Audiences and Journalistic Capital

Abstract

Journalists have found themselves in a complex relationship with audiences as they help gather and distribute news. Audiences represent a new type of entrant into the journalistic field, possibly bringing with them new forms of journalistic capital. This survey-based study sets out to explore how ordinary Americans assess traditional and emergent normative journalistic roles. The study also examines how citizens (N = 2058) and journalists (N = 414) compare in their assessment of this range of journalistic roles and finds that the two groups diverge significantly on assessments of most roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic capital
• journalistic roles
• normative roles
• audiences
• field theory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A portion of the data gathered for this study comes from the US portion of the Worlds of Journalism Study.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A substantial difference between the sample of radio journalists and the national population of radio journalists reported in the U.S. government data is due to the practice of including many radio employees that are not actually journalists in such reports (for example, “announcers”).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Reynolds Journalism Institute.