The Relevance of Digital News: Themes, Scales and Temporalities

Abstract

In news research, news relevance was for long synonymous with how journalists constructed it. But recently, scholars have questioned the assumption that journalists’ preferences correspond with their audiences’. Several studies have approached news relevance from the audience point of view, showing audiences’ news relevance is constructed as an everyday practice, through assessments of topics and brands, and at the backdrop of users’ earlier experiences. News relevance from the audience perspective however still remains undertheorized and builds on traditional understandings of news journalism. This article aims to contribute to this debate with (1) a matrix of four types of news relevance, constructed from an analysis of how young Swedish adults construct news relevance in the contemporary digital media landscape, (2) the identification of three dimensions that distinguish different kinds of news relevance from each other, and (3) a theoretical definition of news relevance from the audience’s perspective grounded in phenomenological theory and empirical analysis. This papers hence provides a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the ways news, understood as something broader than news journalism, is considered relevant by young audiences.