With social media at the forefront of today's media context, citizens may perceive they don't need to actively seek news because they will be exposed to news and remain well-informed through their peers and social networks. We label this the "news-finds-me perception," and test its implications for news seeking and political knowledge: "news-finds-me effects." U.S. panelsurvey data show that individuals who perceive news will find them are less likely to use traditional news sources and are less knowledgeable about politics over time. Although the newsfinds-me perception is positively associated with news exposure on social media, this behavior doesn't facilitate political learning. These results suggest news continues to enhance political knowledge best when actively sought.

Deliberation is considered to produce positive effects on public opinion, in that it exposes participants to alternative perspectives and rational arguments. However, whereas benefits of face-to-face deliberation have been supported by many empirical studies, the effects of online deliberation remain unclear to date. This research compares the effects of online and face-to-face deliberation in experimental settings. A theoretical review of computer-mediated communication and deliberative democracy suggests that online deliberation is not necessarily inferior to face-to-face deliberation. An experiment was conducted to compare the relative outcomes of a deliberation performed in face-to-face and computer-mediated settings. The results suggest that both online and face-to-face deliberation can increase participants' issue knowledge, political efficacy, and willingness to participate in politics.

This article tests the cross-cultural generality of one tenet of spiral of silence theory using an individual difference approach. We argue that the spiral of silence phenomenon is, in part, a manifestation of individual differences in stable personality traits that can be measured universally regardless of country or context—specifically, fear of social isolation (FSI) and willingness to self-censor. In accordance with the theory’s predictions, we examine whether people relatively high in trait FSI are more likely to self-censor their opinions in hostile opinion environments than low FSI individuals. We tested this hypothesis using data from an international online sample of over 2,200 participants spread across four continents and nine countries. Results of partially measurement-invariant multigroup confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the prediction in all countries except for China.

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This article reviews the public and citizen journalism movements of recent years and offers some perspectives on how the current and future journalism can function to benefit democratic public life. A major argument of this article is that 'conversation' defines news as a process of negotiated social meaning and that it should be the organizing principle of today's journalism. It is also argued that traditional journalistic principles such as objectivity and distance may no longer be useful to today's citizen journalism and that we see a rise of new journalistic principles such as interactivity and transparency. Finally, borrowing from deliberative democracy literature, a bottom-up flow model to connect citizen and public journalism is discussed.