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The intermediate time of news consumption
journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-12, 09:53 authored by Emily KeightleyEmily Keightley, John DowneyJohn DowneyMany 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.
Funding
This article is based on data from the project Media of Remembering 2010-2013 funded by the Leverhulme Trust, grant number F00261AC.
History
Published in
JournalismVolume
19Issue
1Pages
93 - 110Citation
KEIGHTLEY, E. and DOWNEY, J., 2018. The intermediate time of news consumption. Journalism, 19(1), pp.93-110.Publisher
SAGE © The Author(s)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2017-01-30Notes
This article was published in the journal, Journalism [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916689155ISSN
1464-8849eISSN
1741-3001Publisher version
Language
- en