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The Chicago School's use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. This article considers how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical approach to the study of human forms of organization and traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communication. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects, and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy, and citizenship. This article suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities.

"This chapter discusses the journalistic practices shaping the reporting of politics. It understands political journalism as a subspace within the journalistic field that interacts intensively with the political field, because this theoretical approach highlights the power relations and world views produced by the insider culture of journalists and political actors. Moreover, the chapter suggests that this insider culture affords political journalists privileged access to information, but may also hamper their autonomy and the transparency of their actions. Further, the chapter argues that the routines and constraints of news production only strengthen this reliance on authoritative sources. Technological change and commercial pressures, however, may represent a challenge to this relationship and the practices which govern it. The chapter closes with a call for studies on political journalism in non-Western contexts, on non-elite, local media and for more comparative research efforts in order to broaden the rather partial and limited picture of political journalism we have so far." (publisher's description)

This article examines widely circulating discourses on tabloid newspapers, analyzing what they tell us about dominant models of citizenship and their problems. Drawing on data from a Mass Observation Archive survey of ordinary people's views of media and democracy, the article demonstrates
that there are only a limited number of ways to talk about popular journalism. What I here call tabloid talk is informed by a liberal democratic model of citizenship and denounces the sensationalist content of the popular press that is seen to undermine serious and rational public debate.
Tabloid talk is used by respondents as a strategy to distance themselves from the newspapers, showing them off as good citizens. It also empowers them to critique the content of the newspapers. However, tabloid talk fails to explain audiences engagement with the popular press and therefore
does not account for effective responses to media content.

To show how U.S. society thinks about public discourse, this study examines how editors in the San Francisco Bay area speak about the letters to the editor section. The research finds that editors successfully balance two visions of the section. On the one hand, editors celebrate its democratic potential. On the other hand, the letters section is also seen as a "customer service" feature that boosts the newspaper's financial success. The coexistence of the two models gives rise to a "normative-economic justification" for public discourse, which captures the idea that what is good for democracy is also, inevitably, good for business.

This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News' live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News' live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1) produce a fragmentary narrative that (2) reflects particular moments in time, (3) curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce 'networked balance', (4) gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and (5) generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism's position within networked information spaces.

This article, based on an interview study of public engagement with the new Welsh Assembly building — the Senedd — theorizes the limits and opportunities of `political tourism', or visits to sites of political importance. To understand visitors' engagement with the assembly building, we explore how they account for their reasons to visit, and their perceptions and expectations of the new building and institution. We identify two principal types of vocabulary displayed by members of the public in making sense of the building, those of political engagement and tourist consumption. Both are informed by what we refer to as practices of the `democratic gaze'. Both vocabularies reveal, to varying degrees, the social mechanics of the gaze, and the inscription and interpretation of agency around the building's design. We conclude by exploring how this study can inform discussions of political engagement and tourism practices.