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This article contributes to the scholarly discussions about the self-responsibilization, defined as a configuration of understandings and action strategies oriented to compensate the (perceived) dysfunctionality of the media system, of audience members in East European societies. The authors argue that audience members' sceptical and self-reliant stance towards political news, which were planted in Soviet times, continue today in the context of mediated geopolitical conflicts. Based on a mixed methods study of Baltic Russian-speaking audiences' behaviour in the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, the authors explore audience members' media repertoires aimed to "fish out" reliable information from the political news by searching for unspoken clues or identifying ideologically biased messages. The authors introduce six political news repertoires based on the varied degrees of plurality of information channels and conditional trust. Then, they characterize audience groups exercising these repertoires and explain how audience members rationalize the chosen repertoires as a part of their agency in the context of geopolitical turbulence. They suggest that media audiences' self-responsibilization is a worthwhile object for further study and call for a shift in East European media research away from a structuralist approach and towards an agency-centred one.

The paper presents an overview over research that considers invisible audiences. Fundamentally we understand media audiences as 'people who receive, co-create, interpret, understand and appropriate media messages' (Reifová and Pavlíčková, 2013:130). Within this realm, we identify and define invisible audiences in a twofold way. Firstly we consider research on audience groups that have been marginalized by both mainstream media and mainstream audience studies such as post-socialist audiences, working class audiences and very young audiences. Secondly we consider audience groups that are literally invisible including practices of lurking in social media environments as well as unintended audiences. The literature review of research of the past ten years on invisible audiences identifies important gaps for both forms of invisible audiences. In conclusion, we suggest more extensive research on the diverse groups of invisible audiences on a more structural level, i.e. questions of certain social, political as well as cultural groups are rendered invisible. Furthermore we suggest that studies consider practices of invisible audiences on the micro, experiential level from the perspective of members of invisible audiences.

The paper presents an overview over research that considers invisible audiences. Fundamentally we understand media audiences as 'people who receive, co-create, interpret, understand and appropriate media messages' (Reifová and Pavlíčková, 2013:130). Within this realm, we identify and define invisible audiences in a twofold way. Firstly we consider research on audience groups that have been marginalized by both mainstream media and mainstream audience studies such as post-socialist audiences, working class audiences and very young audiences. Secondly we consider audience groups that are literally invisible including practices of lurking in social media environments as well as unintended audiences. The literature review of research of the past ten years on invisible audiences identifies important gaps for both forms of invisible audiences. In conclusion, we suggest more extensive research on the diverse groups of invisible audiences on a more structural level, i.e. questions of certain social, political as well as cultural groups are rendered invisible. Furthermore we suggest that studies consider practices of invisible audiences on the micro, experiential level from the perspective of members of invisible audiences.