1st Edition

Mobile News Journalism’s Shift from Fixed to Fluid

    190 Pages
    by Routledge

    190 Pages
    by Routledge

    The rise of the smartphone has shifted news from fixed publication to a flow of updateable information. The chapters in this book investigate the implications for audiences, industry and society as news becomes mobile.

    Wherever we go, news from anywhere can reach us on our smartphones. And wherever we are, we can search up information specific to that place. News is produced by mobile journalists (MoJos) as well as by citizens armed with smartphones, reporting breaking news from crisis zones where information is uncertain, or hyperlocal news from neighbourhoods where little happens. Mobile technology allows citizens to engage deeply with a cause or to skim headlines so they know a little about a lot of things. News is distributed on mobile networks and consumed by mobile audiences as they make their daily way through time and space coloured by their mobile devices. It is consumed in the niches of life. It intersects with place in new ways as geolocated news. It pursues us wherever we are through push notifications. And news has moved from fixed to fluid, a flow of updateable information rather than a regularly issued product. In this book, the contributors take varied viewpoints on mobility and news, its impact on what news is, how journalists produce it and how it fits into everybody’s everyday life.

    The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

    1. News: Mobiles, Mobilities and Their Meeting Points

    Andrew Duffy, Rich Ling, Nuri Kim, Edson Tandoc Jr. and Oscar Westlund

    2. Witnessing a Disaster: Public Use of Digital Technologies in the 2015 South Indian Floods

    Subin Paul and Sujatha Sosale

    3. The Effects of Mobile Push Notifications on News Consumption and Learning

    Natalie Jomini Stroud, Cynthia Peacock and Alexander L. Curry

    4. Mapping the Mobile DNA of News. Understanding Incidental and Serendipitous Mobile News Consumption

    Kristin Van Damme, Marijn Martens, Sarah Van Leuven, Mariek Vanden Abeele and Lieven De Marez

    5. Value Emergence in the Usage of Mobile News Alerts

    Leena Mäkelä, Mika Boedeker and Nina Helander

    6. The Persistence of the Popular in Mobile News Consumption

    Jacob L. Nelson

    7. Mobile but Not Mobilized? Differential Gains from Mobile News Consumption for Citizens’ Political Knowledge and Campaign Participation

    Jakob Ohme

    8. What’s New about WhatsApp for News? A Mixed-Method Study on News Outlets’ Strategies for Using WhatsApp

    Karin Boczek and Lars Koppers

    9. Making the 21st Century Mobile Journalist: Examining Definitions and Conceptualizations of Mobility and Mobile Journalism within Journalism Education

    Matthew N. Bui and Rachel E. Moran

    10. Understanding Mobile News: Looking beyond the Lockscreen

    Leopoldina Fortunati and John O’Sullivan

    11. Digital Journalism after Mobility

    Gerard Goggin

    Biography

    Andrew Duffy, Rich Ling, Nuri Kim and Edson Tandoc, Jr. came together on a three-year research project into news as it is created, distributed and consumed on smartphones. They are colleagues at the Wee Kim Wee School at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specialising variously in news journalism, mobile communications technology and political communication, and their impact in society.

    Oscar Westlund is professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway, with a specialisation in journalism, media management and news media consumption for proprietary news media platforms. As a visiting scholar he was involved in the project that led to this book, and he was also editor of Digital Journalism, where these chapters originally appeared.