Deciding What's News: News-ness As an Audience Concept for the Hybrid Media Environment. (June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Edgerly, Stephanie; Vraga, Emily K.
• Is Part Of: Journalism & mass communication quarterly. Volume 97:Number 2(2020:Jun.)
• Page Start: 416
• Page End: 434
• Publication Date: 2020-06
• Subjects: audience -- news -- hybrid media -- evaluations -- genre -- news values; Journalism -- Periodicals; Mass media -- Periodicals; Communication -- Periodicals; Journalism -- United States -- Periodicals; Journalism -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; 070
• DOI: 10.1177/1077699020916808
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1077-6990

Abstract

A by-product of today's hybrid media system is that genres—once uniformly defined and enforced—are now murky and contested. We develop the concept of news-ness, defined as the extent to which audiences characterize specific content as news, to capture how audiences understand and process media messages. In this article, we (a) ground the concept of news-ness within research on media genres, journalism practices, and audience studies, (b) develop a theoretical model that identifies the factors that influence news-ness and its outcomes, and (c) situate news-ness within discussions about fake news, partisan motivated reasoning, and comparative studies of media systems.