Smartphones and the News

Andrew Duffy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000091076
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book reviews recent studies into smartphones and the news, and argues that the greatest impact on news of the smartphone as a dominant technological artefact is to shift it away from an authoritative, fixed 'first draft of history' to become a fluid, flexible stream of information from which each individual constructs their own meaning.

The news has taken on a new life, fragmented by five billion smartphones, disrupting not just an industry but also the significance of the news in societies worldwide. This book considers how the smartphone has changed the production of journalism through contributions from the general public, the dominance of visual over textual media, the shift towards brevity, the challenges of verification, and the possibilities offered by the multi-skilled mobile journalist, or MoJo. The book looks at the manner in which news is promoted and distributed via smartphones, specifically its place on social media. Finally, it considers how news-on-smartphones fits into consumers' lives, and how their use of the smartphone to access news is impacting back on its production.

This is an insightful research text for journalism students and scholars with an interest in digital journalism, new media, and the intersection between technology and communication.

1 Turn on your smartphone

Over and over again I saw how WhatsApp was the protagonist in many conversations between colleagues. Often, a journalist would jump into the air, brandishing their phones and screaming about a quote, statistic, or picture they have just received on the app. A scraping of chairs abnormally loud would fill the newsroom as journalists and editors gather around and debate about whether they were in front of another apocryphal story, as many circle around WhatsApp those days. Editors, as inveterate doubters, would grab their phones and reach out to their own sources for confirmation or denial.

(Dodds, 2019, p. 733)

Based on his experiences in two newsrooms, Dodds captures in colourful terms one impact of the smartphone on newsworkers. All across the industry, relationships with the device are far from neutral. This emotionally charged association between reporter, source, news and audience, all mediated by the smartphone, gave rise to this book which examines the production, distribution and consumption of news using handheld, portable, multimedia, Internet-enabled communications devices – usually smartphones. It reviews and draws illustrations from the literature to provide an overview of the evolving relationship between the news industry and the citizen/consumer as it is mediated by the smartphone, drawing together diverse strands of research to place the smartphone at the centre of the disrupted news paradigm.

The smartphone has become a dominant technology in news. Back in 2012, Chyi and Chadha were still able to report that people preferred reading news in newspapers than on smartphones, tablets or laptops. Three years later, Smith (2015) reported that people use their smartphones to follow breaking news, which leaves them feeling good that they are making productive use of their time (and their expensive device) but also frustrated at its limitations.

Moving into the modern smartphone era, the Pew Research Center reported that almost three-quarters of US adults have read news on a mobile device at some point (Matsa & Lu, 2016), while according to a 26-nation study in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, news-on-smartphones is increasing as a phenomenon, while more than one-quarter of smartphone users reported using news apps weekly in 2017, up 6% from the previous year (Newman, Fletcher, Levy & Nielsen, 2016). Mobile apps increase traffic to news organisations (Xu, Forman, Kim & Ittersum, 2014) and encourage readers to stay there longer than websites, whether on PC, phone or tablet (Dunaway, Searles, Sui & Paul, 2018) which allows them to charge more for advertisers. More recently still, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report surveyed over 74,000 people in 37 markets (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy & Nielsen, 2018) and found that news apps and emails are gaining popularity, although some people complain of being bombarded, partly due to aggregators such as Apple News. All these figures, while recent in academic terms, are likely to be underestimates as smartphone use and news content production are still rising.

Making the news

News finds itself in a curious situation: there is more of it, from more varied sources, on more varied platforms, in more creative formats, in novel guises offering more choice, it is less profitable, less well staffed by professionals, it is sought out deliberatively and encountered serendipitously, people trust it less, pay for it less, share it more, are more often overwhelmed by it, avoid it more, contribute to it more, access it more frequently and in new places, it exposes people to new ideas or shuts them up in a filter bubble, and it is – to put it mildly – ontologically challenged. The smartphone, as a meeting point of ubiquity, mobility and information, lies at the centre.

This contribution to the Disruptions series considers first how the smartphone has changed the production of journalism, primarily in the form of interactions with and contributions from the general public, the dominance of visual over textual content, the shift towards brevity, the challenges of verification, and the possibilities offered by the multi-skilled mobile journalist, or MoJo. Mobile digital technology is also changing the way journalists see themselves and their professional practice, as they feel some pressure to adopt some of the norms of digital culture.

This coincides with diminishing trust in journalism reported in Europe and in the US, which becomes a concern because there are clear associations between reading a daily newspaper and civic engagement and political knowledge. A well-informed citizenry is crucial to overcoming problems in society and making decisions. But the lack of trust in the news media, its fragmentation across reliable, traditional organisations and a plethora of less tried-and-tested alternative sites largely accessed on mobile digital devices, has placed the relationship between news media and civic participation under question.

Even at a less political level, newspapers have been associated with social cohesion, a collective identity and shared topics of conversation that are the glue of social life (Putnam, 2001; Anderson, 2006). For this benign effect to succeed, people need to trust the press, with its resultant impact on civic engagement: “the relationship between news consumption and public evaluations of the press are a complex interplay between journalists’ success at fulfilling professional roles, the public’s expectations of press performance, and individual preferences” (Gil de Zúñiga, Diehl & Ardèvol-Abreu, 2018, p. 1119).

Yet, this benevolent phenomenon may be in abeyance. People read less news and prefer softer entertainment news over hard political and economic stories (Tsfati & Cappella, 2003). Without the information provided by the watchdog media, people lack the interest and the motivation to collaborate on finding shared solutions to shared problems (Prior, 2005). By contrast, when people watch the news and read newspapers – according to a study conducted before online, mobile digital news was a phenomenon – they are more engaged (Bakker & de Vreese, 2011).

Smartphones and social media

Consequently, this book looks at the manner in which news is promoted and distributed via smartphones. That news has moved predominantly online needs no introduction; the more recent change is its increasing presence on social media – distinct from but often accessed through smartphones. Indeed, the rise of social media for news has reversed and is showing slight decline, in the US falling from a high of 51% in 2017 to 45% in 2018, mostly because Facebook changed to favour news from friends (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy & Nielsen, 2018).

News on WhatsApp has replaced it, to some extent, as news organisations shift away from Facebook. People also find other sites such as Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, WeChat and WhatsApp to be friendlier and more convenient than Facebook, partly because networks on Facebook are often so large that people do not feel comfortable sharing on them as they are not sure they are talking to ‘real friends’ and will not be attacked for what they post. Their inner circles are on WhatsApp. In countries where political tensions have made people cautious about what they post, there has been a related increase in smaller networks or encrypted apps such as WhatsApp.

This book tries not to conflate social media with smartphones. This is not easy. The majority of the literature condensed in this book concerns social media rather than the devices on which it is accessed. This is reasonable: social media is a rich, complex and pervasive phenomenon in journalism. It is routinely accessed – although not exclusively, as people will check Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on their laptops at home or their desktops at work, and they may watch YouTube on their family television – through smartphones. One underlying assumption for this book, therefore, is that much of the literature about the interaction between journalism and social media particularly within the past four to five years, depending on the country where the research was completed and the citizen’s adoption of smartphones, has an implicit bias towards the smartphone.

Turning to the dark side

The smartphone also embodies an emotional bond many people feel for the small device that accompanies them throughout the day and which they use to contact friends and family, to enjoy music, entertainment, games and advice, to keep track of their calories and their heartbeat, to book taxis and check investments, to use as a shield against isolation in public spaces, to pass the time for a bored few moments, to share photographs and video clips, to observe their homes and turn up the heating, turn off the lights or close the garage doors, to counsel their children, to book holidays, to buy presents or to find their way from A to B in a new town. This intimacy, the way smartphones are woven into the fabric of people’s lives, the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ (Ling, 2012), is the real significance of the devices in news.

Yet, alongside news, social media platforms accessed on smartphones have been accused of spreading homophobic, sexist, racist and xenophobic content, partisan political propaganda, fake news, and messaging designed to manipulate political outcomes in foreign countries; as a result, there have been calls for state regulation of the social media platforms which are effectively taking on the role of news distributors with the associated rewards in advertising revenue, and which should therefore accept the same responsibilities that restrict mainstream and legacy news publishers (Crilley & Gillespie, 2019). Smartphones also spread misinformation and fake news, as seen in India when a message on WhatsApp carrying fake news about human traffickers led to the deaths of a dozen people at the hand of SNS-inspired vigilantes (Gowen, 2018).

Reader, audience, consumer: who are we?

Finally, the book considers how news-on-smartphones fits into users’ lives, and how their (our) use of the smartphone to access news is impacting on its production. Digitisation of news has disrupted how, where, when and why people read the news, as well as what they read. So what exactly do people do with news on smartphones? Based on ten years’ study between 2004 and 2014, Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2015) identified the following 16 words, which I cover here extensively as they offer a solid foundation for any future study of how audiences engage with the news, expressed in terms which they themselves have used.

Reading is distinct from checking in or scanning, and it involves taking the time to immerse oneself in a story, with a view to gaining knowledge or understanding the topic. People may click on a news story to save it for later, when they have time to read it in full.

Watching is the television equivalent of reading and involves ‘leaning in’ to the news. Participants in the research said it was like reading a novel in terms of immersion. But while watching was a characteristic of television sets, laptops and tablets, it did not seem to be a feature of smartphone news consumption.

Viewing involves similar platforms, but with them running in the background while the individual is engaged in a simultaneous (but more absorbing) task.

Listening is halfway between the two and can involve simultaneous actions such as driving or doing housework. It is valued both for the information and for offering a connection to the world beyond the car or the home.

Checking, by contrast, is a question of speed, of glancing at the headlines in order to have a generalised awareness of what is happening; and can be followed by saving and reading, watching or listening at a later time. It also fits into a checking cycle, with people running through emails, news apps, social media etc. in one sitting.

What has transformed the prevalence of checking is the emergence of news apps on smartphones which make it easy to frequently check on updates or breaking news, and is associated with news snacking, keeping abreast of what is happening in order not to appear ignorant in a social situation or to mentally file the topic away to be looked at in more detail later.

Scanning allows a reader to look over a story to get the highlights, a more cognitively demanding process than snacking or checking, but less rich than watching or reading.

Allied to this is monitoring, which was not a common word used by their participants over the decade Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink considered, but which refers to actively surveying the news for updates on something of importance to the individual.

More complex is searching, which involves actively looking for the answer to a question or information on a specific subject, usually via a search engine rather than through a news website. All these activities, of course, have been facilitated and made mobile by the ubiquity of the smartphone.

The last collection of news-related activities is more specifically tied to mobile digital news. Clicking allows the user to look beyond the immediate story via hyperlinks to find related and background information – most often in their studies for crime, sport and entertainment rather than hard or serious news.

Finally, the close association of news and social media has also entered the vocabulary of people discussing the news as they link, share, like, recommend, comment and vote on a news story. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the social nature of news is the reasons given why interviewees did not share, like, recommend – they were mindful of how it would appear to others on social media, and what they might think of them. News becomes incorporated into self-image, and is only shared when there is a benevolent outcome anticipated – to look well-informed or smart, to be the first to share a story, to demonstrate kinship with the original poster, for example.

A study by Cohen, Constantinides and Marshal (2019) interviewed people to identify what triggered them to read news on their smartphones. Often the motivation was simply to take a break from another activity – although this did not result in a memorable news experience, and one respondent said he could not recall the news story he had read a few hours earlier. Some liked to read in bed when they woke up, to ease them gently into the day and out of their beds; or as an adjunct to eating breakfast; or, in one case, as a procrastination tactic to delay having to go to work while maintaining a friendly illusion that what they were doing was serious enough to justify late arrival. Others relied on alerts or scrolled through their social media feed with a view to seeing what was happening in the outside world, but rarely clicked on the link to learn more – as long as they felt informed, that was enough. Whatever habits they had, they were distinctly different from newspaper and TV broadcast consumption behaviour. This is not your grandfather’s news.

Perry, O’Hara, Sellen, Brown and Harper (2001) talk about dead times spent on transport or waiting for it, which could be put to use by reading news, and dealing with boredom or filling in a few idle moments, and this was a common theme among Cohen, Constantinides and Marshall’s (2019, p. 77) interviewees: “It’s more killing time in a more productive way than playing a game, which I do sometimes”. They would often choose shorter, snacking articles to read when waiting for someone because they did not know when that person would arrive, and they did not want to launch into a long story and have to break off halfway – or they felt they could not give a complex, longform piece the attention it deserved if a portion of their mind was given over to remaining semi-alert to the arrival of their friend.

At other times, the interviewees ‘double-screened’, reading the news while also watching television and toggling between the two depending on which one caught their interest at any given moment: one respondent suggested,

I tend to feel like I’m being unproductive if I spend an extended period of time reading or watching the news, so I tend to do it when I take a break from something else or am actually engaged in doing something else, so I sometimes have the news channel on while I’m sort of tidying up.

(Cohen, Constantinides & Marshal, 2019, p. 82)

This use of news as a filler in the interstices of life, or as a distraction during other screen-related activities, is well document...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Turn on your smartphone
• 2 Going mobile
• 3 Sources and objectivity
• 4 MoJos on the move
• 5 We the newspeople
• 6 Something to shout about
• 7 Twitter
• 8 News pursues me
• 9 Freedom to choose – or not to choose
• 10 Snacking in the interstices of life
• 11 A time and a place for news
• 12 Still moving
• References
• Index