problems inevitably lead to decreased journalistic quality. It depends on the quality awareness of recipients whether this loss in quality retroacts on media providers. However, there exists no data on whether and under which conditions recipients are able to evaluate the quality of news items. This is why the project investigates those questions. Up to now data gathering and cleansing were completed. The data is currently undergoing analysis. The procedure in short: A series of six experiments was designed in which all participants (n=522-537) had to read and evaluate news items. These news items were varied with regard to (1) quality concerning one out of six quality dimensions: high vs. low, (2) source of news item: Sueddeutsche Zeitung vs. Bild-Zeitung and (3) availability of news item during the evaluation: yes vs. no. After reading participants were asked to evaluate the quality of the news item by means of different open and closed questions. In a second questionnaire data on media use, the perceived image of the source of the news item as well as social demographics and information on media literacy were gathered. Current analyses illustrate that it is difficult for recipients to evaluate the quality of news items. Furthermore the perceived image of the source affects quality evaluations to a certain albeit likewise small degree. A prior to the actual experiments conducted preliminary study suggests that situational factors as e.g. the possibility to see the news item during the evaluation and the reception time of the news item may explain these results. However, currently it is not possible to analyze the concerning data appropriately. So at first, the project extension applied for here will focus on further analyses of the data gathered. Secondly, results shall intensively be discussed with other scholars and further publications shall be compiled to increase the projects visibility. Thirdly, the results provide high connectivity to the non-academic quality discourse between journalists and media providers. This is why we would like to make the results accessible to these groups as well.