Drawing on works of Hannah Arendt, Michael Schudson, Niklas Luhmann and others, this paper reconceptualises the idea of public spheres, arguing that they are chronically fed by news, a relationship that is salient yet long neglected by the scholarship. It defines public spheres as mediated and non-violent gatherings of self-reflective equals discussing issues of general public interest and news as publicised narratives that depict changes and disruptions that are prominently or latently linked to conceptions of the common good. It contends that online publics are marked by at least five distinctive qualities: surprise, chronicity, evanescence, networkedness and unintended consequences. They often storm the whole nation or the globe by surprise, springing up as if out of nowhere; they have a pop-up quality. They are chronic. They are also usually ephemeral, but their networked quality sometimes ensures that they go viral. Finally, they generate unintended consequences, including power effects. These qualities, the paper claims, are key factors for understanding the resilience of public spheres in a repressive environment. Adopting such a pluralist and constructivist perspective, this original news-fed public spheres theory hopes to redirect academic attention to the intrinsic features of news and communication and their interplay, which are unfortunately often ignored by deliberative public sphere theorists. It offers a new prism for approaching the life and death of the chronically appeared public spheres and calls for moving beyond the old line of argument that focuses mainly on communicative features of a single public sphere. As such, it also warns against drawing sweeping arguments based on individual cases, which often fail to grasp the continuous and chronic dynamic between news and public spheres.
Key words: news, news-fed online public spheres, surprise, chronicity, evanescence, networkedness, unintended consequences