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This article opens up the language and categories used by professionals and academics when debating the quality of television news. By considering one specific news practice, that of the Dutch NOS News (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting; the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation), the author demonstrates how the ability to imagine different approaches to news and news audiences has largely been confined by the dominant notion of news as either serious and sophisticated or popular and light. In an effort to move away from this binary conception of news, the author develops a third dimension: that of public quality. If newsmakers have a professional repertoire at their disposal that allows them to choose between a conventional, a popular, and a public approach of news, news might become more imaginative and might cover more fully the intricacies of our lives and those of the lives of others.
Irene Costera Meijer (2003) studied this question.