Deciding What’s News: News-ness As an Audience Concept for the Hybrid Media Environment

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 messa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journalism & mass communication quarterly 2020-06, Vol.97 (2), p.416-434
Main Authors: Edgerly, Stephanie, Vraga, Emily K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Audiences
Comparative studies
Journalism
Media
Motivated reasoning
News
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1077-6990
2161-430X
DOI:10.1177/1077699020916808