Notions of individual newspaper "readers" and theories of "media reception" may not be the best ways to think about what people do with news, both socially and personally, claims Mark Allen Peterson.

In "Getting the News in New Delhi" Peterson offers an intimate, detailed ethnographic account of how people in New Delhi use newspapers, and talk about news, to construct social relations. He argues that the content of the news is often secondary to its social uses.

The chapter appears in the new book The Anthropology of News and Journalism, edited by Elizabeth Bird, and just released by Indian University Press.