[Air-L] CFP News Consumption in the age of mobile media, special section in Mobile Media and Communication

[Rich Ling]

Dear all,

Please consider sending an article for the special section of Mobile Media
and Communication on News Consumption in the age of mobile media.


Guest Editor Oscar Westlund will be accepting abstracts.

The abstracts are due by January 3rd 2013. Please send them to
oscar.westlund at jmg.gu.se or oswe at itu.dk (with “*Mobile Media &
Communication *special section” in the subject line), and should be
accompanied by an abbreviated biography (approx. 200-300 words).

Please see the CFP below for more details.

-- 
Rich L.



*News Consumption in an Age of Mobile Media *

Call for papers for a special section of *Mobile Media & Communication *
titled

“News Consumption in an Age of Mobile Media”, to be published in volume
3:2, 2015 (http://mmc.sagepub.com)

*Guest Editor*: Oscar Westlund, PhD, Associate Professor, the University of
Gothenburg (SWEDEN) and the IT University of Copenhagen (DENMARK)

Having their mobile device continuously within an arm´s length has changed
the ways people access the news in their everyday life. This marks a recent
change in society that raises numerous important research inquires. A
retrospective glance shows that the mobile phone has diffused around the
globe during the 1990s and 2000s. This development has made mobile
communication at any time and any place possible. Now, feature phones have
increasingly been displaced by smartphones, which nowadays constitute the
major portion of mobile devices being sold globally. Facilitated by the
mobile internet, convergence and technological developments of computing
and hardware, these mobile devices provide networked functionalities,
touch-screen interfaces and mobile ecosystems loaded with customized apps
as well as accessibility to responsive web designs. Such mobile devices
have in recent years become adopted, used and domesticated in a plethora of
ways and situations. Alongside these we find that also tablets have gained
significance, offering largely similar affordances (although not
traditional voice calls), but with slightly larger screen sizes.

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets can be used for
functionalities, such as search engines, social networking sites, games and
utility services, but also news provided by both legacy news media and new
publishers. Mobile news has gained precedence not only in the interstices
of our everyday lives, but also, many people have established the mobile
device as a key way in which to keep informed about the news.

This special section focuses the salient case of *access to and use of
mobile news. *The social, cultural, and technological phenomenon of mobile
news constitutes an important area of mobile media development. More
importantly, mobile news also marks a paradigmatic shift to the role news
plays in our everyday lives. This development also has great impact on the
future of journalism and legacy news media. This special section of the
international journal *Mobile Media & Communication *will bring together
scholarly work that examines the evolving nature of news consumption with
mobile devices. The issue welcomes theoretical essays, research reviews and
empirically sound articles exploring a range of phenomena found in the
nexus of mobile devices and news. The articles in the special section
include, but are not limited, to the following themes:

The history (or histories) of mobile news consumption

· The role of mobile news in people´s everyday life

· Analyses of nationally representative data providing explanations to
adoption or usage of mobile news

· Users perceptions of the value and utility mobile news provides compared
to other news media (e.g. affordances, media logic, media niches or
worthwhileness)

· Analyses of how people engage socially with strong and/or weak ties
through mobile news (offline and online).

· The role of mobile devices in cross-media news consumption and media
repertoires

· Attitudes, norms and behaviors relating to personalized news and its
interrelated practices of tracing digital footprints

· Comparisons of people´s mobile news consumption in everyday life and
during societal crises

· Cultural differences in mobile news consumption

· Cross-generational and intra-generational mobile news consumption
patterns

· Specific methodologies that address and develop the study of mobile news
consumption

· The role of location and positioning for mobile news consumption

· Changes in the dynamics of citizen journalism

· Evolving ubiquitous interfaces for mobile news (smartwatches, smart
glasses etc.)

Full articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, including
references, etc. Please submit an abstract of 700-800 words that clearly
spells out the theoretical construct, research questions, and methods and
results. For empirical studies still in progress, please outline the
current state and the timeline. Also include the names, titles, and contact
information for 2-3 suggested reviewers. Abstracts are due by January 3rd 2013,
to oscar.westlund at jmg.gu.se or oswe at itu.dk (with “*Mobile Media &
Communication *special section” in the subject line), and should be
accompanied by an abbreviated biography (approx. 200-300 words)

Providing the abstract meets the criteria for the call, and is selected for
inclusion in the special section, full manuscripts are due by March 15th
2014. Submission of full papers is done through http://mmc.sagepub.com, and
these will be peer-reviewed prior to considered for acceptance. Please note
that manuscripts must conform to the guidelines for *Mobile Media &
Communication*. The special section will be published in 2015. Please
contact guest editor Oscar Westlund with any questions