The rise of the internet, then social media, then the ubiquity of smartphones each successively raised questions about how journalists think about and interact with the people on the receiving end of their work. We're talking about that nebulous concept known as the "audience" -- or, as Jay Rosen famously said nearly 20 years ago, "the people formerly known as the audience," people newly enabled by digital media to participate and engage with journalists and their work as never before.
So, it's not surprising that the journalist-audience relationship has been one of the most central lines of research about journalism for the past 15-plus years. There's much discussion, too, about the "audience turn" in the news industry -- in the way that media organizations are far more focused on understanding who their audiences are and what they want than they were in 20th century mass media -- and also in journalism studies research -- in the way that scholars are shifting significant attention to making sense of how people, going about their everyday lives, feel about and make sense of news: whether they love it, hate it, or avoid it altogether.
But sometimes lost amid that focus on journalists and their audiences is the reality that there is no unidimensional relationship between the two, just as audiences themselves, as James Webster reminds us, always remain an abstraction, it being impossible for media producers to know, with total accuracy, who has consumed their content (and why). What we have needed in research is a more careful elaboration of the many, diverse forms that journalist-audience relationships might take.
In that spirit, Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, Louise Oberhülsmann, and Tim van Olphen have delivered a useful new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly: "From cultivating fans to coping with troublemakers: A typology of journalists' audience relationships." Over several years, Loosen and her team interviewed 52 journalists in Germany representing a range of characteristics -- not just differences in demographics, but also in the relative stability associated with their jobs: some working in traditional reporting roles for established media outlets, others producing content for innovation units within those companies or in startups. All were identifiable journalists working under bylines, as opposed to doing mostly behind-the-scenes tasks.
The researchers found that there isn't one journalist-audience relationship to speak of, but rather "eleven distinct ideal-typical relationship forms," each a kind of "sub-relationship" that journalists establish with their audience or different segments within it, depending on the circumstances involved. The authors describe these 11 relationship forms as "building blocks" of the broader approach that journalists develop toward audiences overall. They also make clear that most journalists draw on multiple forms in the way they think about and interact with the audience, depending on the context at a given moment or in a given role.
Loosen and colleagues depict these relationship forms in a helpful spatial way. The y-axis represents the kind of audience -- from general public at the bottom of the y-axis, to social groups in the middle, to individuals at the top. The x-axis captures the type of communicative practices involved: from just imagining what the audience is like to observing the audience (say, through metrics) to actually interacting with the audience.
Additionally, the researchers considered the frame of relevance involved in each of the relationship forms: were they closer to traditional journalistic roles (such as emotional detachment) or nontraditional in nature (such as involving stronger emotions)?
This helped them organize those 11 relationship forms into four main clusters. The first cluster is fairly traditional: relationship forms based on imagining and observing/measuring the audience as a general public. This includes such forms as:
The second cluster focuses on relationship forms organized around interaction and oriented toward groups, including:
These are relationship forms that challenge the professional status quo in how journalists conceptualize and engage with their audience (or, in this, a community with which they might hold some affinity or solidarity).
The third cluster involves more pronounced forms of interaction (as opposed to mere imagination or observation), and this time further pushes in the direction of orienting toward individuals, not just groups. We're getting further away from the baseline of journalists imagining a general public. In this cluster, there are four relationship forms:
Finally, the fourth cluster points to relationship forms where journalists are experiencing toxicity from the audience or turning away altogether. Here, we are talking about things such as:
This research has a lot to offer, and not just to those of us who care about finely nuanced details about the ways that journalists relate to audiences.
First, it gives language to the emotional economy of the beat. Reporters in the study describe communities that make them "insanely happy" and "a great gift," and debates that are "almost a bit of fun," even as they ration limited mental and emotional bandwidth. This emphasis on emotions is important: The affective nature of journalism sometimes gets overlooked, but it's a vital part of understanding how these relationship forms unfold -- and thus valuable for understanding how coverage decisions are made, which audiences gets attention vs. who gets ignored, and so forth.
Second, the study shows that "to fully understand journalists' audience relationships, it is insufficient to focus only on practices of relating to the audience. Given journalists' limited resources -- such as time and emotional energy -- audience relationships are more about balancing the engagement with certain audiences with the disconnection from others, particularly the unattractive, the troublemakers, and, to some extent, the affected" (emphasis in the original).
So, what should editors and reporters do with this information? Perhaps a starting point is to recognize that because there is no unifying journalist-audience relationship, we should expect journalists to modify the relationship forms they employ as a kind of ever-evolving repertoire, in a highly context-driven way. This calls up questions about when it's best, say, to think and behave like a mass broadcaster reaching distant citizens/consumers compared with engaging like a community builder -- or when the best course is to disconnect from audiences entirely.
"In diversity we trust? Examining the effect of political newsroom diversity on media trust, use, and avoidance." By Eliana DuBosar, Jay D. Hmielowski, and Muhammad Ehab Rasul, in Communication Research.
For about a generation, transparency has been touted as a key element in restoring trust in news, a potential alternative to objectivity as a credibility-building tool. That assertion is often a fairly straightforward one to test empirically, and scholars have tested the effects a wide variety of forms of journalistic transparency over the years: corrections, story labels, explanations of story selection and framing, information about the journalist, the race or ethnicity of the journalist, and so on.
One transparency element that hasn't been tested is the political makeup of an organization's reporting staff. Many news consumers operate with a perceived notion of that makeup for some of the news sources they encounter, and research on conservative news audiences has indicated that they would be more inclined to trust a news source if they knew there were more conservatives in the newsroom. That assertion is the foundation for what DuBosar and her colleagues wanted to test in three experiments on U.S. news consumers.
In each of the experiments, some participants were given a breakdown of the overall proportions of political conservatives, liberals, and, in the case of two experiments, moderates. (Two experiments were done with a real news organization, and one with a fictional one.)
The experiments' results all pointed in the same direction: Disclosing a newsroom's overall ideological leanings made people more likely to consume its content only when its ideological makeup was balanced. Not surprisingly, when the ideological mix favored the opposing side, conservative and liberal audiences were more likely to avoid the outlet. But they didn't give a corresponding advantage to outlets whose journalists were tilted toward their own side -- they wanted an appearance of balance instead. (Independents avoided news from newsrooms that were tilted to both the left and right.)
The authors' conclusions seemed to run somewhat counter to what we've often seen from journalists and observers advocating for transparency as a post-objectivity strategy. "If news organizations do continue to embrace transparency," they said, "they would need to make having an ideologically diverse newsroom a priority or place a greater emphasis on ideals traditionally associated with objectivity." They also noted that animosity toward opposing political views seems to play a greater role in the news selection process than affinity for similar views.
"Consumer preferences and willingness to pay for digital journalism in intermedia competition: A conjoint analysis of online news users in the Austrian market." By Daniel O'Brien, Christian Zabel, and Frank Lobigs, in Digital Journalism.
If we had to determine the single most persistent and important business-side question for news organizations over the past decade, "What influences people's decisions to pay for online news?" would be a strong contender. That's the question O'Brien and colleagues have set out to answer in a survey of Austrian media users.
Others, of course, have sought to answer this question before, but this study has a couple of particular factors in mind: First, the relative attractiveness and importance of print, broadcast, and digital-first news brands in digital journalism; and second, the type of content, like news, sports, entertainment, and weather. The researchers used choice-based conjoint analysis, a survey-based technique common to market research, in which participants made several choices between sets of two pieces of news that varied across price, brand, content, and access model.
The results allowed them to attach a percentage of the collective news selection decision that each attribute accounted for. Price was the dominant factor, accounting for 58% of the decision. Not surprisingly, by far the most influential characteristic for participants' choosing a piece of news was if it was free. The content access model was second most influential (14% of the decision), with freemium models the least popular. Next came additional content (13% of the decision), with weather deemed the most valuable and sports the least.
The least relevant category was the type of news provider, with print publishers' digital content seen as marginally more desirable than broadcasters', and digital-native publishers coming in last. The authors also broke the users into different categories, finding that out of the heavier news consumers, older users actually had a stronger preference for free content than younger ones.
The overall results aren't particularly encouraging for news organizations that are charging for online content. "Consumer reluctance to pay for news remains an obstacle, consistent with the 'free mentality,' which is unlikely to change," the authors wrote. But they do suggest a surprising area for differentiation in a crowded marketplace: Perhaps it might be a bit less around content or brand than originally thought, and more around a varied or innovative access model.
"Dark deserts: Newspaper decline and its relation to government non-compliance with public records laws." By Brett Posner-Ferdman and David Cuillier, in News Research Journal.
"The document divide: Public record requester demographics, efficacy and those left behind." By David Cuillier and A. Jay Wagner, in News Research Journal.
Public records requests are a crucial component to accountability journalism in many parts of the world, including in the U.S., where the federal Freedom of Information Act of 1966 has been a boon to journalists but still allows for all kinds of government stonewalling and obfuscation.
Cuillier might be the country's foremost expert on freedom of information, and he co-authored two studies, both published last month, that provide some valuable new data on who makes open records requests and how local governments respond to them. In one of the studies, Cuillier and Posner-Ferdman requested the same seven documents of all 50 U.S. states, scoring them on their transparency in responding.
They found that states with more newspapers per capita were significantly more likely to thoroughly comply with records requests, as were states with stronger state press associations. (The relationship did not hold for digital-native news organizations.) Newspapers' watchdog actions and the training that press associations provide, the authors suggested, don't just produce benefits for journalists seeking public records, but might lead to more responsive governments for citizens more broadly.
In the second study, Cuillier and Wagner conducted a survey of public records requesters, finding them through the public records service MuckRock, freedom of information listservs, and local public records request logs. As the authors acknowledged, their sample wasn't random or comprehensive, though given the difficulty of obtaining a representative sample of U.S. public records requesters, it's probably the fullest look we've gotten at who makes these requests.
They found that requesters were, as a whole, whiter, older, wealthier, and more likely to be male than both the population as a whole and journalists in particular. They were also significantly more likely to self-describe as politically liberal (60%) than the general population (25%). Men, and those who were older and more educated, were also more likely to sue over enforcement of public records requests. The study's findings, the authors concluded, suggested a "document divide" in which "those with greater societal power and wealth are more likely to utilize public record laws, furthering their advantage while others are left behind." This divide, they said, is one that governments, educational institutions, nonprofits, news organizations, and philanthropists can and should work to resolve.
"Scholarly disengagement as an epistemic crisis: Clickbait, credibility, and the decline of public-facing science." By Maalvika Bhat, Daniel Romero, and Emoke-Agnes Horvat, in Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference. As most any journalist will probably tell you, it's not getting any easier to find sources for most stories. Some of the reasons might reflect broader social trends: Media trust has plummeted, and social media has allowed people to directly reach audiences far more easily. Some strong research has shown, though, that personal experiences with being a source for a story often do not encourage repeat cooperation.
Bhat (who, it should be noted, was accused of plagiarism on her Substack a few weeks ago, though not related to this study; she has responded to the accusations here) and her colleagues examined the experiences of one particular type of sources: academic researchers. They surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. researchers to ask about their disengagement from news media coverage of their work.
Using open-ended survey questions, the researchers asked about what researchers do to ensure their work is covered accurately and how sensationalization or misuse of their research in media affects their work. They found that scholars in the health sciences, political science, environmental science, and media and communications were more likely to disengage from media coverage -- in many cases, precisely the disciplines that are subject to the most media and online skepticism and sensationalism. Late-career scholars were also more likely to disengage.
The reasons scholars gave for disengaging were much more closely tied to what they saw as incomplete, inaccurate, or sensationalistic coverage than to online or professional blowback. The most commonly cited reasons for disengaging were oversimplified research, a loss of narrative control, and selective quoting. Researchers frequently reported engaging in what the authors called "defensive media strategies" like insisting on reviewing their quotes and asking for headlines to be changed. Fourteen percent of the scholars surveyed said they had completely disengaged from news media coverage of their work.
The authors noted that their sample was limited to researchers who had experienced media coverage of their work, making it possible that disengagement was more heavily represented. But given that they never explicitly brought up disengagement in their questions (though they did refer to sensationalization or media misuse of research), the extent of sources' disengagement -- and the disparaging reasons for that disengagement -- were evidence of a more challenging environment for reporters dealing with academic research.