What is Informative to Young Adults? Decoding Informativeness Perceptions Among Audiences of Audio-Visual Digital Platforms

Social media has fundamentally altered what young adults consider news. However, a conceptual mismatch persists: what researchers consider news and journalistic actors often fails to align with what audiences perceive as such. Drawing on reception studies, this paper developes an audience-centered concept: informativeness. It describes the continuous space of a user’s subjective evaluation of media content as new and/or useful. To empirically unpack this concept, this study employed a two-step qualitative research design with eight focus groups of young German adults (ages 18–35). Findings show that audiences attribute informativeness through an encoding schema that is comprised of five core dimensions (informative practices and norms, relevance and relatability, actor-specific, usefulness, and platform-specific), which are flexibly applied beyond and independent of news and news media as a normative standard, and are adaptable to other online information spheres, such as misinformation, health guidance, or political information.