The daily news is an important source of information for citizens. It provides them with a wealth of knowledge about the world around them and serves as an indispensable tool in democracy. It has become one of the primary sources through which citizens connect with the public world, a prerequisite for democracy to function (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 2010; Kaun 2012). But how can we understand what daily news means for users? The complex phenomenon of everyday news use is characterized by a diversity of individual and collective orientations towards the political world. It also includes many forms of news consumption and is influenced by changing patterns of media and digital access. These new trends highlight the importance of understanding the ways that individuals consume and use news for their civic engagement.
Traditionally, newspapers are printed on paper that is either high-gloss or matte (called paper stock) and consist of one or more pages containing various informational articles and advertisements. Typically, they include a main headline page, a section covering the most recent events and an area where opinions can be expressed (as in editorials or op-eds). Aside from these major groupings, newspapers usually feature several other sections including sports, weather, entertainment, comics and a classified ads section.
Most newspapers aim to reach a large and diverse audience, often geographically defined. However, some have a more narrow focus and are aimed at specific groups of readers such as business people (e.g. The Wall Street Journal) or sports enthusiasts (e.g. The Sydney Morning Herald). Similarly, some weekly newspapers are targeted at specific communities such as certain immigrant populations or indie rock fans within a city or region.
A common measure of a newspaper’s health is market penetration, which refers to the percentage of households in a given market that receive a copy of a particular publication. In its heyday in the 1920s, daily newspapers in the United States enjoyed market penetration of 123 percent (meaning that every household received 1.23 newspapers).
While newspapers continue to exist and, to some extent, thrive, their readership has declined precipitously with the rise of other forms of mass communication such as television and the internet. A few papers have even been shut down completely.
A number of digital-only initiatives have been launched to provide a viable alternative to traditional newspapers. These platforms attempt to capture different aspects of everyday news use, whether by mapping patterns of use, analysing experiences with news or tracking use through a variety of data collection methods including behavioural analytics, user-centric research and text analysis (e.g. Rieder 2013; Puschmann 2019). Each of these approaches has its strengths and weaknesses but, importantly, all offer useful contributions to a better understanding of how individuals interact with news. These different perspectives can also help to prioritise which aspects of everyday news use are most worth capturing in order to better understand the role of news for civic engagement and democratic society.