Changing Conceptualisations of News in a Hybrid, Multi-Platform Media Environment

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

This debate about what news is is not new: historically there are four key approaches to this question. The first is journalism-centric, and defines news as the professional output of journalistic practice; it builds on shared understandings of news values, and highlights specific functions of journalism in society. A second defines news as a product: as the outcome of the production process of a complex organisation, packaged according to specific logics, marketed at audiences, and standardised in its form and delivery. Third, news may be understood as a form of cultural expression: a symbolic representation of certain events in the world according to particular, culturally inflected symbolic systems, and representing certain shared political and social values in a society. Finally, news may also be seen from an audience-centric perspective as part of the flow of users’ daily lives, where it fulfils one function along other forms of information and entertainment.

Such pre-digital understandings must now be further extended for the present media environment. Here, the conventional production, distribution, and consumption processes for industrially-produced news have been disrupted, and news is no longer the result of a linearly organised production process; that process has been interrupted by social communication processes, especially in online and social media environments. This has led to the emergence of different parallel news cultures in different news cultures, which must be studied empirically.

Such work shows that news users have a variety of ways of understanding (in the case of Agnes’s study, especially local) news: for instance, as personally relevant and interesting information; as content produced by local media brands (as opposed to circulating in local social media spaces); or as a form of community engagement (where, by contrast, local media may be especially crucial). This means that there is no shared understanding of news in this local context, and the understanding of audiences may diverge from that of journalists; this shows the changing roles of journalists and audiences, too. How news is defined, practiced, and experienced differs between them, then, and this also means that our research methods need to anticipate such divergent understandings.