Accessing the Audience Community: How Newspapers Connect with Audience Communities in Finland, Japan, and Korea

Abstract

The article contributes to the research on media management by approaching the audience as consisting of communities, instead of considering it a mass audience. By developing audience community as a concept in media management and audience research and investigating mainstream newspapers’ perceptions and practices of audience community relations, the study aims to provide a future outlook for the changing community nature of audiences. Newspaper organizations are starting to perceive the audience as a more concrete network of people, and journalistic processes can increasingly consist of generating platforms and practices for communication and communal activities with and among the audience. In the article, these processes are studied empirically by means of a qualitative study carried out in Finnish, Japanese, and Korean newspapers. Interestingly, the findings indicate that audience communities do not, after all, play an important role in the daily practices of the newspapers. The engagement with audience communities in social media is only occasional, intermittent, and by no means systematic. By contrast, interaction with offline communities seems to be more familiar and considered more valuable than connecting with audience communities in social media.

Additional information

Funding

Mikko Villi would like to thank the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Mobile Social Media and Media Organizations project) and the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education for supporting the study.