“Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract

The following is the abstract for the paper on the role of the internet in the research practices of Dutch journalists, which was accepted yesterday for publication. This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe, Bob Nieman and Henri Beunders.

Abstract

With an ever-growing supply of online sources, information to produce news stories seems to be one mouse click away. But in what way do Dutch journalists actually use computer-aided research tools? This article provides an inventory of the ways journalists use digital (re)sources and explores the differences between experts and novices. We applied a combined methodological approach by conducting an ethnographic study as well as a survey. Results show that Dutch journalists use relatively few digital tools to find online information. However, journalists who can be considered experts in the field of information retrieval use a wider range of search engines and techniques, arrive quicker at the angle to their story, and are better at finding information related to this angle. This allows them to spend more time on writing their news story. Novices are more dependent on the information provided by others.

Publication

This paper will be published by the ICONO14 journal in their special issue “Emerging Technologies and Journalism“, to be published in July 2013. We will make the manuscript available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the survey data Open Access at DANS, I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.