ABSTRACT
Until recently, journalists often considered reckoning with audience preferences unnecessary and, indeed, uncouth, because it conflicted with their editorial independence. Nowadays, audience analytics are an established part of journalism, but audience metrics may not provide the best source for assessing the interests and preferences of news users. Drawing from 15 years of audience studies (2004–2020), we argue that a genuine audience turn in journalism and journalism studies is needed to avoid systematic bias and to truly understand what journalism means from a user perspective. A broader methodological approach might be useful to better make sense of changing user patterns. Changing News Use emphasizes the advantages of taking a non-news-centric, non-essentialist, non-representational, and non-media-centric approach. Instead of assuming that what people use most frequently (frequency fallacy) or spend most time on (duration fallacy) can be read as what they find most interesting or even most important (and vice versa), we propose an attitude of sensitivity which centers on listening to and understanding real people’s news needs and news enjoyment. To understand changing news use, it is crucial to explore the role of user practices and user pleasures as integral to the experience of news.
