ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the empirical research process, including methodological perspectives for qualitative research and audience interview design for a project on news engagement. It highlights the methodological choices, lessons learned and relearned and the practicalities of using the five parameters of media engagement for an empirical case. The chapter discusses how news is an intense mode of engagement that is scrutinised, selected and made sense of on a daily basis. Modalities of news engagement was a broad topic in the interview guide, containing questions about the genre itself and communicative modes of news, for example, family news, or entertainment news, social media news and so forth. The impact of news during the pandemic placed emphasis on institutional contexts for news engagement and disengagement.
