The intermediate time of news consumption

Abstract

Many accounts of contemporary mediated communication of various kinds emphasise speed, immediacy and simultaneity as overriding temporal characteristics, and accounts of journalism are no exception. Acceleration in journalistic practice and the associated changes in news content and its communication have a variety of consequences. In the most extreme accounts, this produces ever-shallower news content while the immediacy of its delivery collapses deliberative time for its interpretation. This article attempts to challenge some of the assumptions on which these assertions are based by taking an alternative starting point in analysing news time and temporality: the news audience. We argue that many accounts which emphasise the paralysing effects of fast communication and the acceleration of news in particular fail to acknowledge the complexities of news consumption, instead pessimistically reading off the effects of speed from communications technologies themselves. We go on to consider the value of social scientific audience research characterisation of practices of consuming the news in contemporary culture and suggest that these need to be accompanied by ethnographic approaches to the audience which engage with the ways in which meaning is produced from the resources that journalism provides in everyday lived contexts.

Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency

“…Examining how users access the news on mobile phones, Dimmick et al (2011) used the term “interstices” to label the tiny periods between our daily activities where we often glance at our mobile devices for micro-information or micro-entertainment. Keightley and Downey (2018) wrote about “the intermediate audience,” relying on cultural approaches to “provide empirical tools for understanding how the temporalities of news consumption are imaginatively, socially and culturally produced in everyday encounters with the news” (p. 7). Closely linked to already existing content, SAOE should be (re)searched in those in-between times and spaces.”…”

A User Perspective on Time Spent: Temporal Experiences of Everyday News Use

“…Subsequently, these characteristics are used either for inferring about news use or as input for research into news use. In the first variant, people's experience or engagement with news is read off news production logics; Keightley and Downey (2018) summarize that it is often assumed that "speedily produced news content and fast, flexible technologies of delivery will necessarily produce temporal experiences which are characterised predominantly by speed and, in many cases, that this will routinely produce superficial engagement with the news, or alienation from it altogether" (105). Spending less time with news is thus equated with staying on the surface and being less interested (or even disinterested) in news.…”

“…Peters and Schrøder (2018) argue that research has tended to focus on the "here and now" and make the case for a process-based approach to studying news repertories that focuses on "the emergence, maintenance, and (re)formation of audiences' news repertories in everyday life and across the lifespan" (1079). Keightley and Downey (2018) instead have explored how people themselves experience and navigate the temporal logics surrounding their news use. This aligns with Zelizer's (2018) critique of how time is typically seen as a "blank slate", taking "shape more in response to complex settings than as a result of other kinds of interactions" (113).…”

“…Using Keightley's (2013) notion of "zones of intermediacy", they focus on "the experiential arenas in which temporal meaning is produced at the juncture of times-embodied, social, cultural historical and technological" (Keightley and Downey 2018, 100). This concept draws attention to (1) how temporal experiences are produced where several temporalities meet (e.g., clock time, work time), (2) how the temporalities of news texts and technologies impact and set the parameters for users' experiences, (3) but also how users have agency in navigating and negotiating these times (Keightley and Downey 2018). For instance, the practice of "checking" involves more than a superficial glance at the latest headline: it takes place in a distinct (spatio)temporal context, such as checking one's phone in the morning to postpone having to get up and get ready for work, or filling up the time between two appointments; it is shaped by how the news is presented to the user (e.g., ordered chronologically and/or ranked by importance) and how the device or platforms is to be operated; and-as this article will show-it is shaped by people's tactics for using the news.…”

“…What follows is that "problems" and "solutions" regarding news use also tend to be framed in ways beneficial to this industry (cf. Keightley and Downey 2018). For example, in the "attention economy" (Davenport and Beck 2001) which sees news media competing for the finite resource that is the audience's attention, measuring news use in terms of time spent quickly leads to the question of how the time people spend on news can be increased.…”