The news and its audiences

In this chapter we’ve seen that there is a complex relationship between audiences, communicators, content, and context. This holds true whether we are in the parlour of a house in early 20th century America, being a “good listener” as we practice Baker’s “art of conversation”, or traversing the virtual spaces of social media as a 21st century digital communicator trying to improve the reach of our content.

In the final sections of this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at this multifaceted relationship by focusing on a particular type of communication: news.

Why news? Even in a fragmented media environment, where audience attention is dispersed across a staggeringly high number of platforms and outlets, news consumption remains important. Most of us are news consumers in some form. Even if we actively avoid the news, that in itself is a practice worth investigating. (Indeed, news avoidance is on the rise).

As a media industry with a very long history, news also gives us an opportunity to observe changes over time. There are some fascinating studies on news consumption in the first half of the 20th century that still have great relevance today, including Bernard Berelson’s famous investigation of how New Yorkers “missed the news” during the newspaper delivery strikes of 1945 (Berelson 1949).

Photo by Ron Lach from Pexels. What kind of news audience are you? Listener, reader, scroller… or news avoider?

Today, the audience is at the heart of some of the news industry’s major problems, which include declining trust in journalism, increasing polarisation, the sharing of misinformation, and the erosion of audiences for mainstream news outlets. Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, audiences themselves have been taking on journalistic roles through blogging and by producing user-generated content for mainstream news outlets, leading to the rise of citizen journalism. At the same time, journalistic roles have changed to encompass more interaction with audiences on social media platforms.

But what do audiences actually do with news?

Historically, audience behaviour was neglected in academic studies of the news industry, which were more concerned with news production (how news was made) and the analysis of news texts (Bird 2011). More recently there has been what Irene Costera Meijer described as an “audience turn” in journalism studies and in journalism practice. Costera Meijer defines this “audience turn” as a shift “from paying attention to audiences as problematic for journalism’s role in democracy to reckoning with audiences as fundamental to keeping journalism alive as a constructive force in democracy” (2020: 2330).

In other words, those who study and practice journalism are no longer thinking of news audiences as a vague, undefined public to whom news is “served”. The expectations of audiences, and their interactions with news products and practices, are now front of mind within the industry and the scholarship.