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

新闻媒体目前面临重大问题。这里可以提到新闻室的成本和时间压力、小报化和来自新产品格式（如博客）的日益激烈的竞争。在某些时候，这些问题不可避免地导致新闻质量下降。这取决于接收者的质量意识，这种质量损失是否会对媒体提供者产生影响。然而，没有数据表明受众是否以及在何种条件下能够评价新闻的质量。这就是为什么该项目调查这些问题。到目前为止，数据收集和清理工作已经完成。目前正在对数据进行分析。简而言之：设计了一系列六个实验，所有参与者（n=522-537）都必须阅读和评估新闻条目。这些新闻条目在以下方面有所不同：（1）关于六个质量维度中的一个的质量：高与低，（2）新闻条目的来源：南德意志报与图片报，以及（3）在评估期间新闻条目的可用性：是与否。在阅读之后，要求参与者通过不同的开放式和封闭式问题来评估新闻条目的质量。在第二份问卷中，收集了媒体使用的数据，新闻来源的感知形象以及社会人口统计和媒体素养的信息。目前的分析表明，受众很难评价新闻的质量。此外，源的感知图像在一定程度上影响质量评估，尽管同样很小。在实际实验之前进行的初步研究表明，情境因素，例如在评估期间看到新闻项目的可能性和新闻项目的接收时间可以解释这些结果。然而，目前还无法对相关数据进行适当的分析。因此，首先，这里申请的项目延期将侧重于对收集的数据进行进一步分析。第二，将与其他学者深入讨论研究结果，并编写更多出版物，以提高项目的知名度。第三，研究结果为记者和媒体之间的非学术性话语提供了高度的连通性。这就是为什么我们也想让这些群体获得结果。

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.