In particular, TASKs monitors and assesses the entire process of communication through a triangulation of news providers’ performances and role perceptions, citizens’ and audience’s expectations and performances, and (platformed) journalistic news contents. The assumption is that within the platformized contemporary media ecosystem, media trust and journalistic authority cannot be evaluated anymore just by considering news organizations’ and journalists’ performances, conversely, media users’ perspective as well as the mediating role of platforms should be considered.
To provide systematic and empirically-based insights on news media trust and journalistic authority in a platformized media system, TASKs adopts a highly innovative multi-method approach that combines consolidated qualitative and quantitative research methods with cutting-edge techniques to generate and analyse large-scale data. This project is composed of three data collection foci that will be carried out in parallel tracks and a final step that combines results. Each of these three foci investigates a fundamental aspect of journalism: the production of information, its content, and its audience.
TASKs substantially enriches the existing literature by combining users’ perspective with both journalists’ self-representations and news products. In this way TASKs investigates whether the (dis)trust and level of authority that citizens attributes to their sources of information stem from (un)shared professional values or from specific modes of production that are (dis)liked. Moreover, the project goes beyond the traditional exclusive focus on journalism as an institution, paying also attention to platform dependent channels of information, which are potentially involved in the exchange between trust, authority, sense and knowledge.
This project provides valuable insights to understand relationships that bind citizens and journalism by the (platformed) news information ecosystem in terms of media trust and journalistic authority and then understanding how news media may properly reach their TASKs.
