OMNIBUS NEWS: Engagement or bussed?

• During the summer of 2013 the municipal public bus system, Karlstadbuss, installed television sets (BUSS-TV) on all city buses. These TV sets are airing user-generated content, and traffic information, weather forecasts as well as news from the hybrid commercial/public service broadcaster TV4. This paper addresses the phenomenon from the theoretical intersection of communication geography and journalism studies. This means understanding the city-buses, at once mobile and semi-public spaces, as decorated with a new “communicative texture” that is renegotiating the time-space nexus traditionally tied to news consumption. Furthermore, it potentially implies that a basic news diet become more or less dispersed amongst commuters across the city, and across previous class-demarcations that would engender divergent news diets. This constitutes a potential challenge to the notion of the fragmented news audience and related worries over the increased number of “news avoiders”. From previous research we know that news consumption, even accidental, is linked with political and civic engagement. In an era where media consumption is increasingly fragmented or even avoided, the buss-news reinstalls the almost inescapable news of the 1970’s albeit in a highly situated and limited context. Nevertheless, this new space of ‘news on the move’ is yet to be explored theoretically and empirically. Thus, we ask about the role of Karlstadbuss as a carrier of omnibus news in the media ecology. The paper uses data derived from representative surveys (Värmlands-SOM) conducted before (2010) and after (2014) the introduction of BUSS-TV to study the impact of travelling with the city-buses on political interest and civic engagement as well as general news interest and consumption.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Media and Communication Studies

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Kulturgeografi

Human Geography

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)