Joëlle Swart

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.

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.

New Rituals for Public Connection: Audiences’ Everyday Experiences of Digital Journalism, Civic Engagement, and Social Life

This contribution explores how digitalization facilitates new patterns of using news to connect to larger social, cultural, civic, and political frameworks. Employing in-depth interviews and Q methodology with Dutch news users of mixed age, gender, and educational level in three regions, it finds that news still provides a major frame of reference to public issues in users’ everyday communications. Rather than a complete “de-ritualization” of news practices, wherein no common trajectories for connecting to public life can be discerned anymore, we argue that digitalization facilitates a “re-ritualization” of public connection in which traditional and new media logics interact. While the news still facilitates community, self-presentation, and security, the forms of public engagement people employ to satisfy these needs are increasingly centered on individuals, inextricably embedded in other activities, and more diverse in terms of content. Finally, we find that while news still remains central to people’s public connection, journalism not necessarily is.

Shedding light on the dark social: The connective role of news and journalism in social media communities

Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These “dark social media” are important spaces for “public connection,” a means for bridging people’s private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks that rely on dark social media for communication. Arguing that the use of these platforms is foremost a social practice, the study employs focus groups with local, work, and leisure-related communities to investigate questions of inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness associated with sharing and discussing news. We find the perceived value of news on dark social media hinges on the control and privacy it provides. Community type was less significant than communicative aims of the group for shaping the uptake of news and journalism.

Sharing and Discussing News in Private Social Media Groups

Social media platforms are an increasingly dominant medium through which people encounter news in everyday life. Yet while we know more-and-more about frequency of use and sharing, content preferences and network configurations around news use on social media, the social experiences associated with such practices remain relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap to consider if and how news facilitates conversations in everyday contexts where social media play a communicative role. It investigates how people engage with current affairs collectively in different social formations and their associated following, sharing and discussion practices. Specifically, it studies the role of news in six focus groups consisting of people who know each other offline and simultaneously communicate regularly through private Facebook or WhatsApp groups, and who interact primarily in relation to their membership in a particular (1) location-based (2) work-related or (3) leisure-oriented community. It finds that communication within social media communities whose members consider their ties as weak generally tended to be more news-centred. Even more significant was perceived control over privacy and presence of clear norms and community boundaries, which alongside the communicative aims of the group proved important considerations when it came to deciding whether to share news within the community.