ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that confusion around journalism’s role in contemporary societies results from using ahistorical, often idealized, abstracted views of citizenship as an end for journalism – and end which citizens as individuals and publics as collectives can never attain – rather than as one of many means for performing it. The complement to the quantitative approach – often unhelpfully posited as its counterpoint – is the qualitative tradition, which focuses not on measuring the public but on trying to understand its myriad experiences. In terms of researching news audiences in the current era, this means considering the everyday practices in which news is potentially encountered, and how these build up, stabilize, and are disrupted over time. The types of engagement that metrics capture tend to be less profound in terms of revealing how news-related practices affect people, perhaps change views and behaviours, and therefore potentially have democratic impact.
