Especially nature, living environment and history are topics that audience would like to read more about, states a study by Irene Costera Meijer of the VU University of Amsterdam and Hildebrand P. Bijleveld.

Valuable journalism is a concept that aims to find a middle ground between the perspectives of quality from journalists’ and users’ points of view. The concept shows how users’ news selection practices are more inclusive than journalists often assume and less trivial than Web metrics suggest, the paper describes.

A questionnaire for audiences in Zuid-Holland region of the Netherlands was used to find out what constitutes as quality from the audience’s perspective. Results show four dimensions that are important for quality: urgency, public connection, understanding the region and audience responsiveness. The respondents also answered which topics would be of importance to them and would deserve more attention.

The article “Valuable Journalism – Measuring news quality from a user’s perspective” was recently published in Journalism Studies and is available online (free abstract).

Picture: Fountain pen by Toshiyuki IMAI, license CC BY-SA 2.0