The term audience refers to the individuals and groups to whom products and services, like journalism, are produced for or in the service of. Typically, this would be the readers, listeners, viewers, and so on that a news organization seeks to serve.
News audiences in particular are sometimes interchangeably called “the public” or citizens. Those designations typically imply a civic objective: they are individuals that journalists should seek to inform so that they may participate intelligently in democratic processes.
Audiences may also be referred to as news consumers, which sometimes implies a more commercial logic—after all, the consumption of a product is what is highlighted—and thus emphasizes the organization’s economic objectives over its social ones.
More recently, the term news users has received attention because it moves away from the passive connotation of consumption and instead offers audiences more agency by suggesting that they can actively participate in media use.
Although these terms differ, they all orient themselves toward what we can ultimately call ‘news audiences.’
Although news organizations often depend on their audiences for their financial success—whether directly through subscriptions or indirectly through advertisements—the newsrooms within those organizations have historically wanted little to do with their audiences.
News audiences have historically been treated in a fairly passive sense, as recipients of media or commodities. Put another way, they were often thought about as just people who consumed the work of journalists, and with whom the journalists rarely ever interacted with—save for the occasional letter or phone call the journalist might receive.
Dating back to the 1930s, much of the thinking was oriented around a hypodermic needle model wherein ‘the audience’ was seen as a passive, monolithic group that simply accepted media messages as intended by the sender—in this case, the journalist. This view has progressively become less common since the 1950s.
Today, audiences are typically seen as having more agency in how they encounter and interpret media messages. Put differently, they are seen as being more able to determine how they find news, being more able to participate in how news is produced and distributed, and having greater ability to interpret news through their own filters, which in turn are shaped by their individual background and beliefs. This has profoundly changed how audiences are thought about, both professionally and academically.
Additionally, there are now greater commercial pressures for journalists to think about their audiences as potential active participants in news production and distribution, and to enlist their help in order to lower news production costs and increase the organization’s reach. Indeed, as advertising revenue declines for many sectors and in many parts of the world, commercial news organizations must rely more on audience subscriptions, which generally benefit when audiences feel more engaged. Even with government- and foundation-supported news media, audience engagement is becoming more important to legitimize news organizations' requests for funding.
However, just because audiences can participate does not mean that news producers will seek or even want their participation.
It has been argued that part of what gives a journalist a professional sense of identity if that they have a ‘sixth-sense’ for news, and the training to produce it well. Journalists have thus historically rejected high degrees of audience participation in news production because they perceived such participation to be an affront to their independence and expertise, and thus to the quality of the news content they produced.
In recent years, however, there has been a cultural shift within the industry toward welcoming participation that is not solely the result of commercial pressures. Journalists today are generally more open to the idea of co-production with audiences since they have seen first-hand the quality of the work that citizen journalists have been able to produce. They also now have access to technological actants that make it easier to enlist the help of audiences to engage in certain tasks, like reviewing large troves of public documents released by whistleblowers and activists. Furthermore, there is greater acceptance of the idea that audiences have more to offer journalism—whether through story ideas or their own social networks—than they have been able to contribute in the past.
However, just because audience participation is welcomed does not mean that audiences will themselves want to participate. This is especially true if there is no incentive for participation, or if they’re treated as an appendix of sorts in the broad scheme of things. Put differently, audiences are attuned to exploitation—such as being asked to simply do grunt work for free—and participatory forms of journalism are therefore most successful when the relationships are perceived as being reciprocal, with both journalists and audiences feeling like they have gained something as a result.
Today’s media ecology has also complicated ideas about audiences and the experiences they have. For one, the rapid growth of media choices people have and the ease in which they may access those choices has resulted in the fragmentation of news audiences. No longer do tens of millions of people in the U.S. tune in to see a single news broadcast at the same time, as was the case for CBS Evening News under Walter Cronkite in the 1960s and 70s. Similarly, news audiences are no longer bound to the handful of channels their TV or radio antennas might pick up, or to the delivery zones of their local newspapers, or even to the cultural tastes of their local stores that sell magazines.
Instead, news audiences today can easily navigate their way to the New York Times' website for national news, the Boston Globe’s website for regional news, ESPN’s website for sports news, and SCOTUSblog for news about the Supreme Court. If they want to stream local news from the National Public Radio member station in Minneapolis in the morning, and then download a recorded broadcast from its Miami affiliate in the evening, they can do that, too. If they want to see how the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, covered a particular issue, they can likely find that on YouTube or the BBC’s website.
In short, news audiences have access to far more news content, and far more sources, than ever before—and the cost of switching between news organizations, in terms of both money and convenience, is also lower than ever before in many regards. This makes it difficult for a single news organization to gain a near-monopoly on audiences. However, it has resulted in a media ecosystem wherein a few large organizations are able to capture fairly large audiences due to brand recognition, followed by a steep drop-off to a long tail comprised of many news organizations that can only capture niche audiences and are, in many cases, deemed to be interchangeable by users.
Furthermore, not only do audiences now have access to more options for news but they also have more options for other media, including entertainment, which competes with news for a finite amount of audience attention. That, in turn, can further fragment audiences as they turn to other organizations to satisfy particular media desires instead of relying on a single source, like CBS or NBC, to single-handedly satisfy their want for news, culture, and entertainment.
Although news audiences now have more agency, it is also important to be aware that technological actants play an important role in mediating the interactions between news audiences and journalistic actors, like news organizations. For example, when an individual searches for “news” on YouTube, algorithms developed by engineers at YouTube decide how to order the presentation of results—and those algorithms, in turn, are optimized to promote certain kinds of content. Thus, news audiences are sometimes given a false sense of control, as the search algorithms work invisibly to promote certain kinds of content while deliberately obfuscating alternatives.
Similarly, the experiences that news audiences have may be personalized. For example, an individual may go on a news organization’s website and find the opinion pieces about issues the individual cares about is placed near the top of the page, with the determination coming from a technological actant’s analysis of the individual’s past browsing behavior. When that individual clicks on one of those opinion pieces, which happens to be about climate change, they’ll find that the third paragraph of the story is tailored by another algorithm to describe the average highs and lows over the past few decades in the area around the coffee shop the individual is accessing the website from. Then, as the individual scrolls to the middle of the article, they encounter a static map that is automatically zoomed into their state because yet another technological actant determined the individual is using their phone to access the page. Had they used a device with a larger screen, like a laptop, the individual would have seen an interactive map of the entire United States from the get-go, which promotes a different experience for the individual.
Technological actants have also altered way news audiences and journalistic actors communicate with one another, and thus the kinds of relationships they tend to develop. For example, audience members are now more likely to give feedback on a story through brief, immediate, public exchanges directed at the journalist using a platform like Twitter, as opposed to longer, slower, private exchanges like a letter or e-mail. This can result in more meaningful and direct audience participation, even as it can promote negative forms of participation, such as ‘brigading’ and strategic harassment.
Audiences are the individuals and groups to whom products and services, like journalism, are produced for or in the service of.
Historically, journalistic audiences have generally been thought about in a fairly passive sense, as recipients of media or commodities. In more recent times, journalistic audiences have gained greater ability (and recognition) as active participants in media production and distribution.
Just because audiences can participate does not mean that producers will want or seek their participation, or that audiences will themselves want to participate.
Today’s diffuse media ecology permits greater news audience fragmentation, as audiences not only have more choices but further tend to consume different kinds of news from different news organizations. Additionally, news media are competing with even more (non-news) media than before for a finite amount of attention.
The relationships between journalistic actors and audiences is greatly mediated today by technological actants.