News: Mobiles, Mobilities and Their Meeting Points

Abstract

As both news and audiences are increasingly mobile, this introduction calls for intensified research into mobility as a core characteristic of journalism. This special issue explores the intersection of news with mobility in production, distribution and consumption. News has become mobile in a material sense as it is accessed on portable devices; and in a professional sense of being cut adrift from the business models which sustained it, challenged by peripheral actors and alternative news media, and embracing new technologies, new relationships with the audience and new political challenges to its status quo. One task is to adapt research techniques usually applied to fixed phenomena – or at least applied with the intention of fixing them – to something fluid. This is not impossible. All mobilities need an infrastructure on which to move, offering fixed points in a fluid world. Mobility offers critical questions of power and dominance of who is mobile, how, and under what circumstances; in this way, mobility becomes embodied. And the paradigm calls for research into the mobility of journalism and its interaction with similarly fluid, related actualities: blogs, smartphones, audiences, economics, advertisers, government and technology. Each interacts with journalism to deliver diverse realities.

Keywords:

• Mobilities
• smartphones
• MoJos
• epistemology
• liquidity
• fluidity
• news
• journalism

In the field of quantum mechanics (at least in its more accessible and demotic form), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely the position of a particle can be established, the less possible it is to determine the direction in which it is moving; while the greater certainty with which the trajectory of a particle can be determined, the less precisely one can say where it is (Lindley 2008; Rovelli 2016). Journalism finds itself in an analogous situation. The industry is evidently in motion even if its direction is not clear – although on a general level we can likely agree to a direction involving journalism with fewer resources, more precarious employment, more machine-led work in production and distribution, and where reader-revenue for more niche audiences is common.

Journalism is not alone in facing this uncertainty, and over a decade ago in an interview with Zygmunt Bauman, Mark Deuze observed that “contemporary society is anything but solid or socially cohesive” (2007a, 671). The industry is thus insecure in an unstable society; its role is under question (e.g. Deuze and Witschge 2016); its format evolves and its platforms of distribution are flexible (e.g. Lowrey and Gade 2012); it shifts shape depending on which device it appears on as news stories are repurposed either by hand or through automation via content-management systems (CMS) to appear as broadcast, print, web (e.g. Erdal 2009) as well as on Facebook, as a tweet, on YouTube or other platforms non-proprietary to the news media. Moreover, the people and places involved in its production are changing (Belair-Gagnon and Holton 2018).

This special issue of Digital Journalism therefore concerns itself with journalism as fluid rather than fixed. It explores the intersection of news and mobility in its production, distribution and consumption. News has become mobile in a material sense as it is carried and accessed on portable and personal interactive devices such as smartphones; and it has become mobile in a professional sense of being cut adrift from the business models which sustained it, challenged by peripheral actors (Eldridge 2018; Holton and Belair-Gagnon 2018) and so-called alternative news media (Holt, Figenschou, and Frischlich 2019), and embracing new technologies, new relationships with the audience and new political challenges to its status quo.

This introduction has two points of departure: first, the mobilities paradigm and the associated concept of liquidity as a social reality; and second, how this first point links to the emerging phenomenon of mobile news and its relationship with place. Mobility is not all; it demands places to move from and to, and ‘boundary management’ is critical in a world of flow (Beck 2008), so our agenda is for a thread of scholarship that attempts to break away from the limitations of quantum physics and to establish both the status of journalism and the direction in which it is going.

Liquidity and the mobilities paradigm

Bauman (2010) coined the term ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the instability of the post-modern experience. The term ‘liquidity’ was attached to journalism by Deuze (2007b) to refer to the ongoing and destabilising changes to the newsroom in the early years of the 21^st century. As a “paradigmatic profession of modernity”, journalism is enmeshed with changes to modernity (Jaakkola et al. 2015, 812) so that “journalism is connected to liquid modern life in a sort of reinforcing loop” (Bauman, in Deuze 2007a, 673). Change and uncertainty are so pervasive as to become a normalised state, to the extent that “flexibility has replaced solidity as the ideal condition to be pursued of things and affairs” (Bauman 2012, ix).

Others have similarly argued that the transformation of modernity demands a re-evaluation of ontological, epistemological and normative claims made by the social sciences, leading to the emergence of what became known as the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller 2011). Rather than studying fixed phenomena, the paradigm’s interest is in movement between them; those who move; and the forms and symbolism of such movement. “Mobilities theorists … resist the traditional sociological image of the social world as an array of bounded entities or sedentary containers” concentrating instead on movement among them (Sheller 2011, 351). This is not to say that boundaries become unimportant, and the places between which mobility occurs as well as the spaces across which it is enacted both retain their importance. But the mobilities paradigm opens up greater consideration of movement alongside the infrastructure which permits it to happen. From its inception, the paradigm has mostly addressed mobility as it is embodied in transport networks, tourism, diasporas, migration and movement in diverse forms; in the flow of people, information and goods; and latterly in its conceptual significance and symbolism in areas such as gender, power, ecology and the social production of place. This introduction, however, takes mobilities as a metaphor to illuminate the state of flux in which news journalism is unwillingly engaged, paradoxically trapped in motion. Rather than studying what journalism is, therefore, the mobilities paradigm invites study into how, why, and whither it is moving.

Such an undertaking is problematic: how can scholarship contain something as mutable as mobility? By way of a guide, John Urry, a progenitor of the mobilities paradigm, has identified several elements it encompasses, including the role of movement in social relationships, social norms that demand co-presence, the synthesis of individual movement and systems of mobility and the interaction of those mobility systems, and the power dynamics implicit in systems that allow some to move but not others through diverse means and across different forms of border (Urry 2008). In short, the paradigm has a broad remit. Perhaps too broad and critics have observed that it “celebrates a kind of ‘mobility fetishism’ and a way of ‘anything flows’ discourse” (Canzler, Kaufmann, and Kesselring 2008, 2). Further, mobilities have been challenged for being an un-critiqued benefit: the freedom to move is generally something to be approved of, as its opposite, immobility or the state of being trapped, is undesirable (Sheller 2011). Yet this is the mobility of a free agent; contrast this with that of the refugee – which is arguably the position journalism finds itself in, journeying often unwillingly, sometimes regretfully, and towards an uncertain destination.

Mobilities meet mobile phones

The greater challenge for research is to convert mobility from metaphor into epistemology, that is, how researchers can develop approaches, methods and studies that produce and advance knowledge. News has always been metaphorically mobile, moving from event to person to person. The embodiment of mobility in news dates back to the printed newspaper, the radio and even the portable television (Goggin, Martin, and Dwyer 2015). Today, ‘mobile news’ is taken to mean news delivered on a personal and portable interactive device such as a smartphone. Such mobile devices are taken for granted as part of everyday life for many of not most (Ling 2004; Newman et al. 2018), which has led to news publishers focusing on mobile technologies as a means to connect their audiences with their content.

Commercially, the move from print to website was long foretold; news’s move onto social media accessed via smartphones was less expected and has resulted in publishers struggling to maintain control over the distribution of their content. Google and Facebook have developed powerful positions as digital intermediaries channelling traffic, content and data etc. (Nel and Milburn-Curtis 2019). Consequently news publishers develop measures for what Chua and Westlund (2019) refer to as platform counter-balancing, intended to reduce their dependency on platforms non-proprietary to them, including but not limited to working with reader revenue amid difficulties monetising attention to the news via platforms (Myllylahti 2019). The rise of global platform companies (most notably Facebook and Google) has had a substantial and negative impact on the advertising revenue model which has supported news production for the past century (Cornia, Sehl, and Nielsen 2018). Conceptually, too, news has moved from being fixed to fluid, a flow of updateable information rather than a regularly issued product. Changes in production are also affected by changes in how, where and when news is consumed in the niches of life (Struckmann and Karnowski 2016) as smartphones have led to changes in news consumption.

As one illustration of how the metaphor of mobility might take material form, then, the smartphone embodies many of the changes facing journalism, placing mobility alongside uncertainty, innovation, increased competition, greater connectivity, and disruptive change. Within the broader realm of digital journalism created, distributed and accessed on smartphones, we find news produced by mobile journalists (MoJos), and the everyday newsgathering, interacting with sources, recording interviews, taking photographs and videos, and now corresponding with readers through social media; we find citizens using their networked smartphones to contribute to journalism (e.g. Burum and Quinn 2015; Westlund and Quinn 2018); news distributed via mobile networks and platforms (e.g. Villi and Matikainen 2015); and news consumed by mobile audiences on mobile devices in diverse spaces and times of the day (e.g. Wolf and Schnauber 2015; see also the annual Digital News Reports from RISJ).

News organisations have adapted to accommodate new technologies of mobility: smartphones and related devices (smart watches and augmented-reality glasses), and novel forms of newsroom have sprung up. News publishers strive towards adapting to shifting needs and patterns of news consumption by investing in, developing and running applications and/or sites tailored for mobile devices. Even among those offering news via mobile news apps and mobile news sites there is a wide spectrum of approaches. Some publishers produce tailored material for their mobile news services, which includes producing vertical videos as well as ‘silent videos’ that do not annoy others nearby, for instance, if watched while commuting. Other news publishers essentially use their CMSs to publish the same news materials across all of their proprietary platforms. In turn, these in some cases make no use of mobile affordances, and in other cases customise the news experiences for mobile devices by purposefully using personalisation and location-based technology when instructing algorithms what news is displayed to whom, and how (e.g. Westlund and Quinn 2018). Mobility is inexorably linked to mobile devices, and mobile news consumption has in many countries become the most common way of accessing the news (Nel and Milburn-Curtis 2019). Obviously, news consumption with mobile devices takes place across diverse places, sometimes even from the moment people grab their smartphone as they wake up in the morning, and during morning routines, during commute and the interstices of everyday life, until the moment people call it a day. Ultimately, there is a strong link between mobility, mobile devices and news, albeit news publishers approach this in diverse ways.

Mobilities and place

Mobilities may be further characterised by the places between which they are enacted. Place has been a central concept in journalism from the eyewitness who is privileged for being ‘there’, extending into beats, neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns, cities and countries, then expanding to include countries regions and territories and the way they are imagined by audiences (Schmitz Weiss 2018a; Gutsche and Hess 2018; Usher 2019). The link between news and place, epitomised in the beat, is so deep-rooted that Barnhurst has characterised it, perhaps sceptically, as “news usually turns up wherever reporters look” (2016, 158). Place is not just a setting where news occurs, it is “a particular location that bears significance for human agents, assembled and attained relationally, but also reflective of power structures and allowing potential for agency” (Papacharissi 2015, 28). Alongside the ‘mobilities turn’, then, scholars have also argued for a ‘spatial turn’ (e.g. Reese 2016). Labelled variously as geolocated news, location-based news, place-based journalism, spatial journalism, local news and international news (Schmitz Weiss 2018b) and even a ‘cartographic turn’ in news (Goggin, Martin, and Dwyer 2015), there has been increasing interest in the intersection of place and the news media, particularly as it is consumed on mobile devices in the form of locative media (e.g. Øie 2015).

Yet locative media is itself a moving target, as its technologies and their functionalities have developed (Erdal et al. 2019). Studies five years ago focused on the location-based networking platform Foursquare, which is barely a presence in studies today beyond leaving traces as a ‘zombie media’ in all subsequent locative apps (Evans and Saker 2017, 69). Schmitz Weiss (2018b) refers to Breaking News, part of NBC, which won awards for delivering local content, but in 2016 closed down after just four years as it was not profitable. “Journalism does not have a business model for locative journalism yet” and instead “journalism organizations primarily have been content with easy and straightforward connections to legacy bread-and-butter products, such as localized traffic and weather reports” (Erdal et al. 2019, 170). The mobilities turn and the spatial or locative turn are, of course, intertwined: the mobility of the news consumer drives media dedicated to the places where they go; the enforced mobility of the industry drives news organisations to experiment with locative media; and mobile media encourages individuals to assume that information on their immediate environs will be accessible on their handheld device.

Practically, the relationship between place, mobility and news is captured by Schmitz Weiss (2018b, 43) as “industry research and studies show that local news is driving digital and mobile news consumption behavior. News consumers are satisfying their news appetite while on the go via the mobile device.” Nevertheless, news publishers still struggle to identify how to turn mobile news to their advantage by presenting their product in a valuable way, for example, or engaging with readers on a more individual basis. Based on this struggle, which has not yet generated a viable business model, some scholars have reached the conclusion that “innovation by the media does not determine the usage among the public” (Schmitz Weiss 2013; Westlund 2015, 152).

Where the industry leads, readers may not follow. Yet there may be another agenda at work, and location-based news has also been used to encourage advertisers to support news on the grounds that knowing a reader’s location allows media companies to target them with location-based advertising (Goggin, Martin, and Dwyer 2015); indeed, some organisations offer location-based advertising without any connection to editorial content. As much as providing a service to the reader, knowing where they are located also has commercial implications which may in itself have driven the push towards location-based media just as much as the desire to serve the audience with local news.

One challenge for scholarship into place and mobility is that each has both a physical and a symbolic meaning. It is material and imaginary and the latter may be disconnected from the former (Wilken and Goggin 2012). A refugee need not be in her hometown to feel its symbolic pull; indeed, the meaning the place has is based on her enforced absence. There is thus a complex interplay between event (news), audience, place and mobility, exacerbated by mobile media devices such as smartphones. Place has symbolic meaning that depends on the context of the individual, making evident the limited significance of where a place is. Take the example of news of a protest in a city. A mobile reader travelling between their home city and another and seeing on the news that there are protests in one or the other will ascribe different significance to either place depending on where the protests are and the direction of their travel – and their intention to join the protest, avoid it, or help someone caught up in it. The place of the protest is fixed; its meaning is variable. Similarly, the significance of place alters depending on what is happening there (the news) and the trajectory of the individual. The mobility of the reader has a fixed physical reality (they are in transit) and a mutable symbolic meaning depending on what is happening in the places they are moving to or from. They may wish to hurry away from or towards the protest, depending on their intentions.

Likewise, for news producers, place has a geographic and a symbolic significance: Donnelly (2005, 59) says that proximity “indicates the local nature of the news—how close, both physically and psychologically—an event is to the reader”. In Singapore where most of the authors are based and which has both a Chinese ethnic majority and a history of British rule and the English language, the newspapers emphasise news from both China and the UK, neither of which could be considered geographically proximate. Finally, there is also the issue that news events which are non-location specific, or distributed across a large and varied geographic space – such as the climate and refugee crises – are easier to disregard, but find purchase in the public imagination when they are localised to a country, city or town. The interplay between the physical and the symbolic, the geographic and the cultural, the individual context, the trajectory of the person, their starting and ending points, the reason for their mobility combine to create a bewildering complexity.

Directions for mobilities scholarship

The news/mobility intersection also raises issues for scholars on how to study an evolving target. What epistemologies and methods are suited to understanding specific aspects of this changeable industry? Trending research topics such as data journalism, social media, commercial potential, reporter safety, and audience analytics cannot be treated as if separate from mobile devices and mobility, but should drive study into their role, significance and peculiarities in all these topics. We suggest three areas of scholarship in which mobilities might guide research: into sociological understandings of the news; the political-communication perspective; and the accelerating socio-technology of news production and consumption.

From a sociological perspective, the news has several institutional functions in society. These include the Jeffersonian mission of enlightening the electorate with relevant (and ostensibly vetted) information, and an entertainment dimension (sports scores, information on lifestyle issues, gossip, etc.). The broader consequence of these two elements is the generation of legitimacy in governance and cohesion in society. To this, we add the critical element that legacy news institutions are also businesses that generate profits for certain sectors of society (Carlson 2017). The mobilities/digitalisation turn in news distribution disrupts all these functions. The lowered threshold for access afforded by digital devices and the accompanying platforms mean that it is easier to generate and distribute information that can pass as Jeffersonian political information – whether or not it would pass muster as reputable news journalism. Simultaneously, content that appeals to sub groups, often at the expense of wider social cohesion, can also be distributed. Disruptive platforms also undercut the role (and the profits) of legacy news companies. The pulverising of these previously integral institutional functions can lead research into the framing of a new journalism that reconsiders how to best inform the populace as they work to maintain the efficacy of democratic institutions. Relevant for this context is research into the design and democratic role of news recommender systems (Helberger 2019).

Just as the printing press did when it was introduced (Eisenstein 1979), the combination of mobile digitalisation and the pending development of artificial intelligence paints the outline of a broader shift in journalism, as well as in other social domains. It can be argued that these developments will coalesce into what can be called a general-purpose technology (Helpman 1998), a socio-technological structure which has a pervasive impact on pre-existing social and economic institutions. Other general-purpose technologies, such as electrification, moved through society and changed fundamental production processes (e.g. facilitating the assembly line), social institutions, and the way that people lived (inexpensive domestic lighting, refrigeration, etc.). It is clear that mobile digitalisation has the same potential to disrupt institutions and to challenge accepted forms of information diffusion. All of this threatens the role of journalism as an institution which informs and entertains the populace, just as it threatens its commercial structure. Bringing this around to journalism and mobilities scholarship, the view of AI-enabled mobile digitalisation as a general-purpose technology suggests an increasingly urgent need to focus on how people get relevant information with which to make informed (and hopefully enlightened) decisions.

The news/mobility intersection also has implications for the political context where news and information play a central role in orienting citizens towards collective problems of the community. News has long been considered a ‘currency’ for participating in political processes (Gans 2004; Habermas 1962/1989), and with mobile media having emerged as an important platform for accessing, sharing and disseminating news (Newman et al. 2018; Nel and Milburn-Curtis 2019), its impact on the terrain of citizen engagement has become a hot topic for scholarly attention. Early work on new technology’s contribution to citizen engagement in political spheres has been heavily influenced by its mass communication roots. Under this framework, exposure to news on television and newspapers is simply replaced or supplemented with news from new technological platforms, and scholars have assessed its impact on citizen engagement measures such as online/offline political participation, civic engagement, voting and political expression (e.g. Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, and Valenzuela 2012; Kim, Chen, and Gil de Zúñiga 2013; Rojas and Puig-I-Abril 2009; Skoric et al. 2016; Willnat et al. 2013). While much of this work has paved the way towards refining our understanding of new media spaces and their political implications in general, it has also tended to focus excessively on social media.

This is not surprising given the increased news distribution through social media (Bergström and Belfrage 2018; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018) and the novel affordances that enable public engagement at a personal level, unrestricted by organisational resources or commitment to particular ideologies (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Yet the mobilities paradigm has more to offer for those interested the role of news, information, expression and participation in an ever-changing technological landscape: “What’s mobile about mobile communication is not so much the particular device, the individual user, or the general technology, but the social contexts in which these components come together in communication” (Jensen 2013, 27). The mobilities paradigm thus shifts the focus beyond digital spaces and social media to fully integrate the notion of being mobile – always moving, connected and personally attached (see Jensen 2013) – and its implications for political life. In a mobile era, consumption of news and engagement in politically inclined activities all occur within specific social contexts that blur the boundaries between the personal and the political. Scholars need to consider the cognitive, contextual and communicative implications of political participation in the mobile age. Some recent theorising has started to do just that by considering specific qualities of mobile technologies for citizen engagement in the political realm (e.g. Martin 2014). More work should follow such endeavours.

Third, from a socio-technological viewpoint, it is easy to see the interaction between news and mobility in various aspects of journalism practice. Discourse on the changing definition of a journalist arises from non-traditional journalists now also taking part in the performance of journalistic acts using digital technologies. News production has not only become more mobile, but the definition of who takes part – and who can and should take part – in it has also become more fluid. Embedded in this discourse is how social roles ascribed to journalists are also changing, if not expanding, moving from a we-tell-you-what-is-important function to providing spaces for non-journalists to engage in determining what is important and discuss why it is important. News routines are also changing, both due to what mobile technology allows journalists to do and due to the expectations it creates in terms of what journalists should be able to do. And yet what a news/mobility paradigm allows us to reflect on is not just what mobility does to news, but what news can do, and perhaps has done, to mobility. The rise of what is frequently labelled as fake news is facilitated by its ability to mimic real news at a time when credibility of real news is declining; misuse of social media is in part patterned after the idea of breaking important news to an audience, prioritising speed at the expense of accuracy (Bruno 2011), as well as obsessing with audience reach and engagement. This approach forces us to think that technological developments and changes in journalism not only affect each other but also that they occur within distinctive contexts that should be accounted for.

The mobilities paradigm can guide journalism research in examining not only what is changing in news production and consumption, but also in how these changes should be examined. Often, news research is done through the lens of what is, at the expense of what could be. For example, the use of new technologies and the rise of new actors and routines in journalism are examined through traditional journalistic norms and definitions. This has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of normalising what has been rather than providing a more nuanced understanding of what really is changing. But how are journalistic norms being renegotiated, and by whom? How are changes in news production and consumption routines emblematic of larger social and technological shifts? That news is frequently migrating away from traditional platforms should no longer surprise us, but what might surprise us is how mobile news use is changing how audiences define what counts as news. A traditional news-centric discourse lamenting decreasing news consumption might be inconsistent, even inaccurate, when compared with what audiences now consider as news and its place in their social affairs.

Advancements in this special issue

The mobilities paradigm can thus illuminate myriad areas and the papers in this special issue confront the issues that accompany the paradigm as it applies to the news in diverse ways. Uncertainty lies at the heart of journalism and news reporting represents an attempt to make sense of this uncertainty, as Paul and Sosale (2020) examine. The event reported – floods in Chennai – the technology disseminating the news and the people reporting are all out of the regular round of everyday newsgathering. Mobiles and mobilities in journalism combined to deliver news in fluid circumstances. When news itself becomes mobile and actively pursues the audience through push notifications, Stroud, Peacock, and Curry (2020) observe that this challenges the traditional divide between purposeful and incidental news exposure; what had been fixed must become fluid in order to assess an innovation. Push notifications also call upon consumers to be more flexible in where and when they access the news, alongside the effect that people who sign up for these news alerts also report greater news use. Incidental and serendipitous news is also at the heart of Kristin Van Damme et al. (2020) mixed-method study of predictors of news diversity. Mäkelä, Boedeker, and Helander (2020), meanwhile, are concerned with the epistemology demanded by studies of the heterogeneous audience as they use news alerts; an audience has differing and changeable attitudes, and resist study as a unified group. Jacob Nelson (2020) places physical mobility at the heart of his paper on the persistence of the popular in news consumption; news’ mobility (through mobile devices) changes how and why it is consumed in some situations, while in others it remains stable.

But, as Sheller and Urry point out, mobility is pervasive but not ubiquitous: “We do not insist on a new ‘grand narrative’ of the global condition as one of mobility, fluidity, liquidity. The new mobilities paradigm suggests a set of questions, theories, and methodologies rather than a totalizing description of the contemporary world” (2006, 210). Accordingly, Jakob Ohme (2020) observes that changes to accessing information on mobile phones does not lead to greater political mobilisation. While the attributes of the mobile device used to access news (notably the small size, which makes it mobile, and the locations and contexts in which it is used when on the move) may impact on the amount of news consumed and the attention paid to it, its impact on subsequent behaviour is unclear. Other forms of mobility have also not taken hold which again indicates what happens when mobilities or change are resisted. In her study of the (non-)adoption of WhatsApp, Boczek and Koppers (2020) highlights the problems news organisations face in implementing innovation; the mobility of their situation does not translate into innovative adoption of mobile technologies (quite the opposite). Yet one mobility can drive another, and Bui and Moran (2020) examine how the rise of mobile news impacts on journalism education and on the unequal power relations and social implications of the precarious nature of mobile news journalists’ professional existence. The value of the mobilities paradigm in these situations is to raise critical-cultural questions of how “mobility’s different aspects appear and take place in particular spatial settings under the workings of diverse forms of power” (Jensen 2011, 255). Mobility itself is never neutral.

New elements, new perspectives

To return to quantum mechanics and Heisenberg (once again as analogy rather than ontology) sub-atomic particles exist as ‘quanta’ in a state of constant instability and can be observed only as they interact with other particles. The equations of quantum mechanics “do not describe what happens in a physical system, but only how a physical system interacts with another physical system” (Rovelli 2016, 18, our italics). In layman’s terms, reality is defined by interaction; change the elements interacting and the reality consequently changes. This suggests another line of enquiry for mobilities studies of journalism, that its reality is not defined in isolation but in its interactions with other phenomena. Blogs, smartphones, audiences, economics, advertisers, government and technologies – each one will interact with journalism (or elements of it) to deliver a different reality. This diversity accepts that journalism is changeable and in constant motion; the intention is not to fix it, but to accept its fluidity. The process of examination rather than its end product is the logical outcome of a mobilities paradigm study of journalism in motion. This drives real-world questions: what impact has this had on how reporters source newsmakers and stories, how they report on them, and how they construct news packages? What role do mobile devices have in different forms of journalism, and how is news for mobile devices brought alive and consumed in the form of text, audio and video? This special issue has predominantly advanced knowledge relating to the second question.

Another approach, as per Bauman (2005) is to look less at what is arriving in journalism studies and practice and to look more at what is departing. This would, at least, focus study on the trajectory of journalism by ascertaining whence it has come and what it has left behind. This is no easy task. To look at just three long-held ‘truths’ of news journalism: is the traditional value of objectivity now due for the scrapheap to be replaced by transparency in newsgathering processes? Accuracy is a long-held virtue but given the increased need for speed in a 24/7 digital news stream, it may find itself in second place as stories are posted and updated with fresh (and more accurate) information. Finally, seeking profitability as a business to continue to employ and pay for trained, credible journalists through subsidy from advertisers has offered evidence that some things, for many news outlets, are moving into the realm of historical artefact rather than current reality. The erosion of such aspects of ‘high journalism’ was noted as long ago as the 1980s (Hallin 1992). Scholarship examining these as potentially ‘the aspects formerly known as journalism’ might offer closure and lead to a clearer sight of the direction the industry is heading. Remaining tied to these fixed classical precepts may misinform anyone endeavouring instead to establish journalism’s trajectory.

Finally, taking another perspective on the changes journalism and more broadly society faces, Bauman (2010, 2012) suggests that we are in an ‘interregnum’ period, where the old ways no longer work but the new ways have not yet been identified. He cites Gramsci (1971, 276) that such times of change are not in the quotidian run but are extraordinary periods when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” This is to be embraced. A state of liquidity, Bauman says, is not an adversary, but rather a quest for solidity; we are mobile in order to find a mooring. Yet at the same time, he argues that the modern liquidity is a reaction against and a movement away from old solidities with which we are dissatisfied, preferring liquid lives. It would be hard to argue that the industry prefers the uncertainty that accompanies its current liquidity, and many, one imagines, would be comforted by a clear direction or imminent goal for their enforced mobility. But that is the industry; scholarship, by contrast, has never sought comforting certainties.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.