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draws on a study of 16 Danes, where media diaries were used to collect information about news practices at multiple times during one day. This informa‑
tion was subsequently used to guide semi-structured interviews. Here, the digital media diary provided a unique opportunity to gather rich information
about media practices, which the participants would not recall or pay attention to on their own. In that way, digital media diaries - in both the passive and
active versions - emerge as a unique tool to prompt user behavior and stimulate interview questions on a more detailed level. In the end, constraints and
limitations of digital media diaries – notably digital divide issues – are discussed. References Boase, J., & Ling, R. (2013). Measuring Mobile Phone Use:
Self-Report Versus Log Data. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 18(4), 508–519. Hargittai, E., & Karr, C.
(2009).What R U Doin? Studying theThumb Generation UsingText Messaging. In E. Hargittai (Ed.), Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social
Scientists Pretend They Never Have (pp. 193–116). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Prior, M. (2009). The Immensely Inflated News Audience:
Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(1), 130–143. Ørmen, J., & Thorhauge, A.
M. (2015). Smartphone log data in a qualitative perspective. Mobile Media & Communication , 3 (3 ), 335–350.
PN 160 Catching People's News Experience. Why We Use and What We Have Learned from the 'Day in the Life Method’, Think Aloud Protocols,
Video Ethnography and Digital News Tracking
I. Costera Meijer1, T. Groot Kormelink1, M. Kleppe1
1 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Audiences and users have become increasingly important for journalism. A good example is Dutch quality newspaper de Volkskrant. On the eve of the new
millennium, 50 percent of the paper’s revenue was based on advertising. In 2016, this figure had been reduced to 18 percent. 82 percent of revenue is now
raised by a stable and (in 2015) even increasing (digital) community of paying readers. To get a more thorough understanding of changing news user prac‑
tices and news distribution logics, a closer look at people’s news experiences is crucial. News organizations tend to rely on web metrics to monitor the be‑
haviour of online news users. Although these instruments give precise details on what, when and how long users read online news, metrics are limited
instruments for understanding people’s changing user practices and preferences. Becoming more knowledgeable about underlying news user patterns and
considerations calls for different scholarly questions and research methods. Our paper reports on the benefits and limitations of taking a radical user centred
approach, quantitatively and qualitatively; starting from the user’s device, user practice and user experience instead of the news site, news organisations
or editors’experiences. In this paper we will reflect upon four research methods we have used and adapted in order to captivate people’s news experience.
First, the relevance and importance of using the notion of experience as framework for the study of news use will be explained (Dewey, 1934; Costera Meijer
& Groot Kormelink, 2015). Second, we will discuss the pros and cons of the day in the life method as an alternative to the more familiar diary method. How
did we make use of it and which types of experiences we were able to capture? Third, we will share our experience with using think aloud protocols as a way
of getting insight into people's’everyday news use considerations. What kind of knowledge do they enable and what are their limitations? Fourth, we will
report on video-ethnography as a means of getting insight into the meaning of gestures, spaces, places and sensory aspects of news use. Finally, we will
reflect on our use of the‘Newstracker’, a digital tool we developed to monitor users’actual consumption of news websites on desktop and laptop computers
by the use of a proxy installed on the devices of a group of respondents. In our conclusion we will compare how each of these four methods capture people’s
changing news experience in a different manner and whether a mixed method may be the best approach. References: Costera Meijer, I., & Groot Kormelink,
T. (2015). Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014. Digital Journalism, Vol. 3, No. 5, 664–679 Dewy,
John (1934, 2005), Art as Experience. London: Penguin.
PN 161 Beyond Media and Audiences – Media Diaries as a Method for Understanding Life with and Without Media
A. Wagner1, C. Schwarzenegger1
1 University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany
In this presentation we make a case for the manifold uses of media diaries for communication research; especially uses one would normally argue they
are no good for – studies that focus neither on the media nor on audiences as such. We review merits and limitations of media diaries as a research tool in
highly saturated media environments. Thereby, we do not consider it viable to focus either on mass media or interpersonal communication in separation
but always have to consider the entanglement of the two, as Bolin’s (2014) media-as-a-world perspective suggests. We consider media diaries as a lens on
such multi-faceted entanglements of people’s media and communication practices in the everyday that can help us understand their personal logics, rou‑
tines and motivations without reducing them to their role as member of an amorphous mass formerly known as the audience. Although media diaries are
a neglectedmethod for communication research at large and audience research in particular, hardly reflected inmethodology textbooks, they aren’t entirely
forgotten. Berg and Düvel (2012) describe the application of media diaries in communication studies reaching from standardized investigation of temporal
characteristics of mass media usage to more ethnographically informed views. What appears rather constant across different applications of the method is
an implicit media centrism of the approach. Kaun (2010) states diaries provide researchers with a source of data to grasp forms of meaning construction,
and allow for a nuanced understanding of subjective perspectives of informants in their life-worlds. However, thereby media diaries may tempt informants
to focus on the extraordinary, and memories that stick out of the media experiences but do not document mundane day-to-day occurrences in their ba‑
nality. Certain events included in the diaries could be triggered by the mere fact that informants are documenting their practices and feel urged to produce
valuable content. We argue that we therefore should not decouple media and communication practices from the everyday and look beyond media usage
and its contexts to understand the significance of said practices without overemphasizing them. We develop our argument based on a variety of studies
conducted between 2012 and 2015. Media diaries were either used as stand-alone methods or in triangulation with other forms of inquiry (focus groups,