The Production of Journalistic News from Online Voter Advice Applications’ Data: Reporting about Public Opinion in France, the Netherlands, and Turkey

Since a decade, online ‘vote helpers’ have flourished in Western countries and beyond. These applications aim at helping the voters in taming the flood of political communication by providing users with candidates and parties’ stances on a selected range of political issues. In order to reach a substantive number of users, the makers of online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) establish partnerships with media organizations. These partnerships are based on a mutual exchange of services: the media promote the VAA site within its different outlets and the VAA makers regularly provide the media partners with substantive analysis regarding voter behaviour, on the basis of the data collected through the application. This coupling of traditional media and a Web-based application developed by researchers has not been investigated yet in terms of journalistic production and civic engagement. How do the journalists participating in these partnerships perceive this new raw material? Are those journalists trying to enhance the debate about issues and content, thus drawing attention away from the horse-race? Compared to polls’ vote intention, how are journalists integrating these non-representative data into their reporting? In order to answer these fundamental questions on the exchange and creation of information between Internet based application and traditional media, this paper looks at the journalistic production in the printed press, and of their related website, issued from media-VAAs partnerships in France, the Netherlands and Turkey. By using more than 15 interviews with the journalists who participated in these partnerships, this paper aims to shed into light how the different journalistic cultures, and particularly the way how journalists perceive their role toward voters, filter the Internet interaction with traditional media and hence the potentiality for influencing citizens’ opinions in electoral contexts.