Renée van der Nat
Renée van der Nat has been a research associate at Journalismlab since 2015. Her research focuses on the relationship between journalism and its audiences. This relationship has changed fundamentally over the last decades. Audience expectations have shifted as people enjoy more agency in the construction and consumption of journalism. Practitioners react to these changes and are exploring new ways to engage news audiences.
She’s also a lecturer at the Utrecht School for Journalism where she focusses on courses involving practice-based research and media studies.
Renée current research focusses on discontented news users – people who don’t trust news media of express media criticism. Who are these people? And what are they looking for? Answering these questions should lead to a project in which researchers, journalists and discontented news users collaboratively look for new solutions.
For her PhD (2017-2022), Renée scrutinized the changing dynamics between journalists and their audience for one particular journalistic genre – interactive narratives. To grasp the dynamics between journalists and their audience, she studied interactive journalistic narratives, their production processes and audience reception. Results can be found here (Dutch).
Fields of expertise
- Multimedia journalism
- Narrative journalism
- Interactive journalism
Publications
- Blurring and Redefining Boundaries of Journalism in the Production and Reception of Interactive Digital Storytelling
- Interactive journalistic narratives: Balancing authorial, user, and technological agency
- Navigating Interactive Story Spaces The Architecture of Interactive Narratives in Online Journalism
