News Now

Abstract

This article explores how mobile consumption practices afforded by new mobile media have transformed the spatialities and temporalities of news media through processes such as proliferation, participation, personalization, cross-platform flow, geolocation, and mapping. Expanding journalism studies to encompass digital social media and the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research, the approach taken here gives greater attention to the making and unmaking of materialities and infrastructure in order to show how the mobile production, dissemination, and consumption of news produces new spatial temporalities and scales. With the emergence of various mobile interfaces and personalized networks connected via mobile social media, news is not only constantly accessed “on demand” from miniature mobiles, but also tagged, curated, aggregated, and easily re-distributed, fostering “ambient journalism” (Hermida) and on-location “citizen witnessing” (Allan). Through a historical analysis of changes in the New York Times since the 1990s and a consideration of emerging modes of on-demand, on-location, participatory news production, it is argued that the redistribution of the places, spaces, and timing of news production and consumption has transformed not only the content, form, and style of news, but also the very temporality of news as an event. Through an analysis of the impact of these changes on the reporting of recent natural disasters, the article seeks to envision an enlivened terrain of mobile news that is live, active, immersive, pervasive, and constantly updating, yet also attentive to the implications of infrastructural disruption, data-mining, and surveillance.