Introduction: The Places and Spaces of News Audiences

This special issue on the places and spaces of news audiences presents an initial attempt to do this; to see how the everyday digital geographies of contemporary media, communication, and information flows intersect with the everywhere “lived” geographies of individuals, and how this impacts audience perceptions of news, of storytelling, of journalism. The past few decades have seen a tremendous increase in the number of different devices and platforms through which we can get journalism—from tablets to smartphones, Twitter, online news, and so forth—and the different possible places and moments of news consumption have multiplied in concert. Although it is not certain just how robust traditional practices such as reading newspapers or watching the evening news will be in the future, to whatever extent they may have been stable in the past, what does seem clear is that old audience habits are certainly becoming de-ritualized and it is unclear what will replace them. As consumptive possibilities gradually spread to any conceivable instant and every potential location we desire, it seems fairly self-evident that conceptualizing the news media diet of audiences as something clearly distinguishable from other mediated forms of communication is problematic. Similarly, as the temporal and spatial architectures of media use are increasingly unshackled from the distributional constraints of unidirectional, programmatic mass media, audiences are slowing catching up to the possibilities. This changing ecology of digital media may appear quite disruptive, its scale and impact being perceived most strongly early on in its introduction (until such emerging practices and ways of living with media become habitual and taken-for-granted). Coming to grips with the impact this has on journalism requires a scholarship attuned to these different spatio-temporal affordances