The Places and Spaces of News Audiences

Book excerpt: 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: papers were delivered before breakfast, the evening news on TV buttressed the transition from dinner to prime time programming, and radio updates were centred around commuting patterns. These habits were organized not just around specific times but occurred in specific places, following a predictable pattern. However, the past few decades have witnessed tremendous changes in the ways we can consume journalism and engage with information – from tablets, to smartphones, online, and so forth – and the different places and moments of news consumption have multiplied as a result, to the point where news is increasingly mobile and instantaneous. It is personalized, localized and available on-demand. Day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year, technology moves forward, impacting more than just the ways in which we get news. These fundamental shifts change what news ‘is’. This book expands our understanding of contemporary news audiences and explores how the different places and spaces of news consumption change both our experiences of journalism and the roles it plays in our everyday lives. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.