Renée van der Nat
Renée van der Nat has been affiliated with the Research Group for Quality Journalism in Digital Transition since 2015. Her research focuses on the relationship between journalism and citizens and the role of technology in this. This relationship has fundamentally changed in recent years, and expectations are shifting on both sides. The public has gained much more influence in the creation and consumption of journalism, and the field is responding to this. This dynamic is central to Renée's research. She is also a lecturer at the School of Journalism in Utrecht.
In 2023, Renée launched the Raak Publiek project "Broken Connection." Together with fellow researchers and industry partners (including NOS, Omroep Brabant, and Omroep Venlo), she explores how journalists and citizens (wish to) communicate with each other, and studies how conversational AI (such as ChatGPT) can play a role in strengthening the connection between citizens and journalism. Read more about this project here.
In 2022, Renée began research on dissatisfied news users—people who do not trust news media or are critical of how the media operate. Who are they? And what do they want? Ultimately, Renée aims to explore together with these dissatisfied news users how things could be different. This research resulted in a successful Raak Publiek grant application. Read more about this research here.
During her PhD research (2017-2022), Renée focused on a special genre of journalism—interactive journalistic stories—where this changing dynamic between journalist and audience is manifested. To map this out, she studied interactive journalistic productions, production processes, and audience reception of interactive stories. You can find the results of the research here.
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
