(RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE

Abstract

Current technological, organizational and institutional changes fundamentally alter the relationship between journalism and its audience – with consequences not only for journalistic practice, but also for theoretical and methodological issues of media research. After briefly recounting three perspectives on the audience, the paper outlines key aspects of the sociological theory of inclusion and explicates them in a novel and comprehensive heuristic model of audience inclusion in journalism. It introduces two constructs which apply both to journalism and the audience: (1) inclusion performance subsumes inclusion practices and their manifest results, and (2) inclusion expectations subsume attitudes, norms and perceptions with respect to audience inclusion in journalism. The degree of congruence between performances of journalists and audience members is interpreted as inclusion level; the degree of congruence between the expectations is interpreted as inclusion distance. This model can serve as a heuristic for empirical operationalization, helps to systematize existing and future research on digital networked media and journalism into a coherent sociological framework and is also open for comparative research on participation in other social systems.

Keywords:

• journalism
• audience
• Web 2.0
• inclusion
• audience participation

Acknowledgement

The paper has benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions by Nele Heise, Julius Reimer, Oscar Westlund, Tamara Witschge and two anonymous referees.

Notes

The concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are not limited to systems theory, but serve as central dichotomy in various sociological theories and paradigms (Stichweh 2009).

We acknowledge that this is only one of various ‘heterogeneous, multidimensional and competing’ (Löffelholz 2008) theoretical approaches to the question ‘what is journalism?’. Whether journalism is modelled as social action, as social system, as popular culture or with the focus on journalism's normative role, will in addition make a difference on how the relationship between journalism/journalists and publics/audience is conceptualized. What all these different approaches have in common, however, is the need to account for the shifts brought about by digital interactive media.

While we concentrate on journalism in this paper, it should be noted that public communication is not restricted to journalism, but also includes for example public relations and advertising.

This does not mean, however, that the particular relations between these roles are immutable. For example, by applying inclusion theory to West German history from 1960–1989, Gerhards (2001) shows how demands of citizens for participation in the social systems of medicine, education, law, politics and economics have increased in what he calls ‘the rebellion of the citizens’.

In fact, declining readership and revenue are phenomena predominantly observed in Europe, Australia and the United States. In its annual report on ‘the state of the news media’, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (2011) pointed out that ‘US newspapers suffer more than others’ anywhere else in the world. However, in India, Egypt and Lebanon print papers are thriving with respect to advertising revenues, and in Africa paid newspaper circulation in 2009 rose by 4.8 per cent (see the special report on international newspaper economics within the report: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey/international-newspaper-economics/).

We recognize that these categories and dimensions rely on analytical distinctions: both within journalism and audience, actual communication always includes aspects of performance and expectations. Additionally, ‘journalism’ and ‘audience’ are broad roles which contain various actors, organizations and interests.

Additional information and findings are available at http://jpub20.hans-bredow-institut.de/.