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Audiences' involvements with news have been shown to be far more varied than normative theories of liberal democracy typically suggest, often evading standards of unemotional objectivity prescribed by civic duty ideals. However, news users' methods of navigating normative expectations about their emotive experiences with news remain unclear. This article operationalizes the concept of "feeling rules" to uncover responses to discrepancies between emotive expectations and experiences with news, developing a novel analytical approach using linguistic and paralinguistic indices of perceived norm breaking. It applies this to a quota sample of Danes between 18 and 24 years of age, asked about their information-seeking practices using semi-structured interviews and a card-sorting exercise to prompt reflections about a broad spectrum of media. The article makes manifest four strategies for negotiating misalignments between feelings rules and emotive experiences: (1) discontinuation and (2) continuation of media use flouting feeling rules, (3) compartmentalization, and (4) justification. The findings advance our scholarly understanding of news use as a site of complex social identity negotiation for young people, where not only externally visible behaviors but also emotive experiences such as seriousness and (dis)trust are prescribed, in order to explain underlying mechanisms behind the behavioral change—and resistance to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the underlying aspects surrounding emotional labor in everyday life inside newsrooms and how these aspects contribute to discursively (de)stabilize journalism as an institution. In order to do this, we apply the literature on affect and emotion in journalism as well as on discursive institutionalism to the analysis of a particular moment of crisis: the fraud scandal around Claas Relotius, an award-winning German reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel. The discovery of his massive fake feature stories caused a fierce and controversial discussion on the media about structural problems in journalism as well as the use of emotion in feature stories and exclusion mechanisms inside the newsroom. In our textual analysis of 138 articles on this case published in German and selected international media between December 2018 and December 2019, we uncovered four main areas in which the role of emotions is discursively negotiated (1) Form: feature stories and their use of emotions, (2) Actor: emotional attributions to Relotius, (3) Practice: emotions as part of editorial practices, understood here as emotional labor in the newsroom, and (4) Institution: the description of the event and its affective implications for journalism as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]