“Remember that?” A temporal perspective on how audiences make sense of the news

Abstract

Despite its recent turn towards audience studies, journalism and political communication research rarely considers how meanings are made from news in the context of everyday life. The relationships between news consumption and time are also understudied, except when the emphasis is on speed. In this study, I seek to answer the question: how do one’s past news engagements (and sometimes, anticipations of future events) shape how this person interprets a news story? I present findings from fieldwork conducted with 42 participants in the Chinese-Canadian community in the Toronto area, including more than 80 hours of in-depth interviews and 42 “news diaries” collected from each participant. The findings are organized into a typology of news meaning-making in time: gathering, threading, weaving, and fitting. Implications of this typology for understanding perceptions of misinformation and promoting public engagement with the news are discussed.