The news that young people consume is increasingly subject to algorithmic curation. Yet, while numerous studies explore how algorithms exert power in citizens’ everyday life, little is known about how young people themselves perceive, learn about, and deal with news personalization. Considering the interactions between algorithms and users from an user-centric perspective, this article explores how young people make sense of, feel about, and engage with algorithmic news curation on social media and when such everyday experiences contribute to their algorithmic literacy. Employing in-depth interviews in combination with the walk-through method and think-aloud protocols with a diverse group of 22 young people aged 16–26 years, it addresses three current methodological challenges to studying algorithmic literacy: first, the lack of an established baseline about how algorithms operate; second, the opacity of algorithms within everyday media use; and third, limitations in technological vocabularies that hinder young people in articulating their algorithmic encounters. It finds that users’ sense-making strategies of algorithms are context-specific, triggered by expectancy violations and explicit personalization cues. However, young people’s intuitive and experience-based insights into news personalization do not automatically enable young people to verbalize these, nor does having knowledge about algorithms necessarily stimulate users to intervene in algorithmic decisions.

News has traditionally served as a common ground, enabling people to connect to others and engage with the public issues they encounter in everyday life. This article revisits these theoretical debates about mediated public connection within the context of a digitalized news media landscape. While academic discussions surrounding these shifts are often explored in terms of normative ideals ascribed to political systems or civic cultures, we propose to reposition the debate by departing from the practices and preferences of the news user instead. Therefore, we deconstruct and translate the concept of public connection into four dimensions that emphasize people’s lived experiences: inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness. Situating these in an everyday life framework, this article advances a user-based perspective that considers the role of news for people in digital societies. Accordingly, it offers a conceptual framework that aims to encapsulate how news becomes meaningful, rather than why it should be.

The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres, and practices in everyday life by mapping patterns of cross-media news use. Combining Q methodology with think-aloud protocols and day-in-the-life-interviews, five distinct news media repertoires are identified: (1) regionally oriented, (2) background oriented, (3) digital, (4) laid-back, and (5) nationally oriented news use. Our findings indicate that users do not always use what they prefer, nor do they prefer what they use. Moreover, the boundaries they draw between news and other information are clearly shifting. Finally, our results show that in a world with a wide range of possibilities to consume news for free, paying for news can be considered an act of civic engagement. We argue that perceived news use and users' appreciation of news should be studied in relation to each other to gain a fuller understanding of what news consumption entails in this rapidly changing media landscape.KEYWORDS audience studies; cross-media; digitalization; everyday life; media repertoires; news use; Q methodology; value IntroductionThe current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of information. Not only has digitalization resulted in a proliferation of available news sources, people now have more power to navigate the news content they want to use, when, where, and how. Therefore, news users increasingly choose their own trajectories across the media landscape and follow the news on multiple media platforms (Picone, Courtois, and Paulussen 2014). Previous studies have tried to map these changes in several ways. One possible avenue measures actual news use, employing quantitative measures such as Web metrics analyses to track news users' clicking behavior (e.g. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013) and surveys to map self-declared usage rates (e.g. Mitchell, Holcomb, and Page 2013;Newman, Levy, and Nielsen 2015;Yuan 2011). Such studies address questions about which news outlets are most frequently used or on what stories users spend the most time. A second strand of research considers shifting user preferences, typically employing qualitative methods including interviews and focus groups to uncover the importance of news in users' everyday lives (e.g. Van Cauwenberge, d'Haenens, and Beentjes 2013;Zerba 2011 Both lines of research then try to establish claims about what current news consumption looks like. However, by focusing on either patterns of perceived news media use or the perceived importance of platforms and outlets, one might not be able to grasp the complexity of news use. For instance, Chyi and Lee (2013) found that online newspaper users might actually prefer the print...

Young people’s increasing dependence on social media for news demands increasing levels of news literacy, leading to a rise in media literacy programs that aim to support youth’s abilities to critically and mindfully navigate news. However, being news literate does not necessarily mean such knowledge and skills are applied in practice. This article starts from young people’s own news practices and experiences on social media to explore when news literacy becomes meaningful in the practice of everyday life. Based on in-depth interviews with 36 young people aged 16–22, it explores what strategies and tactics they employ to access, evaluate, or engage with news. It argues that such practices can be considered as expressions of news literacy, through which young people negotiate platform structures and norms taught in media education. Moreover, it reconceptualizes news literacy as a form of situated knowledge, emphasizing how platform and social contexts shape users’ attitudes, motivations, and perceptions of agency.

Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These "dark social media" are important spaces for "public connection," a means for bridging people's private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks that rely on dark social media for communication. Arguing that the use of these platforms is foremost a social practice, the study employs focus groups with local, work, and leisure-related communities to investigate questions of inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness associated with sharing and discussing news. We find the perceived value of news on dark social media hinges on the control and privacy it provides. Community type was less significant than communicative aims of the group for shaping the uptake of news and journalism.