Decoding Audience Needs: A Critical Analysis of Turkish Digital Journalism through the User Needs Model
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This study examines how digital news platforms in Turkey address and ideologically reconstruct user needs within a polarized media environment. It is grounded in the User Needs Model (UNM), which combines audience engagement, platform logic, and metric-driven journalism. However, the model's neglect of social structures—such as class, race, and gender—limits its critical capacity and treats audiences as atomized individuals. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative content analysis of 200 news items from four platforms with a discourse analysis of 30 purposively selected stories. The coding process showed high inter-coder reliability (Cohen’s Kappa ≥ 0.81). The findings reveal that narrative formats, most notably “Give Me Perspective” and “Connect Me” embed political and emotional cues through historical references and affective framing. In the Turkish context, user needs are not merely unmet but ideologically repurposed. Consequently, UNM should be reconsidered not only as a practical taxonomy but also as a critical lens to interrogate editorial logic and the democratic function of journalism in hybrid media systems.
Author: Sarphan Uzunoğlu
Institution: İzmir University of Economics
Language: Turkish
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7128529892