News Diversity

Diversity and information media

News diversity is an essential part of a good working democracy. To frame this, we will examine the following 3 dimensions in this project: (1) diversity of issues, (2) diversity of actors, and (3) viewpoint (or opinion) diversity.

Information media diversity under threat

At present the feeling prevails that the news diversity is jeopardised. To asses this threat the project starts from 3 assumptions:

• The diversity of media is increasing, in part because of the Internet-based information supply
• The diversity of supply is not applicable to more political and social sensitive themes
• The use of media content is increasingly segmented, which means that news diversity on the individual level just might decrease

Users diversity

Recent studies give an insight in how and which platforms play a role in the consumption of media. Information on what people consume is rather scarce and not coherent.  Moreover, also the link between audience segments (gender, age, education, ethnicity, profession …) and news content becomes increasingly important to figure out.

Grasping news use/consumption is hard to organise

With the advancements is mobile technology people can consume news and media by different devices, giving them access to different sources as well as to new sources, while also the situational context is less restrictive to the consumption of news. It is therefore hard to pinpoint how news is being consumed. This calls for a more holistic view on how media and news are imbedded in our daily lives.

“MOTUS is perfectly suited to capture at the same time the news users’ repertoire and the socio-spatial context of news use.”

How?

For this project hbits will:

1. Make it possible to map the news use patterns of 600 respondents between 18 and 45 years old, and for 7 consecutive days
2. Extra tasks will be asked to the respondent based on notifications send via the MOTUS-app, eg. to scan personal social media pages and give details about the source, the content, … but we will also ask about their attitudes towards diversity
3. Provide information for a focus group discussion