The potential to restore value through community-building
In discussions about how news consumption is changing, the loss of collective rituals around it is often overlooked. In Paraguay, newspapers used to arrive every Sunday and were read and passed around the family. Whatever was in their pages became part of the conversations of the free hours of the weekend. To this day, the print paper is an artifact I associate with family reunions. Others can surely relate.
Today, those shared moments are harder to find. Phones and platforms pull us into our own feeds, guided by algorithms that know what we like but not what we share.³³ Journalism has become a solo experience. The habits that once brought people together – to talk, argue, or laugh at a headline – have quietly fallen away. I believe there’s an opportunity to rebuild them.
While the early web made unprecedented levels of information exchange possible –and allowed the existence of news outlets like mine – the rise of algorithmic platforms came at a cost. Some of the deeper roles that communication once played were gradually eroded. James W. Carey captured this idea in a powerful 1989 essay, where he distinguished between communication as information transfer and communication as ritual:³⁴
In a ritual definition, communication is linked to terms such as sharing, participation, association, fellowship, and the possession of a common faith. This definition exploits the ancient identity and common roots of the terms commonness, communion, community, and communication.
What Carey was saying is that people do not communicate only to pass on information; they do it to recognise one another and shape society together. His call was to move beyond a purely instrumental approach and rebuild communication as something with “restorative value”.
Content-centric journalism opts for a narrow focus, continuing to deliver news as information – the antithesis of what Carey proposed.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the latest trend toward more personalised content. The intention (meeting user needs) is understandable. But in the process, we’ve lost the touchpoints where shared conversations begin. We’ve drifted further into individualised experiences, compounding the isolation and disconnection already heightened by the pandemic.³⁵
What’s missing is the shared dimension of processing, learning, and engaging with information. Journalism can and should help rebuild that layer of common understanding and civic values that sustains public life and underpins democracy.
Media research also often treats readers as entities in isolation. In a 2014 study on how to measure media impact, Philip Napoli observed most research has a strong micro-orientation: “The unit of analysis is typically the individual media user.”³⁶
But as Napoli noted, we know that news can impact communities, processes, and systems too. That kind of collective impact at a macro level just doesn’t happen overnight. It emerges slowly, across many touchpoints and players. It is a collective, not a lone user journey.
³³ Kleis Nielsen, R. & Ganter, S. (2022). The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society. Oxford University Press.
³⁴ Carey, J. (2008). Communication as Culture, Revised Edition: Essays on Media and Society. Taylor & Francis Group.
³⁵ The University of Edinburgh. (2024). Anxiety and depression due to the pandemic could remain for years. Retrieved from https://genscot.ed.ac.uk/our-impact/latest-results/pandemic-mental-health
³⁶ Napoli, P. (2014). Measuring media impact. An overview of the field. The Lear Center.