In news research, news relevance was for long synonymous with how journalists constructed it. But recently, scholars have questioned the assumption that journalists’ preferences correspond with their audiences’. Several studies have approached news relevance from the audience point of view, showing audiences’ news relevance is constructed as an everyday practice, through assessments of topics and brands, and at the backdrop of users’ earlier experiences. News relevance from the audience perspective however still remains undertheorized and builds on traditional understandings of news journalism. This article aims to contribute to this debate with (1) a matrix of four types of news relevance, constructed from an analysis of how young Swedish adults construct news relevance in the contemporary digital media landscape, (2) the identification of three dimensions that distinguish different kinds of news relevance from each other, and (3) a theoretical definition of news relevance from the audience’s perspective grounded in phenomenological theory and empirical analysis. This papers hence provides a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the ways news, understood as something broader than news journalism, is considered relevant by young audiences.

When studying media audiences, comparisons between countries, cultures or specific geographical regions are often valued for providing rich data, offering scholars the benefit of a wider perspective. An international comparative outlook can help understand how different media systems interrelate with cultural and social contexts, as well as show how global media technologies are used and made meaningful in local settings. However, it also comes with a multitude of challenges, which can be particularly palpable using qualitative methods, resulting partly from the often relatively small-scale samples at hand, and partly from the demand to understand complex sense-making processes and nuances in audiences’ expressions and interpretations. This chapter discusses some of the methodological complications that can arise when embarking on cross-cultural audience research, especially highlighting how researchers may need to adapt in times of crisis or unforeseen events. It draws on a qualitative research project on news consumption among young people in three different countries, Sweden, Estonia and Russia, which—based on interviews, focus groups and elements of ethnographic observation—examined how young adults (aged 18–26) conceptualise and use news in their highly digitised everyday lives. During the course of the research, two major socio-political crises, Covid-19 and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributed to the project taking a different route than originally planned, and the chapter emphasises the necessity of flexibility and reflexivity in audience research, as well as attempting to challenge more rigid ideas of how to compare media audiences across geographies and cultures.

News today is a genre "in flux". New kinds of news producers and novel means of distributing, sharing and using news align with alternative ways of understanding what news is. Based on an extensive ethnography of news practices and perceptions among a broad range of young adults in Sweden, this book discusses how the rapid digitisation of news has shaped young people’s understanding of it, as well as how news is made relevant, trusted and used in the temporalities and spatialities of everyday life. This cutting-edge volume analyses the blurring boundaries between news and social media, facts and stories, highlighting how new media categories such as influencers and memes can take on the status of news for young audiences and shape their understanding of themselves and the world.

Since their emergence in the early 2000s, social media have continued to increase in popularity, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Even though they have been studied in relation to a wide range of topics, including their role in politics, social relationships, activism, identity construction, and youth cultures, the rise of social media is also connected to a number of less dramatic, yet pervasive, shifts relating to their integration into the mundane practices of day-to-day life. In this article, we explore the uses of social media as part of everyday life, a perspective that has gained less attention in research about social media. We take an interest in how young adults create meaning around their daily practices, involving many different social media platforms. Doing so, we draw on in-depth individual and small group interviews with 67 young adults, aged 18–26, conducted in Sweden during 2019–2021. We approach social media as a joint environment, consisting of a wide range of different platforms traversed by the user. The empirical analysis identifies three significant meanings of social media: filling empty slots, everyday transformations, and mood management. These three different meanings are shaped by different temporal, spatial, and technological characteristics and emphasize the importance of social media use in the lives of the young adults.

The extended reliance on media can be seen as one indicator of mediatization. But even though we can assume that the pervasive character of digital media essentially changes the way people experience everyday life, we cannot take these experiences for granted. There has recently been a formulation of three tasks for mediatization research; historicity, specificity and measurability, needed to empirically verify mediatization processes across time and space. In this article, we present a tool designed to handle these tasks, by measuring the extent to which people experience that media reach into the deeper layers of daily human life. The tool was tested in an empirical study conducted in Sweden in 2017. The results show that perceived media reliance is played out in relation to three types of basic desires: (1) (re)productive desires, (2) recognition desires, and (3) civic desires, and is socially structured and structuring. We argue this tool, in diachronic analyses, can measure one important aspect of mediatization.