New article by Merel Borger and Anita van Hoof, of VU University Amsterdam, and José Sanders, of Radboud University Nijmege explores the assumptions that news organizations and journalists have about audience input.

The authors conducted a content analysis of five different examples of participatory journalism in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2014 and examined the contents against two criteria: ‘objectivity’ and ‘diversity’. Second, they studied if this criteria were linked to the degree to which professional journalists have control over the participatory content.

The results show that reporting style is more subjective as professional control over content is weaker. When weakening the professional control, participants were also more likely to rely on personal experience and to select news based on soft news values. Participants tend to move away from traditional journalistic understandings of objectivity and diversity, the authors write.

The article “Exploring participatory journalistic content: Objectivity and diversity in five examples of participatory journalism” was published online before print by Journalism under Creative Commons CC BY-NC licence. It is available here for free.

Picture: journalist by jeanbaptisteparis, licence: CC BY-SA 2.0