Wedel, L. (2026). What is informative to young adults? Decoding informativeness perceptions among audiences of audio-visual digital platforms. Digital Journalism, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2026.2685660
Summary
This paper introduces informativeness — the continuous, subjective attribution of media content as new and/or useful — as an audience-centered concept for studying how young adults evaluate online content beyond institutional definitions of news. Drawing on Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the “radical audience turn” in journalism studies, Wedel argues that existing concepts (news-ness, information orientation, information-ness) remain tethered to journalistic norms or to specific platforms. Through a two-step qualitative study with 44 young German adults across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, the paper derives a five-dimensional schema through which audiences decode whether content counts as informative, finding that journalistic norms get reapplied to non-journalistic actors and that perceived expertise, relevance, and platform logic — not professional certification — drive informativeness judgments.
Key Contributions
- Proposes informativeness as a platform- and actor-agnostic audience concept that decouples evaluation from traditional news as the normative baseline.
- Empirically derives a five-dimensional decoding schema: informative practices and norms; relevance and relatability; actor-specific cues; usefulness; platform-specific cues.
- Offers a conceptual model tracing how audiences move from perceptual cues (actor, content, platform) through decoding dimensions to a judgment of informativeness.
- Extends portability to misinformation, health, and political information research, and to media literacy interventions.
- Reframes the journalism–audience disconnect: relevance depends on aligning with audience evaluative logics, not reasserting institutional authority.
Methods
Two-step qualitative design conducted via the Kernwert online platform in Germany (Nov–Dec 2023):
- Step 1 — At-home tasks: Participants individually listed and ranked up to five actor and content types they considered informative on audio-visual social media, with no researcher-provided definition. Type-forming analysis produced group-specific typologies used as discussion anchors.
- Step 2 — Focus groups: Eight online semi-structured focus groups (4–6 participants, ~22 min relevant discussion each) probed reasoning behind the rankings.
- Sample: 44 young Germans stratified by cohort (Gen Z 18–26; Gen Y 27–35) and education (with/without Abitur).
- Analysis: Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke) in OpenQDA, with inductive coding close to participants’ language before synthesis into broader dimensions.
Findings
- Recurring actor categories: news media, journalists, influencers, family/friends, celebrities, political actors, comedians, brand pages. Content types: news, tips and tricks, facts and knowledge, funny content, advertisements.
- Highly educated participants more often cited journalistic actors as informative; lower-educated participants rarely cited traditional news media.
- Influencers were ranked both very high and very low, depending on whether they were perceived as topic-focused experts or self-representational; quasi-journalistic influencers were consistently rated highly.
- Journalistic norms (recency, factuality, source transparency, detail, objectivity) were applied to non-journalistic actors — sometimes more favorably than to legacy news.
- Relevance/relatability operated via four subtypes: thematic, societal, geo-local, and personal (with personal especially salient for Gen Z regarding friends/family).
- Usefulness (practical applicability, learning, self-improvement, conversational value) was a major driver; Gen Y emphasized life-challenge content, Gen Z everyday educational content.
- Platforms differ on a selection spectrum: self-selection on YouTube, actor-mediated on Instagram, algorithmic on TikTok. Instagram’s sociality shaped its informative role; TikTok was often framed as a “guilty pleasure.”
Connections
No other papers were provided under shared topics, so there are no in-register wikilinks to make here. Intellectually, the work sits at the intersection of the audience turn in journalism studies (extending news-ness, information orientation, and information-ness debates) and reception-studies traditions building on Hall’s encoding/decoding — connections that would be worth wiring up as related notes are added to the vault.
Podcast
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