Defining and Measuring News Media Quality: Comparing the Content Perspective and the Audience Perspective Philipp Bachmann 1 , Mark Eisenegger 1 , and Diana Ingenhoff 2 Abstract High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political impli- cations. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is diffi- cult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important con- siderations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multime- thod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens’ notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas’ ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four cri- teria derived from the deliberative ideal (N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broad- casting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys (N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems. 1 Universität Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland 2 University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland Corresponding Author: Philipp Bachmann, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Zentralstrasse 9, Lucerne, 6002, Switzerland. Email: philipp.bachmann.01@hslu.ch Article The International Journal of Press/Politics 1–29 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1940161221999666 journals.sagepub.com/home/hij