Reading digital news: Participation roles, activities, and positionings

In this study, the main objective is to analyze the agency of social actors in terms of reading an online newspaper. The data consists of material from two online newspapers, the French lemonde.fr and the British guardian.co.uk. The methodology builds on the notion of framing that allows us to distinguish between two main frames. The activities that users perform are interactional, language-related, and include semiotic and technologically based activities. The first frame concerns how the news content is organized. It involves the opening page of an online newspaper. The users monitor and choose to read, remediate, share news texts, manage, and/or archive information. They can also generate and send items to the newspaper. The second frame concerns how news content is represented. It focuses one multimodal, thematic news presentation in a screen setting. Here, users are readers, viewers, listeners, and writers who assemble the news stories that they want to focus on. In addition, they can express their standpoint in a comment section. The positioning includes an evaluation of the newsworthiness and credibility of the news information.