Research on the hybridization of journalism has tended to focus on the producers and their products, but the blurring boundaries of news cannot be fully understood in the contemporary media landscape without taking into account the place that journalistic information has in the media consumption habits of citizens. News, put in the context of everyday life, is one of the many inputs that citizens have to engage with society, learn and relax from their obligations. To explore these implications, we conducted a qualitative study of the news consumption of 90 Wallonian citizens representing a variety of socioeconomic, geographic and demographic characteristics. Participants filled in a semi-structured week-long media diary and were interviewed before and after diary to collect their interpretations and justifications of the news consumption described in the diaries. Results show how journalistic products are embedded in their daily lives as resources to structure routines and fill in moments, but, at the same time, citizens appreciate the importance of news to connect to their immediate context and have normative expectations on the quality of journalistic work. Moreover, the plurality of motivations, platforms (from the newspaper to the cell phone) and uses of news among our respondents invites for a reflection on the assumptions that professionals and scholars do about the position and the role of journalism in society, a need to acknowledge the tension between the social dispersion of news production practices and the normativity implicitly negotiated in each news story produced and consumed.

info:eu-repo/semantics/published