Chris Peters

Emotion aside or emotional side? Crafting an ‘experience of involvement’ in the news

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. For 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.

Journalism To Go: The changing spaces of news consumption

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 Barnhursts “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.

From Grand Narratives of Democracy to Small Expectations of Participation

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 journalisms 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 journalisms roles for democracy are appropriated or discarded in favour of a participation paradigm to conceptualise digital journalism.

The daily you

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 (Turow, 1997), this 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.

Introduction: The places and spaces of news audiences

This special issue on the places and spaces of news audiences presents an initial attempt to do this; to see how the everyday digital geographies of contemporary media, communication, and information flows intersect with the everywhere “lived” geographies of individuals, and how this impacts audience perceptions of news, of storytelling, of journalism. The past few decades have seen a tremendous increase in the number of different devices and platforms through which we can get journalism—from tablets to smartphones, Twitter, online news, and so forth—and the different possible places and moments of news consumption have multiplied in concert. Although it is not certain just how robust traditional practices such as reading newspapers or watching the evening news will be in the future, to whatever extent they may have been stable in the past, what does seem clear is that old audience habits are certainly becoming de-ritualized and it is unclear what will replace them. As consumptive possibilities gradually spread to any conceivable instant and every potential location we desire, it seems fairly self-evident that conceptualizing the news media diet of audiences as something clearly distinguishable from other mediated forms of communication is problematic. Similarly, as the temporal and spatial architectures of media use are increasingly unshackled from the distributional constraints of unidirectional, programmatic mass media, audiences are slowing catching up to the possibilities. This changing ecology of digital media may appear quite disruptive, its scale and impact being perceived most strongly early on in its introduction (until such emerging practices and ways of living with media become habitual and taken-for-granted). Coming to grips with the impact this has on journalism requires a scholarship attuned to these different spatio-temporal affordances.

Visual truths of citizen reportage: Four research problematics

In striving to better understand issues associated with citizen contributions to newsmaking in crisis situations, this article identifies and elaborates four specific research problematics – bearing witness, technologies of truth-telling, mediating visualities and affectivities of othering – in order to recast more familiar modes of enquiry. Specifically, it provides an alternative heuristic to theorize the journalistic mediation of citizen imagery, and the myriad ways this process of negotiation maintains, repairs and at times disrupts the interstices of professional–amateur boundaries. Rather than centring analysis on how crisis events highlight change, it discerns the basis for a critical tracing of the material configurations and contingencies shaping journalistic imperatives towards generating visually truthful reportage. In seeking to move debates about how best to enliven digital journalisms future beyond the polarities of new media advocacy and criticism alike, we emphasize the importance of developing a collaborative, co-operative ethos of connectivity between journalists as citizens and citizens as journalists. Accordingly, each proposed problematic is examined in a manner alert to pinpointing its prospective value for theory-building, and in so doing elucidating its potential utility for scholarship in the years ahead.

Repositioning news and public connection in everyday life : a user-oriented perspective on inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness

News has traditionally served as a common ground, enabling people to connect to others and engage with the public issues they encounter in everyday life. This article revisits these theoretical debates about mediated public connection within the context of a digitalized news media landscape. While academic discussions surrounding these shifts are often explored in terms of normative ideals ascribed to political systems or civic cultures, we propose to reposition the debate by departing from the practices and preferences of the news user instead. Therefore, we deconstruct and translate the concept of public connection into four dimensions that emphasize people’s lived experiences: inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness. Situating these in an everyday life framework, this article advances a user-based perspective that considers the role of news for people in digital societies. Accordingly, it offers a conceptual framework that aims to encapsulate how news becomes meaningful, rather than why it should be.

The “Public Eye” Or “Disaster Tourists” : Investigating public perceptions of citizen smartphone imagery

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.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.

Navigating Cross-Media News Use: Media repertoires and the value of news in everyday life

The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres, and practices in everyday life by mapping patterns of cross-media news use. Combining Q methodology with think-aloud protocols and day-in-the-life-interviews, five distinct news media repertoires are identified: (1) regionally oriented, (2) background oriented, (3) digital, (4) laid-back, and (5) nationally oriented news use. Our findings indicate that users do not always use what they prefer, nor do they prefer what they use. Moreover, the boundaries they draw between news and other information are clearly shifting. Finally, our results show that in a world with a wide range of possibilities to consume news for free, paying for news can be considered an act of civic engagement. We argue that perceived news use and users’ appreciation of news should be studied in relation to each other to gain a fuller understanding of what news consumption entails in this rapidly changing media landscape.

Evaluating journalism through popular culture: : HBO’s The Newsroom and public reflections on the state of the news media

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.