Including the Audience

Abstract

The audience has always been an important reference for journalism although, under mass media conditions, it remained an “operative fiction” for its practitioners, reflecting a clear distinction between sender and recipients. Recent shifts in mediated communication towards networked public spheres and the increasing implementation of participatory features force media organizations, journalists and scholars alike to rethink the journalism–audience relationship. We introduce the concept of audience inclusion in journalism, to provide an analytical framework to investigate the relationship between journalists and (their) audience. The article presents the results of a multi-method case study of the German television newscast “Tagesschau” and its online platform tagesschau.de, and compares the attitudes of journalists and audience members towards the role of journalists, the relevance of participatory functions, the motivations for participation, and their general assessment of audience participation. By and large we find congruence between journalists' and users' expectations towards audience participation in news journalism. However, there is notable disagreement regarding the (assumed) motivations of users for participating at “Tagesschau”.

KEYWORDS:

• audience participation
• case study
• inclusion
• journalism
• journalistic role conceptions
• self-image
• system theory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Further information on the background of the project and its outcomes is provided in our project blog (http://jpub20.hans-bredow-institut.de). The authors would like to thank the student assistants Christina Heller, Hendrik Holdmann, Mareike Scheler and Niklas Weith, as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. See http://www.ard.de/intern/ard-erste-tagesschau-quote-nachrichten/-/id=1886/nid=1886/did=2680936/10gqz4z/.

2. See http://www.facebook.com/#!/tagesschau/likes.

3. See https://plus.google.com/112424296951779201005/posts.

4. We assume incongruence to be indicated by a difference of means larger than 0.5. This is also supported by t-tests which have shown that differences are highly significant (p<0.001) when larger than 0.45 (journalistic role conceptions and the (expected) importance of participatory functions), 0.47 (general assessment of audience participation), as well as 0.54 (“meta”), 0.65 (“Tagesschau-Blog”), 0.71 (audience mail), 0.74 (Facebook) regarding the (assumed) participation motivations of users.

Additional information

Funding

FUNDING The presented case study is part of a research project which is funded by the German Research Foundation [grant number LO 853/4-1] for 2.5 years (2011–2014).