Project Overview
This project is a collaboration between DPG Media and the AI, Media and Democracy Lab. The media sector in the Netherlands has been keeping up with the fast pace of digitization and (technological) innovation in recent years. This rapid digitization coincides with readers opting out whilst reading articles, and a growing population even avoiding news completely as well as news outlets having difficulties to reach audiences. Research shows this is not caused by insufficient reach of audiences, but rather because audiences are not served or represented adequately. This confronts news outlets with a specific challenge to reach audiences, as well as an opportunity. One of these potential opportunities is Modular journalism.
What is modular journalism?
Modular journalism is a form of journalism where content could be recrafted, reorganised, and represented as self-contained modules comprising text, audio, video, images, or other interactive elements (building on Kulkarni, 2022). For example, if a reader wants a short bullet-point account of the news article, this can be easily achieved through modular journalism. With the use of generative AI-tools, modular journalism could be taken a step further. This means that a written news article could also be presented as audio or video content to provide readers with even more flexibility in their news consumption, or to present news with different layers of detail or complexity. This could potentially improve audience engagement and even opens up an opportunity to explore underrepresented audiences. Furthermore, modular journalism could potentially decrease the degree of intentional and unintentional news avoidance.
Approach
To explore to what extent modular journalism could benefit DPG Media, this project aims to learn more about the audience’s opinions on this form of journalism. By setting up diverse focus groups, the research explores whether audiences would find modular journalism useful and desirable. The results will help in evaluating how and to what extent modular journalism could be implemented within DPG Media’s model.
This project is still in process. More information will follow.
Researchers
