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oa I really thought I would use more than just Google: Investigating professional journalistic online use with browser history donations
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Computational Communication Research, Volume 6, Issue 2, Jan 2024, p. 1
Abstract
Data donations have often focused on general population samples and everyday media use. In this paper, we show how this approach can be used as a tool to study professional media use in sub-samples. We do so by exploring whether and how we can use browser history to gather information about the online information repertoires of journalists, taking into account the specific characteristics of these professionals. Data donations from journalists are particularly fruitful as they provide insight into a population that may be especially biased in their self-reports of media use due to normative ideas about media consumption and journalistic research. Our study combined a pre-donation online survey, a browser history donation via custom-made data donation software, and a qualitative interview during and after the donation to contextualize the donation experience and the donated data. We show which journalists are willing to participate in data donation and how they experience such an endeavor. We see systematic differences in their self- reported use of information intermediaries and the measured web history data, especially in the prevalence of social media and news websites. We discuss how these differences are reflected by the journalists as well as the quality of the donated data.