Chris Peters

Despite an 'audience turn' in journalism studies, confusion persists about the experiences driving audience engagement. Young adults are especially intriguing in this regard, as they have grown up in digital environments, are less willing to pay for journalism, and lack key historical catalysts for the formation of news habits. Accordingly, this article investigates the information repertoires of this group, using a mixed-method approach to focus upon the preferences and experiences of Danish youth, aged 18-24. Crafting an innovative research design integrating individual interviews, Q-sort methodology, and think aloud protocols, the article explores five repertoires: the online traditionalist, depth-seeking audiophile, digital news seeker, interpersonal networker, and non-news information seeker. In these repertoires, 'traditional' journalistic media is often eschewed, while 'new' media come to the fore. The paper also examines two analytical themes cutting across repertoires: a tension between the seamlessness of where news is ('platform newsiness') versus how it is conceptualized ('traditional journalism'); and the guiding role of face-to-face communication and social networks when engaging with news. In sum, by exploring the formation of information repertoires at this crucial life stage, the article provides insights into a key demographic, whose practices and preferences shape the news industry's ongoing sustainability.

This article develops the concept of 'mimetic weaponization' for theory-building. Memes recurrently serve as identificatory markers of affiliation across social media platforms, with ensuing controversies potentially proving newsworthy. Our elaboration of weaponization refers to the purposeful deployment of memetic imagery to disrupt, undermine, attack, resist or reappropriate discursive positions pertaining to public affairs issues in the news. For alt-right memetic conflicts, impetuses range from 'sharing a joke' to promoting 'alternative facts,' rebuking 'political correctness' or 'wokeness,' defending preferred framings of 'free speech,' or signalling cynicism, distrust or dissent with 'mainstream' media, amongst other drivers. Of particular import, we argue, is the politics of othering at stake, including in the wider journalistic mediation of a meme's public significance. Rendering problematic this contested process, this article focuses on Pepe the Frog as an exemplar, showing how and why variations of this mimetic cartoon have been selectively mobilized to help normalize-ostensibly through humour, parody or satire-rules of inclusion and exclusion consistent with hate-led agendas. Digital journalism, we conclude, must improve its capacity to identify and critique mimetic weaponization so as to avoid complicity in perpetuating visceral forms of prejudice and discrimination so often presented as 'just a bit of fun.'

This article’s contribution to theory-building focuses on the everyday circumstances under which journalism encourages a civic gaze. Specifically, it elaborates our heuristic conception of the “visual citizen” to explore journalism’s mediation of a politics of seeing, paying particular attention to how and why renderings of in/visibility signify varied opportunities for civic engagement within digital news landscapes. In recognizing a distinction between direct and virtual witnessing, it establishes a conceptual basis for an inductive typology delineating interrelated, potential citizen-subject positions across a continuum. Four such positions are identified and appraised, namely the visual citizen as: (a) news observer and circulator, (b) accidental news image-maker and contributor, (c) purposeful news image-maker and activist, and (d) creative image-maker and news commentator. Evaluating these positions in relation to their significance for visual journalism, this article aims to advance efforts to rethink the inscription of imagery in news reportage and its import for public life.

For millennia, the idea that rituals create a shared and conventional world of human sociality has been commonplace. From common rites of passage that exist around the world in various forms (weddings, funerals, coming-of-age ceremonies), to patterned actions that seem familiar only to members of the in-group (secret initiations, organizational routines), the voluntarily performance of ritual encourages people to participate and engage meaningfully in different spheres of society. While attention to the concept was originally the purview of anthropology, sociology, and history, in recent decades many other academic disciplines have turned to ritual as a ‘window’ on the cultural dynamics by which people make and remake their worlds. In terms of journalism studies in particular, the concept of ritual has been harnessed by scholars looking to understand the symbolic power of media to direct public attention, define issues and groups, and cause social cohesion or dissolution. Media rituals performed in and through news coverage indicate social norms, common and conflicting values, and different ways of being ‘in the world’. The idea of ritual in journalism is accordingly related to discussions around the societal power of journalism as an institution, the ceremonial aspects of news coverage (especially around elite persons and extraordinary ‘media events’), and the different techniques journalists use to ‘make the news’ and ‘construct reality’. Journalism does more than merely cover events or chronicle history – it provides a mediated space for audiences and publics that both allows and extends rituals that can unite, challenge and affect society.

Having the means to access “news” at any moment without much hassle likely changes the experience of journalism for many people. Beyond this, one might even say that the way we interact with information on a daily basis transforms through this phenomenon. Considering such changes in what is often referred to as “everyday life” provides a useful starting point for research into media use. It guides us towards a number of considerations, from how we structure our day through certain habits and patterns of media consumption; to the development of technology and the formation of new rituals; to shifting dynamics of communicative flows across societies and their impact; and to the processes whereby the emergent becomes the familiar. Obviously such analyses are not bound to the disciplinary confines of media studies and the term “everyday life” enjoys a rich, if vague and complicated, twentieth-century history.1 Indeed, a quick Google Scholar search of “everyday life” takes us on a whirlwind interdisciplinary tour of academia, from sociology to cultural studies, psychology to political science, anthropology to economics. There is good reason for this, in that thinking through consistency and change—patterns and disruptions—across the passage of time forms the analytic foundation for much scientific research. But while “everyday life” adorns the cover of many a noted book (e.g. Goffman 1959; de Certeau 1984), a comparable term is almost nowhere to be found. “Everywhere life” not only draws the Google equivalent of a blank stare, even writing it down or saying it aloud feels a little awkward. This is almost certainly no discursive anomaly but is rather indicative of the subjugation of spatial thinking to temporal analysis within academia (Soja 1989). While space has been “treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Foucault 1980, 70). Journalism studies is not immune from this tendency. Yet if we want to understand much of what makes media use meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only its everydayness, but its everywhereness as well.

Over the past decade a new breed of television journalism, what I term the cable news magazine, has risen to become the highest-rated programming on the cable news networks. Despite their popular appeal, and arguable status as the definitive genre of cable news, such broadcasts receive scant academic attention. This paper analyses the most prominent of these cable magazines, The O'Reilly Factor, on Fox News. I argue that through performing belief, The Factor “re-makes the news” in a manner that lowers the threshold demanded under journalism's traditional rules of truth. Yet surprisingly, the show also adheres to, or at least lauds, many traditional tenets of the objectivity regime. What is novel, and what possibly accounts for its popularity, is the wilful intertwining of belief, journalistic involvement, and truth-claims in a brazen fashion; a dramatic departure from the cool style which epitomised twentieth-century journalism.

This paper contends that to understand how audiences engage with journalism in the contemporary age, we must conceive of news consumption not just as something we do, but as something we do in a particular place. It considers the experience(s) of consuming journalism, and reflects upon the influence “space” has in this equation. I ask how news consumption is integrated into, and shapes, the social spaces of everyday life, and how this may be transforming. The title, “Journalism to Go”, thus has a tripartite meaning relating to changing notions of space, speed, and convenience in journalism. Specifically: journalism is now produced to facilitate increasingly mobile places of consumption (Space); journalism is now produced to adjust for the faster pace of the information age (Speed); and journalism is now produced to interact with and provide multiple channels of access for audiences (Convenience). This paper demonstrates the analytic importance of the first of these by considering data generated through Barnhurst's “Life History & The Media” project, which details young adults’ stories of media use. This analysis uncovers that moments of media consumption do not simply take place in space; rather, the spaces of everyday life are produced through these socio-cultural practices.

In relation to journalism, the concept of ‘emotion’ is consistently undertheorized. Employed with commonsensical discernment, it is conflated with tabloid practices, sensationalism, bias, commercialization, and the like. Consequently, when discussed, emotion is often treated dismissively; a marker of unprincipled and flawed journalism. Yet hard, self-styled objective, ‘just the facts’ journalism is not unemotional, just as soft, so-called tabloid news is not irrational. As authors who study the sociology of emotions note, emotion has a social component and can more broadly be conceptualized as the experience of involvement. This article utilizes this understanding to interrogate traditional news dichotomies before applying this perspective to consider non-valorized news alternatives. One significant change over the past few decades is not that the news has become emotional (indeed, it has always been); rather, the diversity of emotional styles, the acceptability of journalistic involvement, and attempts to involve the audience have become more explicit.

Historically, or so we would like to believe, the story of everyday life for many people included regular, definitive moments of news consumption. Journalism, in fact, was distributed around these routines and often still is. Many of these habits were organized not just temporally but also spatially, following a predictable pattern and occurring in regular, set places. There was a certain stability to news consumption, and the notion of ritual – habitual, formalised actions which reinforce the ‘symbolic power’ of media institutions – provided a good fit to explain these practices. However, the past few decades have seen a tremendous increase in the number of different ways we can get journalism in everyday and 'everywhere' life – from tablets to smartphones, Twitter, online news, commuter papers, and so forth – and the different possible places and moments of news consumption have multiplied in concert. As consumption gradually spreads to any potential instant and every possible location we desire, our news media diet becomes somewhat indistinguishable from other mediated forms of communication.  In short, the places and spaces of news consumption are changing, but we don’t know what impact this is having on journalism’s various audiences or on how we process, access and discuss information. Accordingly, the aim of this special issue of Journalism Studies is to provoke discussion on the ‘Places and Spaces of News Audiences’, bringing together scholars from an interdisciplinary perspective to expand our understanding of contemporary news audiences and their changing spatio-temporal experiences of journalism.

This article critically examines the invocation of democracy in the discourse of audience participation in digital journalism. Rather than simply restate the familiar grand narratives that traditionally described journalism's function for democracy (information source, watchdog, public representative, mediation for political actors), we compare and contrast conceptualisations of the audience found within these and discuss how digital technologies impact these relationships. We consider how “participatory” transformations influence perceptions of news consumption and draw out analytic distinctions based on structures of participation and different levels of engagement. This article argues that the focus in digital journalism is not so much on citizen engagement but rather audience or user interaction; instead of participation through news, the focus is on participation in news. This demands we distinguish between minimalist and maximalist versions of participation through interactive tools, as there is a significant distinction between technologies that allow individuals to control and personalise content (basic digital control) and entire platforms that easily facilitate the storytelling and distribution of citizen journalism within public discourse (integrative structural participation). Furthermore, commercial interests tend to dominate the shaping of digital affordances, which can lead to individualistic rather than collective conceptualisations. This article concludes by considering what is gained as well as lost when grand visions of journalism’s roles for democracy are appropriated or discarded in favour of a participation paradigm to conceptualise digital journalism.

While HBO’s The Newsroom presents itself as fictional television, its narrative is driven by critiquing American cable news culture and contemporary journalism ethics. This article analyses popular reflections on the programme to identify what these discourses reveal about public evaluations of the state of the US news media. Based upon 1115 lengthy audience posts and discussions and 49 news articles, I argue that the response to this supposedly ‘fictional’ newscast nonetheless reveals a highly politicized scepticism about the actual news media and a corresponding – although fairly depoliticized and surprisingly uniform – nostalgic lament for the journalism of days gone by. Similarly, findings suggest that the traditional modernist discourse of journalism as a public good persists – both among journalists and the public – despite the evident commercial underpinnings of the American media system. The study finds that audiences and journalists alike use the show as a catalyst to (1) ‘name and shame’ news outlets – including the fictional Newsroom, (2) engage in political confrontation and (3) employ the rhetoric and metanarratives of the Anglo-American objectivity regime to define ‘good’ journalism. However, it also finds that while individuals may embrace critique, they often lack critical skills to go beyond politicized accusations of bias.

This article contributes to debates regarding professional-amateur interfaces in photojournalism by reporting on findings from a qualitative study with members of a demographic cohort often described as ‘millennial’ users (that is, people born between 1980 and 1999). A textual analysis of their responses identified five thematics for analysis: 1) respondents’ views regarding the prospective role of bearing witness and what it may entail; 2) the motivations of those engaged in this type of activity; 3) the uses of citizen smartphone imagery by news organisations; 4) presumed distinctions between professional and amateur or citizen photojournalism; and 5) ethical questions of trust where the ensuing imagery was concerned. On this evidential basis, professional photojournalism’s discursive authority is shown to be open to challenge by the alternative ethos of citizen imagery, with respondents’ perceptions raising questions over realness, authenticity and truth-value complicating, and at times destabilising, familiar professional/amateur normative binarisms.

"There is no doubt, journalism faces challenging times. Since the turn of the millennium, the financial health of the news industry is failing, mainstream audiences are on the decline, and professional authority, credibility and autonomy are eroding. The outlook is bleak and it’s understandable that many are pessimistic. But this book argues that we have to rethink journalism fundamentally.

Rather than just focus on the symptoms of the ‘crisis of journalism’, this collection tries to understand the structural transformation journalism is undergoing. It explores how the news media attempts to combat decreasing levels of trust, how emerging forms of news affect the established journalistic field, and how participatory culture creates new dialogues between journalists and audiences. Crucially, it does not treat these developments as distinct transformations. Instead, it considers how their interrelation accounts for both the tribulations of the news media and the need for contemporary journalism to redefine itself. "

Storytelling is at the centre of journalism practice. It is the key for communicating with the audience and it exerts a heavy influence over how news is perceived in the public sphere. In the digital era the way in which journalists tell stories is undergoing a dramatic shift. New media offer new possibilities, while they at the same time stimulate traditional media to search for new venues to convey their stories in an attractive and authoritative way. This volume addresses how journalism tries to find and craft new forms and genres of storytelling. It questions how these transitions stimulate new journalistic practices and shift the institutional function and ethics of journalism. What does it means to tell newsworthy and trustworthy stories in a digital age?

The changing patterns of news consumption in a digital era bring about new configurations between audiences, information, the devices upon which they consume it and the different (mobile) places and (shiftable) times where and when this is possible. This chapter highlights the need to consider these interrelated changes in the media ecology if we want to grasp the newfound complexity of media consumption. Specifically, it outlines how audience engagement with news and different spatiotemporal configurations made possible by digital technology are trends that complement and reinforce one another in terms of changing the socially-situated affordances of news use. Having sketched these contours, the chapter then highlights analytical challenges for understanding and conceptualizing the new interrelations between digital news content, production, and consumption, grounding this analysis with theoretical insights that emphasize the significance of spatiotemporal dynamics. The emphasis here is on the interrelations and mobilities of digital news audiences, based on a recognition of the productive impacts of media use while being careful to note the limitations of a paradigm shift that points solely to the possibilities generated by the ubiquitous presence of media in our everyday lives. Aspects of interaction and personalization beget by new media technologies certainly shape the possibilities, practices and power audiences have to choose news wherever, whenever, and however they want. However, this simultaneously challenges the conventional routines and symbolic power of journalism as a place where, metaphorically, people can come together.

If we want to understand much of what makes news use meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only what they consume, how and when, but also where. Simply put, the places and spaces of news consumption matter, and matter significantly, for how people choose, interpret, and attend to the news. This chapter outlines the importance of space and place when it comes to audiences/users of journalism and the gradual recognition of this in digital journalism studies, with an eye to highlighting pertinent research trajectories. It first explores how the everyday digital geographies of contemporary media flows intersect with the everywhere ‘lived’ geographies of individuals, and how this changes as we move from an era of mass media consumption to digitalized media practices. It then outlines some key conceptual aspects to consider, from the spatial politics of news consumption, to questions of geographic scale, mobile news use, and everyday life practices. Considering spatiotemporal transformations in everyday life provides a useful starting point for thinking about the changing places news is available, and the remainder of the chapter explores some prominent examples, namely the home, workplace, public, and virtual spaces.

This chapter engages with how audiences’ expectations and perceptions of journalism are currently being shaped by considering three pertinent and interrelated changes in concert: the shifting experiences of public trust in the media; increasing audience involvement in journalism; and a growing public understanding of media techniques. I propose we try to understand the shifting nature of the news landscape not by taking journalism as a starting point, but by looking at journalism through the changing lens of its audience(s). More specifically, the idea of media literacy is a helpful concept we can use to begin deciphering the changing audience—journalism relationship

In the 21st century, more-and-more genres of broadcast journalism seem to be ‘trusted’ sources of news and a diverse range of voices and formats are influential. Accordingly, this chapter examines to what extent network evening newscasts are changing as they adapt to this tumultuous journalism landscape. Specifically, it compares one of the bastions of broadcast journalism, the CBS Evening News, under what appears to be two vastly different stewardships – that of Walter Cronkite and that of Katie Couric. By counterpoising CBS Evening News under Cronkite with the same broadcast under Couric a few decades later, one gets a better sense whether this journalism mainstay has indeed begun to incorporate elements associated with its ‘softer’ counterparts, and if so, to what extent.

Joseph Turow’s The Daily You takes us behind-the-scenes of the advertising industry to get a better sense of not just how its capitalistic rationale is put into practice, but its potential impact on individuals in a consumer society. While readers are probably most familiar with his Breaking Up America (1997), this current book is a more natural development of its 2006 antecedent, Niche Envy. Indeed The Daily You contains familiar arguments Turow has made previously about marketing discrimination and profiling in a digital age, but this book delves further into the actual mechanics and end-goals of how advertising companies gather data, profile people, and try to follow ‘valuable’ individuals across as many possible geographic locations and devices as possible.

Boczkowski and Mitchelstein’s The News Gap offers an extensive insight into one of journalism and democracy’s great conundrums: are the interests of the general public in line with the ‘public interest’? Its aim is to investigate the preferences of news audiences – at the risk of giving away the ending, they tend to favour the ‘unhealthy food’ of sports, entertainment and crime over ‘healthier’ public-affairs content – via a large-scale empirical study of consumption at 20 online news sites in seven countries. What makes their contribution unique is that they then compare this with the story selection made by these same news outlets, offering a detailed empirical assessment of the long-assumed ‘gap’ between what journalists and the public deem ‘newsworthy’.

This thesis constructs a narrative that challenges our current understanding on hate crime, at least within a Canadian context. It questions the contention made by many authors that the idea of hate crime first appeared in the early 1980s. While this may be true with respect to terminology, the idea of criminal hatred – in terms of crimes based on bias – can be seen to date back to the 1960s and the debate on hate propaganda. Through repeated discussion of hate propaganda as a distinct concept in the House of Commons, and by claiming ownership of a number of diverse events in its name, the idea of criminal hatred gained an increasingly irreversible existence as something matter-of-fact. In 1970, legislation was enacted against hate propaganda. Criminal hatred moved from being a peripheral assertion to a self-evident statement by building itself up through an increasingly powerful network of legislative allies. To investigate this transformation, this thesis employs an analysis based upon actor-network theory. Actor-network theory is an approach that helps one understand how concepts come to be embraced through the mobilisation of allies. In essence, by following actors, it helps one comprehend the process of translation whereby certain assemblages ‘sum up’ heterogeneous coalitions of humans and non-humans to construct seemingly stable, rational, natural, and objective concepts. Actor-network theory helps one understand the movement and networks that need to be in place for the ‘new’ object of hate propaganda to emerge. This network managed to forge a connection that linked the idea of ‘hate’ to criminality. However, it appears this conceptualisation of criminal hatred is somewhat different from the object predominantly spoken of today in terms of hate crime. The threat imagined during the conceptualisation of hate propaganda was that hate material was not just offensive, it was capable of mounting an offensive. Hate crime, on the other hand, has a victim-centred focus of criminal hatred that concerns itself with criminal acts performed not based upon who the victim is but what the victim is. Yet both objects share a focus on criminal hatred as a form of criminal activity spurred on by bias. Both are advocated for by special interest organisations that represent minority groups. Both attempt to extend, strengthen and make durable the network against discrimination. However, what is meant now when we speak of criminal hate, is not what was always meant.

This thesis constructs a narrative that challenges our current understanding on hate crime, at least within a Canadian context. It questions the contention made by many authors that the idea of hate crime first appeared in the early 1980s. While this may be true with respect to terminology, the idea of criminal hatred – in terms of crimes based on bias – can be seen to date back to the 1960s and the debate on hate propaganda. Through repeated discussion of hate propaganda as a distinct concept in the House of Commons, and by claiming ownership of a number of diverse events in its name, the idea of criminal hatred gained an increasingly irreversible existence as something matter-of-fact. In 1970, legislation was enacted against hate propaganda. Criminal hatred moved from being a peripheral assertion to a self-evident statement by building itself up through an increasingly powerful network of legislative allies. To investigate this transformation, this thesis employs an analysis based upon actor-network theory. Actor-network theory is an approach that helps one understand how concepts come to be embraced through the mobilisation of allies. In essence, by following actors, it helps one comprehend the process of translation whereby certain assemblages ‘sum up’ heterogeneous coalitions of humans and non-humans to construct seemingly stable, rational, natural, and objective concepts. Actor-network theory helps one understand the movement and networks that need to be in place for the ‘new’ object of hate propaganda to emerge. This network managed to forge a connection that linked the idea of ‘hate’ to criminality. However, it appears this conceptualisation of criminal hatred is somewhat different from the object predominantly spoken of today in terms of hate crime. The threat imagined during the conceptualisation of hate propaganda was that hate material was not just offensive, it was capable of mounting an offensive. Hate crime, on the other hand, has a victim-centred focus of criminal hatred that concerns itself with criminal acts performed not based upon who the victim is but what the victim is. Yet both objects share a focus on criminal hatred as a form of criminal activity spurred on by bias. Both are advocated for by special interest organisations that represent minority groups. Both attempt to extend, strengthen and make durable the network against discrimination. However, what is meant now when we speak of criminal hate, is not what was always meant.