News Audiences and the Challenges of Digital Citizenship

This chapter contends that contemporary concerns around democracy’s centrality in academic studies of journalism stem from a spatiotemporal unease with its ties to an evidently outdated communication perspective of the mass press and a related, at times prescriptive, liberal recognition of the spaces where people engage with information around public affairs. It stems from intellectual misgivings about elevating an institutionalist role of journalism in public life at the expense of a cultural one. And it stems from the frequency with which etic concepts are deployed to investigate what journalism means to citizens, to only then be conflated with the emic motivations for most people. In short, this chapter asserts that confusion around journalism’s role in contemporary societies results from using ahistorical, often idealized, abstracted views of citizenship as an end for journalism – and end which citizens as individuals and publics as collectives can never attain – rather than as one of many means for performing it. It may be more helpful to view journalism in terms of the processes it sets in motion, maintains, complements, and/or resists for potentially prefiguring citizenship and what has been called the ‘conduct of conduct’, namely the governance of society at multiple, interdependent levels through a myriad of intertwining practices. Accordingly, this chapter poses two sets of interrelated questions: What do we know about contemporary news audiences, how has research tried to capture their practices, and what does this reveal about their relationships with journalism? How might we reimagine journalism’s relationship with democracy using a framework anchored in the contexts of digital citizenship – rather than the liberal ideals of good citizenship – to understand citizens’ lived experiences with news?