Audiences' Value Perceptions for Local News Content

It's the final day of ECREA 2012, and I've wandered into a session on the perception of news. The first speaker on this (uncomfortably early – which means there's hardly anyone here; hello, conference organisers!) Saturday morning is Mark Harmon, whose interest is in examining the value of local news. In the US, news use except for online news has declined; traditional outlets and mainstream broadcast news are down, while local broadcast news is stable, and online (including mobile and tablet) news is growing.

This also reflects changes in the news product, and the perceived value of that product; new add-in content is especially important here. Audience research has long been used to establish the perceived value of news, but such work has been fairly isolated and limited, and is often very platform-specific (focussing only on print or broadcast); instead, what is necessary is the examination of a range of factors and attributes: media forms, story types, the added value provided by the outlet (related content, links to sources, interactive possibilities, or a searchable archive), and the credibility of the sources and journalistic staff used.

Can these factors be unbundled, measured, and compared? Conjoint analysis is useful here, as it measures relative values across multiple factors; the project examined this by developing a range of multifactor story profiles for local news stories, which some 400 participants (college students, naturally) were asked to rank in their perceived value. This revealed that the medium was most important: mobile devices led from local TV, while radio trailed behind; breaking news was seen as most valuable, while news analysis was least important. Value-added factors did not show any clear trends; patterns remained within the standard error.