Chris Peters

Roskilde University · Department of Communication & Arts

If we want to understand much of what makes news use meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only what they consume, how and when, but also where. Simply put, the places and spaces of news consumption matter, and matter significantly, for how people choose, interpret, and attend to the news. This chapter outlines the importance of...

In relation to journalism, the concept of ‘emotion’ is consistently undertheorized. Employed with commonsensical discernment, it is conflated with tabloid practices, sensationalism, bias, commercialization, and the like. Consequently, when discussed, emotion is often treated dismissively; a marker of unprincipled and flawed journalism. Yet hard, se...

Research into people’s digital news use centres on the here and now, which means sustained attention to the processes influencing changing consumption patterns is often perfunctory. Accordingly, this article advances journalism studies scholarship by developing a comprehensive analytical framework to investigate such processes, focusing on the emer...

User-based research into the lived experiences associated with smartphone camera practices – in particular, the taking, storing, curating and sharing of personal imagery in the digital media sphere – remains scarce, especially in contrast to its increasing ubiquity. Accordingly, this article’s detailed analysis of open-ended questionnaires from ‘mi...

The past few decades of journalism studies have been characterized by a focus on change, from the transforming digital media ecology, to shifting usage patterns, transitioning business models, and other pressing developments. However, specifying such changes in relation to news audiences and engagement is challenging. This article aims to unfold th...

This article develops the concept of “mimetic weaponization” for theory-building. Memes recurrently serve as identificatory markers of affiliation across social media platforms, with ensuing controversies potentially proving newsworthy. Our elaboration of weaponization refers to the purposeful deployment of memetic imagery to disrupt, undermine, at...

Despite an “audience turn” in journalism studies, confusion persists about the experiences driving audience engagement. Young adults are especially intriguing in this regard, as they have grown up in digital environments, are less willing to pay for journalism, and lack key historical catalysts for the formation of news habits. Accordingly, this ar...

Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy...

This article’s contribution to theory-building focuses on the everyday circumstances under which journalism encourages a civic gaze. Specifically, it elaborates our heuristic conception of the “visual citizen” to explore journalism’s mediation of a politics of seeing, paying particular attention to how and why renderings of in/visibility signify va...

For millennia, the idea that rituals create a shared and conventional world of human sociality has been commonplace. From common rites of passage that exist around the world in various forms (weddings, funerals, coming-of-age ceremonies) to patterned actions that seem familiar only to members of the in-group (secret initiations, organizational rout...

Journalism studies as an academic field is characterized by multidisciplinarity. Focusing on one object of study, journalism and the news, it established itself by integrating and synthesizing approaches from established disciplines – a tendency that lives on today. This constant gaze to the outside for conceptual inspiration and methodological too...

Social media platforms are an increasingly dominant medium through which people encounter news in everyday life. Yet while we know more-and-more about frequency of use and sharing, content preferences and network configurations around news use on social media, the social experiences associated with such practices remain relatively unexplored. This...

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 peo...

This contribution explores how digitalization facilitates new patterns of using news to connect to larger social, cultural, civic, and political frameworks. Employing in-depth interviews and Q methodology with Dutch news users of mixed age, gender, and educational level in three regions, it finds that news still provides a major frame of reference...

This article investigates selected newspapers’ editorial mediations over contrasting perceptions regarding the significance of a controversial set of ‘iconic’ news photographs, namely images of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee, whose drowned corpse washed ashore in September, 2015. Specifically, this study examined individual editorial i...

This chapter analyses audience responses to HBO’s The Newsroom to argue that its sociocultural value as entertainment programming lies not in its content as popular communication per se, but in the audience response to the show. I assert The Newsroom helps cultivate valuable discussion on journalism and, moreover, prompts political talk on many con...

Given the interdisciplinary nature of digital journalism studies and the increasingly blurred boundaries of journalism, there is a need within the field of journalism studies to widen the scope of theoretical perspectives and approaches. Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age discusses new avenues in theorising journalism, and reassesses establish...

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 o...

The changing patterns of news consumption in a digital era bring about new configurations between audiences, information, the devices upon which they consume it and the different (mobile) places and (shiftable) times where and when this is possible. This chapter highlights the need to consider these interrelated changes in the media ecology if we w...

Imagine for a moment – a thought experiment if you will – that journalism as we have come to know it would disappear overnight. What would happen in terms of the informational flows in society? What would we miss and what would be the risk, if any? Instinctively, the answers likely proffered to such a hypothetical scenario are predictable: people w...

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...

In striving to better understand issues associated with citizen contributions to newsmaking in crisis situations, this article identifies and elaborates four specific research problematics – bearing witness, technologies of truth-telling, mediating visualities and affectivities of othering – in order to recast more familiar modes of enquiry. Specif...

While HBO’s The Newsroom presents itself as fictional television, its narrative is driven by critiquing American cable news culture and contemporary journalism ethics. This article analyses popular reflections on the programme to identify what these discourses reveal about public evaluations of the state of the US news media. Based upon 1115 length...

This article contributes to debates regarding professional-amateur interfaces in photojournalism by reporting on findings from a qualitative study with members of a demographic cohort often described as “millennial” users (that is, people born between 1980 and 1999). A textual analysis of their responses identified five thematics for analysis: (1)...

Having the means to access “news” at any moment without much hassle likely changes the experience of journalism for many people. Beyond this, one might even say that the way we interact with information on a daily basis transforms through this phenomenon. Considering such changes in what is often referred to as “everyday life” provides a useful sta...

Joseph Turow’s The Daily You takes us behind the scenes of the advertising industry to get a better sense of not just how its capitalistic rationale is put into practice but its potential impact on individuals in a consumer society. While readers are probably most familiar with his Breaking Up America (Turow, 1997), this book is a more natural deve...

This article critically examines the invocation of democracy in the discourse of audience participation in digital journalism. Rather than simply restate the familiar grand narratives that traditionally described journalism's function for democracy (information source, watchdog, public representative, mediation for political actors), we compare and...

Storytelling is at the centre of journalism practice. It is the key for communicating with the audience and it exerts a heavy influence over how news is perceived in the public sphere. In the digital era the way in which journalists tell stories is undergoing a dramatic shift. New media offer new possibilities, while they at the same time stimulate...

When journalists are considered in popular culture, the names that most often spring to mind are from broadcast, especially over the past few decades. From early stalwarts of the medium, like Edward R. Murrow, to reporters such as Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer, whose exclusive interviews are among some of the most watched pieces of journalism, it...

There is no doubt, journalism faces challenging times. Since the turn of the millennium, the financial health of the news industry is failing, mainstream audiences are on the decline, and professional authority, credibility and autonomy are eroding. The outlook is bleak and it’s understandable that many are pessimistic. But this book argues that we...

This chapter engages with three pertinent and interrelated changes impacting journalism in concert: the shifting experiences of public trust in the media; increasing audience involvement in journalism; and a growing public understanding of media techniques. I propose we try to understand the shifting nature of the news landscape not by taking journ...

This paper contends that to understand how audiences engage with journalism in the contemporary age, we must conceive of news consumption not just as something we do, but as something we do in a particular place. It considers the experience(s) of consuming journalism, and reflects upon the influence “space” has in this equation. I ask how news cons...

Over the past decade a new breed of television journalism, what I term the cable news magazine, has risen to become the highest-rated programming on the cable news networks. Despite their popular appeal, and arguable status as the definitive genre of cable news, such broadcasts receive scant academic attention. This paper analyses the most prominen...

This dissertation explores the 'blurring' of news styles and emergence of new forms within American television journalism over the past 25 years. It considers how the roles of emotion and 'objectivity' have been reconfigured in a climate of unprecedented technological and commercial shifts. It is unique as it investigates two innovative forms of br...

This thesis constructs a narrative that challenges our current understanding on hate crime, at least within a Canadian context. It questions the contention made by many authors that the idea of hate crime first appeared in the early 1980s. While this may be true with respect to terminology, the idea of criminal hatred – in terms of crimes based on...