News gap in a digital news environment: Calibrating editorial importance from user-rated news quality and identifying user characteristics that close the news gap

While previous studies have found a clear gap between users’ news preferences and editors’ news choices, whether a similar user–editor gap exists when it comes to news quality evaluations remains an open question. We therefore conducted a nation-wide survey of 7810 South Korean users, collected online social indicators from a digital news platform, and asked users and editors to evaluate the quality of 1500 news articles and rank-order these articles’ editorial importance, respectively. Even after controlling for users’ news preferences and news genres, we found that users distinguished news articles quality in a manner comparable to that of editors. Our analysis also showed that users with higher issue involvement, issue knowledge, or ideological strength tended to rate news quality similar to editors. Moreover, we found that ideological strength served as an alternative cognitive schema for issue knowledge for individuals who lacked sufficient knowledge to assess news quality.