Welcome to the Final Seminar of our Ph.D Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus.

Commentator: Assistant Professor Joëlle Swart (University of Groningen).

On June 18th, the Department of Information Science and Media Studies organizes a PhD Final Seminar for candidate Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus. The Final Seminar takes place toward the end of the PhD period, when the candidate is a few months away from submitting their thesis.

Commentator: Joëlle Swart, University of Groningen.

Title: Making sense of news audiences and their experiences: Practices and responses to news in the age of datafication

This thesis explores how people relate to news as experience. I ask how news audiences’ experiences can be captured and how these experiences can help provide a more profound understanding of how people relate to news in everyday life.

Hidden practices

While audiences have become increasingly central to journalistic practices and academic discussions about journalism, the understanding of audiences’ practices and behaviors are paradoxically dominated by professional measures and quantification of user data like clicks, time spent, and sales rather than audiences’ own experiences with news. A central aim of this thesis is to explore hidden aspects of people’s news consumption not found in digital traces and thereby advance a phenomenologically grounded understanding of experiences that shape interactions with news.

To answer these questions, I have conducted recurring interviews and media diaries with news audiences, supplemented with video ethnography and data donations. This empirical material is analyzed through four articles. The first article explicates the overarching term ‘media experience’ as an analytical concept to capture key insights about mediated lives in digital societies. The second article zooms in on the experiences of young adults who do not pay for news and their considerations for not subscribing to digital news subscriptions. The third article critically assesses the metric of ‘time spent’ by analyzing how people navigate when reading news online and how short bursts of news use relate to meaningful experiences. Finally, the fourth article offers a conceptualization of ‘news experience’ as an analytical lens to understand how people relate to news in everyday life, empirically grounded in six distinct forms of news experience.

A holistic approach

The thesis highlights the significance of a holistic approach to understanding people’s complex practices and behaviors. Whereas research and news professionals predominantly have made sense of people’s news use through cognitive approaches that highlight agency and intentionality, this thesis also emphasizes experiential qualities, which encompasses sensory, affective, perceptional, technological, and social dimension.