Suchergebnisse

Victims of the Press? -- What's In It for Them? Weighing the Pros and Cons of Becoming a News Subject -- The Interview Stage Part I: Encountering Journalists -- The Interview Stage Part II: From Interaction to Story -- Truth (Perceptions) and Consequences: How News Subjects Judge Accuracy and Error -- That's Me!...But It's Not Me: Aesthetic, Emotional, and Existential Effects of Confronting Our News Selves -- Celebration, Condemnation, Reputation: Audience Feedback as an Indicator of Status and Stigma -- Making the News in a Digital World -- Lessons for Subjects and Journalists

Review of: Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public, Jacob L. Nelson (2021)
New York: Oxford University Press, 234 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-19754-260-6, p/bk, $27.95

Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news ("firsthand news") and discussions of news ("secondhand news"), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.

Why do some people maintain a news habit while others avoid news altogether? To explore that question, we put findings from an interview-based study of news avoiders in the UK and Spain into dialogue with past research on factors found to shape news consumption. We found that news avoiders saw news as having limited informational benefits and high costs in terms of time, emotional energy, and mental effort. They also did not see consuming news as a civic duty to be pursued despite the costs, nor did they have strong ties to communities that highly valued news consumption. This meant they had few social incentives to return to news habitually and that connections between distant-seeming topics in the news and immediate concerns were rarely reinforced. We conclude that group-level social factors play an understudied but important role in shaping news avoidance.

A small but growing number of people in many countries consistently avoid the news. They feel they do not have time for it, believe it is not worth the effort, find it irrelevant or emotionally draining, or do not trust the media, among other reasons. Why and how do people circumvent news? Which groups are more and less reluctant to follow the news? In what ways is news avoidance a problem-for individuals, for the news industry, for society-and how can it be addressed?This groundbreaking book explains why and how so many people consume little or no news despite unprecedented abundance and ease of access. Drawing on interviews in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as extensive survey data, Avoiding the News examines how people who tune out traditional media get information and explores their "folk theories" about how news organizations work. The authors argue that news avoidance is about not only content but also identity, ideologies, and infrastructures: who people are, what they believe, and how news does or does not fit into their everyday lives. Because news avoidance is most common among disadvantaged groups, it threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities by tilting mainstream journalism even further toward privileged audiences. Ultimately, this book shows, persuading news-averse audiences of the value of journalism is not simply a matter of adjusting coverage but requires a deeper, more empathetic understanding of people's relationships with news across social, political, and technological boundaries

"A small but growing number of individuals in the West identify themselves as news avoiders and are turning away from traditional news organizations. For news avoiders, news as reported by the mainstream press is not worth their time or emotional energy, not relevant to their lives, too partisan, or not to be trusted. Even in the last few years as news has seemed particularly pressing, people are increasingly avoiding it as revealed in a recent surveys. In Avoiding News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, Rasmus Nielsen, Ruth Palmer, and Benjamin Toff examine the reasons behind news avoidance, its impact, and what, if anything, can be done about it. Their work is based on interviews and surveys with more than 160 news avoiders in Spain, the UK, and the United States. The authors examine how news avoiders get information - social media, friends and family, alternative news sources - and how they develop "folk theories" about how news organizations work. They also consider the ways in which race, class, and gender shape people's ideas about news and how news avoidance affects already disadvantaged communities. The authors conclude that news avoidance is a problem for civil society and has contributed to the recent rise of reactionary populism in the West. To confront the problem of news avoidance a variety of efforts are needed that not only change the content of the news but seek to understand and address individuals' habits and views about news organizations"--