The future of public connection research

Moving Forward After A Successfull Audience Turn in Journalism Studies

"Much of the discussion surrounding the so-called ‘crisis’ or even ‘collapse’ of journalism that accompanied the rise of digital journalism in the early 2000s might have also aptly be characterized as a ‘crisis of audiences’, in terms of not knowing: what news they wanted; were willing to pay for; and journalism’s ongoing public relevance in their everyday lives. In response, scholarship witnessed a resurgence of news audience research attending to this confusion – an ‘audience turn’ that saw researchers trying to uncover how digital news ecologies were changing the ways and reasons people got news, as well as the appropriate conceptual and methodological strategies to uncover this. Given the sheer scope of journalistic change over the past decades, research into news audiences emphasized a number of different trajectories, from shifting digital patterns of consumption, to uses of news on mobile/social media, comparative differences across countries and sociocultural variables influencing use, evaluations of trust, and investigations into what extent journalism still facilitates public connection. Accordingly, it is no longer fair to say – as many still claim – that audiences are ignored in journalism studies. But now that an audience-centred research agenda has taken hold, what are the next steps forward? This talk first outlines why the ‘audience turn’ was a necessary and important corrective in journalism studies. It then looks to the history of media and communication research to see what questions have been lost along the way, and how we might engineer renewed research inquiries to tackle them", Chris Peters.

Engagement among Maybe-Users of News - Narratives and Dimensions of Mediated Public Connection in Denmark 

"Reflecting on their original study ten years on, Couldry, Livingstone and Markham (2018) note how the most dramatic change in the media landscape - the spread of the internet in general and social media platforms in general - has clearly led to a “huge speculation – and a rapidly growing body of research – concerned with the public and political consequences: for news-following and civic engagement, on the part of the public. In the now seminal study of public engagement in the UK news practices were not a specific standalone focus, but integrated in the overall focus on media content consumption and non-media factors of mediated public connection. News, they noted, is located in the interface of the regularity of following the news and the attitudes to the news (Livingstone and Markham, 2008: 56) and in my talk I will take a closer look at this interface, exploring the narratives around mediated public connection. I will ground the talk empirically in a larger project carried out in Denmark from 2015-17, which explored everyday news engagement among a group of Danish ‘maybe users of news’, particularly focussing on how they themselves articulate and relate to such ideals of mediated public connection. The data consists of in-depth interviews with – and media diaries written by - 38 participants with different age and educational background. I operationalise Kaun’s (2012) analytical framework of civic experiences as orientation (public connection) and in my talk I argue for several interconnected dimensions of news engagement, namely news engagement as a moral obligation (to be informed), news engagement as a social obligation (to participate, take a stand, discuss) and lastly as an ideal to understand (to critically evaluate), and I explore how these dimensions are present in varying degree among participants with different educational and social background", Jannie Møller Hartley.