Both Sides of the Story

Abstract

While digital networked media contribute to a substantial shift in the relationship between journalists and their audiences, current research still largely focuses on one side or the other. This paper aims to overcome this conceptual and empirical deficit by presenting findings from two case studies on German news journalism (a daily TV newscast and a weekly political talk show). They operationalize the concept of inclusion distance, which aims at the (in-)congruence of mutual expectations between journalists and audience members, in a series of standardized surveys among newsroom staff as well as their online users. The paper introduces three different comparative dimensions which this study design affords and illustrates them with findings (1) on journalistic role conceptions and (2) the (assumed) motivations for participation. Besides demonstrating the value of such a multi-level comparison, our findings also provide substantial and nuanced evidence concerning the relation between journalists and their audiences: in both cases we find high congruence regarding the importance of traditional journalistic tasks such as objective reporting on complex issues, while the inclusion distance is larger for tasks connected to new participatory practices such as opportunities for user-generated content. Regarding motivations for participation, we find a somewhat larger inclusion distance as journalists of both newsrooms overestimate emotional or self-directed goals, but underestimate the wish for expanding knowledge as reasons why users participate.

Keywords:

• audience participation
• case study research
• comparative research
• inclusion theory
• news journalism
• political talk show

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the project “(Re-)Discovering the Audience” conducted by a team at the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research (Hamburg). The authors would like to thank Nele Heise and Julius Reimer as well as Bob Franklin and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. The other two case studies, which are finalized at the time of writing this article, deal with a daily and a weekly newspaper. Detailed results on the newscast case study have been published in Heise et al. (2013).

2. Surveying the offline audience, i.e. “TV only” viewers or “print only” readers, was not feasible with the project’s budget.

3. Items were partly drawn from established scales, partly created by the research team. A documentation of the survey instruments can be found in our project blog at http://jpub20.hans-bredow-institut.de/?p=768.

4. This decision is supported by t-tests, which have shown for the newscast case study that differences are highly significant (p < 0.001) when larger than 0.45 (journalistic role conceptions and the (assumed) importance of participatory functions), 0.47 (general assessment of audience participation) and 0.71 ([assumed] motivation for participation via audience mail).

5. Note that due to the smaller sample sizes in this case study the differences in mean are not statistically significant.

6. Since we concentrate only on a subgroup of all respondents, the sample size is rather small and only a few differences in means are statistically significant.

Additional information

Funding

Funding. This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [grant number LO 853/4-1].