Despite these changes, we believe that journalism still has an essential role to play in our democratic society; in fact, perhaps even more so than ever. But how does this role look like?
Theory and Practice
We believe in a strong combination of theory and practice. This is reflected in our research as well as in our teaching. To understand how journalism operates, one cannot do without also paying attention to practical journalistic skills.They are part of our teaching, and also our cooperation with media partners helps us do better research. But at the same time, we maintain a critical distance. After all, we study the state of journalism - even if it's sometimes not as good as we would hope. Based on these insights, we contribute to a better theoretical understanding of journalism that goes beyond specific cases. Vice versa, these theories inform our empirical investigations.
An extra layer
Journalistic skills are important, as are actionable insights based on research: What works, what does not work? We go a step further. For us, journalism is not a goal in itself - it is a cornerstone of democracy and citizenship. Therefore, when we study changes in journalism (say, the impact of artificial intelligence) or audience behavior (say, the increased reliance on social media platforms), we do not do so just for the sake of it: Ultimately, we are interested in the societal implications of these changes - not just in chasing the newest tool or trend.
Innovative phenomena, innovative methods
When we study new phenomena, we need to critically assess whether we also need new methodological approaches. We do not believe in a strict divide between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Rather, we combine what helps us best to get a complete picture. In particular, our group has strong expertise in methods like interviews and focus groups, experiments, content analysis - but also computational text analysis and online field experiments. We also like to build things: We actively develop new tools and approaches, such as data donation solutions to analyze digital trace data, or recommender systems to understand how users interact with algorithmically curated news.
A clear focus and a lot of connections
In an increasingly globalized world, journalism needs to be studied beyond borders as well. Nevertheless, political and media systems differ, and language matters as well. Our group has strong expertise of the Dutch and Flemish media landscape - and at the same time, we have collaborations all over the world (and always welcome more!). This allows us to put things into perspective and to learn from each other. The same holds true for interdisciplinary collaborations: To study journalism in today's media environment, insights from the humanities, social sciences, but also computational sciences need to be combined. We actively foster these collaborations and increasingly learn to speak each others' languages, publish in interdisciplinary outlets, and visit conferences that a few years ago, a typical journalism scholar might not have visited.