Beyond the Here and Now of News Audiences: A Process-Based Framework for Investigating News Repertoires

Abstract

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 emergence, maintenance, and (re)formation of audiences' news repertoires in everyday life and across the lifespan. First, we delineate the repertoire concept and its insights for audience research, before crafting a heuristic to illustrate how faster and slower timescales interact to influence these practices. We then synthesize diverse concepts of different theoretical ancestry to develop analytical prisms around socio-spatial context, technology, and the individual, which guide research inquiries alert to the transformational processes of news repertoires. Finally, we introduce an empirical agenda to operationalize our conceptual treatment, elucidating methodological premises around diachronic change, identity-formation, and sense-making that capture why publics develop a relationship with journalism.

Media use in changing everyday life: How biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection

“…The increase in smartphone use reported on by these informants, and by informants quoted previously, can most sufficiently be explained in this manner. While most of the key elements in the two analytical portraits align well with the framework proposed by Peters and Schrøder (2018), some central aspects are difficult to place. This primarily concerns a dimension of personal wellbeing, so intimately connected to the bodily experiences of the individual that it is difficult to frame as a social factor.…”

“…However, considering social and political factors in Table 1. Matrix of the two analytical portraits of informants Ana and Lise, drawing on the initial framework proposed by Peters and Schrøder (2018).…”

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

“…Recently, two articles on news use have engaged critically with the notion of time itself. 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.…”

The Visual Citizen in a Digital News Landscape

“…While the range of visual practices associated with news consumption is apparently expanding, at the same time -paradoxically -the mundane practices of news consumption are becoming less visible (Peters & Schrøder, 2018). The traditional story of everyday political engagement through journalism, for many people, used to rely on accustomed moments of news consumption in regular, set places.…”

“…journalism's ongoing role in facilitating visions of citizenship. People convoke news repertoires from the ensemble of media available at a given point of time across their lifespan, routinely and habitually drawing upon them for reasons of political identity, social integration, and sense-making in everyday life(Peters & Allan, 2018;Peters & Schrøder, …”