I am an Associate Professor (Universitair Hoofddocent) in Journalism Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I also earned my PhD. My doctoral research was part of the NWO-funded project The New News Consumer, which explored how digitalization impacts the practices and habits of news users.
My research is at the forefront of the “audience turn” in journalism studies. I am particularly interested in how audiences engage with news in their everyday lives, and how these practices evolve — or remain stable — in a rapidly changing media landscape. This focus has led me to study how young adults navigate an increasingly abundant media environment, including the roles of newer platforms such as TikTok and sources like cestmocro.
More recently, I have been drawn to interdisciplinary approaches, which I believe are essential for addressing today’s key societal challenges. In my NWO Veni project “Beyond the News: How People Encounter, Engage with, and Make Sense of Societal Issues” (2024–2027), I combine ethnographic and computational methods to explore how societal topics enter citizens’ lifeworlds and how their ideas about these topics develop over time. I also received an NWO XS grant (2025–2026) to make media research more inclusive, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of media practices and interpretations across different sociodemographic groups.
I co-edit the international book series Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research and have contributed to the Reuters Digital News Report for over a decade. I serve on the Editorial Board of Digital Journalism and was named their 2020 “Reviewer of the Year.”
Alongside my research, I am deeply committed to teaching and mentoring. I teach several courses in the BA and MA Journalism programs and have supervised over 70 BA and MA theses. I currently co-promote three PhD projects and also teach a high school class on media use via VU’s Pre-University College program.
