Pressure from politics and the public has created a greater demand for the media to be more accountable. Moreover, growing structural changes in the media landscape – including media concentration, commercialization, fiercer competition, an increasingly fragmented public, and the advent of new media – have also challenged how media should be accountable and responsive. This article looks at how Dutch broadcast media are responding to increasing pressure in terms of accountability and responsiveness through a case-‐study research from two leading broadcast news organizations. The need for more openness to and connection with the public is acknowledged, and among many journalists this is now even considered a necessity. However, when it comes to routinized daily application, there is a general resistance as it does not live within their professional autonomy and authority. New online instruments have created opportunities with more platforms and possibilities for the public to participate. However, at this point the online instruments put new constraints on the social system of organization with unforeseen activities and costs.
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This study explores how journalists in highspeed newsrooms gather information, how gathering activities are temporally structured and how reliability manifests itself in information-gathering activities.
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Verifying information is one of the core activities of journalism. However, recent research shows that many stories derive from unchecked information from news agencies and PR material. That being said, reporters who do not use this pre-packaged material, but who instead produce original stories based on independent research, might be journalists who stay devoted to the verification of information. Therefore, this study focuses on in-depth stories that originated inside the newsroom. We expected that these kinds of stories would be checked and double-checked, because time constraints are less important and these stories are characteristic of independent, quality journalism. Contrary to this expectation, the results show that even these kinds of stories are not always vetted. The lack of time was seldom mentioned as an excuse. Our research points to avoidance mechanisms which inhibit journalists from verifying their information.
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As media budgets do not increase with the same speed as the rise of complementary media, the right media choice has become more important as well as more difficult. Especially for local and regional news organizations that deal with budget reductions, a decline of youth willing to pay for news and an increase of media that provide free access to ‘news’ pose great challenges. In the context of an already complicated media strategy puzzle, Virtual Reality (VR) has entered the news domain. VR, according to journalists, might be a new means to reach the audience. However, local and regional VR productions almost do not exist, making it unclear how to create local/regional VR news and how to implement this effectively in the newsrooms. VIRGiN reveals types of local/regional stories and storytelling techniques that fit VR based on research among local/regional journalists and editors from Omroep Brabant and Breda Vandaag and their (potential) young audiences. Based on this, two local and regional VR news proof of concepts will be created: One grounded on journalist input, while the other concentrates on user generated VR news. These activities will reveal the ideal local and regional stories and storytelling techniques and best ways to motivate, make use of and share (user generated) VR content. The proof of concepts, together with production and process reports, will provide tangible examples and guidelines for local and regional journalists to learn whether and how to implement VR in their stories. This project is a stepping stone towards a larger (inter)national collaboration on VR news creation.
