In their article “I Really Thought I Would Use More Than Just Google: Investigating Professional Journalistic Online Use with Browser History Donations”, Lisa Merten, Felix Victor Münch and Maren Schuster describe how the method of data donation can be used to investigate professional media use in journalism. The article was published in the open access journal Computational Communication Research.
Data donation has often focused on general population samples and everyday media use. This paper shows how this approach can be used as a tool to study professional media use in subsamples. It examines whether and how browsing history can be used to gather information about the online information repertoire of journalists, taking into account the specific characteristics of this professional group. Data donations from journalists are particularly fruitful because they provide insights into a population that may be particularly biased in their self-reports of media use due to normative beliefs about media consumption and journalistic research.
The study combined a pre-donation online survey, a donation of browser history via customized data donation software, and a qualitative interview during and after the donation to contextualize the donation practice and the donated data. It shows which journalists are willing to participate in data donation and how they experience such an undertaking.
Systematic differences emerge in the use of information brokers as reported by the journalists themselves and in the measured web log data, particularly in the prevalence of social media and news websites. The authors discuss how these differences are reflected in the journalists’ statements and in the quality of the donated data.
You can download the article as a PDF: Merten, L., Münch, F. V., & Schuster, M. (2024). I Really Thought I Would Use More Than Just Google: Investigating Professional Journalistic Online Use with Browser History Donations. Computational Communication Research, 6(2). https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/CCR2024.2.7.MERT