The role of traditional media and the Internet in relation to young people’s political participation has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Starting from a notion of differential media use and an encompassing notion of political participation, this article tests the relationships between media use (newspaper, television, and Internet) and offline and online forms of political participation. Findings from a national survey ( n = 2,409, age 16 to 24) reveal that a variety of Internet uses are positively related with different forms of political participation, whereas the relationship between most uses of traditional media and participation are weak, albeit positive. The study rejects the predictive power of duration of media use but finds support for the type of media use. Positive relationships between online communication and noninformational uses of the Internet vis-à-vis participation are found. The research demonstrates how a wider and more contemporary conception of political participation, together with more detailed measures of media use, can help to gain better insight in the roles media can play in affecting participatory behavior among the Internet generation.

Twitter, blogs and alternative news sites play an increasingly important role in the realm of news and journalism. Journalists often use Twitter to survey the public opinion and to gather information for their articles. At the same time, there has been an explosive growth of non-journalistic websites that have started to compete with professional news organizations for the attention from the audience. What do these trends mean for the credibility of news that citizens consume? In a survey-embedded experiment (N=1,979) we address this question by investigating argument credibility within news articles, varying the sources that are cited, the type of news outlet and the style of information gathering by the journalist. Confirming our hypothesis, the results show that arguments are more credible when experts are cited instead of random citizens. However, it appears that the credibility of arguments is judged the same, regardless of the type of online outlet (either the website of an interest group or the website of an independent quality newspaper). Further, arguments based on information from Twitter and based on face-to-face interviews are judged differently under specific conditions. The apparent indifference of citizens towards the origin and interests of information sources has significant democratic implications.

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This paper presents a brief overview of the Research Software Engineering landscape in the Netherlands and includes a summary of the results from a survey held in December 2017 in the Netherlands and several other countries. The results show that best practices are widely adopted. Research software is produced by small teams or individuals, is often used for scientific publications, and is frequently acknowledged in publications.