Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public

219 Pages·2021·1.887 MB·English

by  Jacob L. Nelson

Imagined Audiences
JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION UNBOUND
Series editors: Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
Nikki Usher, The University of Illinois Urbana-C hampaign
Journalism and Political Communication Unbound seeks to be a high-p rofile
book series that reaches far beyond the academy to an interested public
of policymakers, journalists, public intellectuals, and citizens eager to make
sense of contemporary politics and media. “Unbound” in the series title has
multiple meanings: It refers to the unbinding of borders between the fields
of communication, political communication, and journalism, as well as related
disciplines such as political science, sociology, and science and technology
studies; it highlights the ways traditional frameworks for scholarship have
disintegrated in the wake of changing digital technologies and new social,
political, economic, and cultural dynamics; and it reflects the unbinding
of media in a hybrid world of flows across mediums.
Other books in the series:
Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities
Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young
Imagined Audiences
How Journalists Perceive and Pursue
the Public
JACOB L. NELSON
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Nelson, Jacob L., author.
Title: Imagined audiences : how journalists perceive and pursue the public / Jacob L. Nelson.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Series: Journalism and pol commun unbound series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045400 (print) | LCCN 2020045401 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197542590 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197542606 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780197542620 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: News audiences—U nited States— History— 21st century. |
Journalism— United States— History— 21st century. | Online journalism z
United States— History— 21st century. | Journalism—T echnological
innovations.
Classification: LCC PN 4 784 . N 48 N45 2021 (print) | LCC PN 4 784 . N 48 (ebook) |
DDC 071/ .3— dc23
LC record available at https://l ccn.loc.gov/ 2020045400
LC ebook record available at https://l ccn.loc.gov/ 2020045401
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197542590.001.0001
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Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Talia Grey
Preface
In summer 2010, I began work as an editor for a local news website. The site’s
owners aspired to solve a problem that had perplexed local news publishers
since the advent of the internet: In an online environment, where profit
comes from huge audiences, how do you make news with a geographically
confined readership financially sustainable? The company’s answer was to
develop strong bonds between local communities and the journalists hired
to cover them. The owners believed that doing so would make ads on their
sites more valuable than those found anywhere else online because they
would be reaching a more devoted and attentive group of people.
How were these community bonds pursued? The tactics varied wildly
from quarter to quarter. At first, editors were given budgets so we could
hire freelancers to cover as much local news as possible. The budgets soon
disappeared, and editors were given video cameras and told to make a lot
of short videos. We tried photo galleries. Then audio-s lideshows. We held
events. We sponsored local debates. We enlisted residents to write columns
for a small amount of money. When those budgets dried up as well, we
encouraged the same residents to blog for free. It sometimes felt like our
executives had assembled a list of journalism innovations cited in the trade
press or discussed at industry conferences, thrown them into a bag, and
plucked a new one out each month.
In 2013, the company tried another approach to profitability: It laid off
half its editorial staff.
Since then, journalism’s problems have only grown more complicated and
its fate has grown more uncertain. This book is about the people confronting
that uncertainty.
Introduction
There is never a single answer to the question of “What do audiences
want?”
Anthony Nadler1
In a cluster of cubicles in the middle of the Chicago Tribune’s downtown
newsroom, Tom Palmer holds an iPad to his face and stares.
As one of the paper’s digital editors, he has been tasked with reviewing
an investigative report that’s about to run to see how it will look on mobile
platforms when it gets published.
“We try to replicate our users’ experience,” Palmer explains.
A few moments later, he gives the okay to his team. They send out a
breaking news alert that immediately reaches 60,000 people. The other dig-
ital editors begin posting the story to the paper’s homepage and social media
pages, changing the photos and headline that had been chosen for the print
version in an effort to make it more appealing to each medium-s pecific
audience.
“We massage it for an online readership,” one of the editors says.
“How do you know what each audience wants?” I ask.
“It’s educated guessing,” he replies. Then, while gesturing to an open tab on
his computer browser that lists an elaborate set of online audience metrics,
he adds, “Combined with some tools to kind of check your work.”
Ten miles south of Tribune Tower, the four journalists behind City Bureau
arrange tables and chairs while waiting for people to arrive. They are pre-
paring for one of their Public Newsrooms, weekly events that invite commu-
nity members from Chicago’s South and West Sides to meet with and speak
to local journalists.
“When people think of journalists, they think of this nameless, face-
less other,” says Bettina Chang, City Bureau’s co- founder and editorial di-
rector. “Trying to bring them together with journalists in a collaborative
Imagined Audiences. Jacob L. Nelson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197542590.003.0001
2 Imagined Audiences
environment, or just an environment where everybody is learning together,
is so important.”
Public Newsrooms are intended to provide an opportunity for community
members who feel left out of traditional journalism to share their thoughts
and questions with reporters. They also enable reporters to learn from com-
munity members about how their work is received.
“We are trying to tell communities that we care about them, that they can
see us face to face, and that they can interact with us in lots of different ways,”
Chang explains. “For City Bureau, community engagement is a two-w ay
street that’s always occupied.”
At the Tribune, the audience comprises numbers on a screen. At City
Bureau, it comprises people in a room. For the former, the pursuit of the au-
dience is a battle for attention. For the latter, it’s a quest for connection.
The journalists behind both organizations believe they understand the
people they hope to reach, and this understanding motivates the decisions
they make to reach them.
The truth is that no one ever knows for sure.
The changing role of the audience in journalism
Like all forms of media, journalism’s success depends in no small part
on its reception. An article that includes the most scandalous of scoops
accomplishes nothing if no one reads it. And a newspaper can’t hope to
pay its staff and generate a profit if its offerings don’t compel people to be-
come subscribers. All news publishers, be they television, magazine, print,
or online, thus depend on finding and maintaining an audience to survive.
Journalists know this to be true, and that knowledge affects how they ap-
proach their work. What they do not know, however, is whom precisely that
audience comprises, and what compels them to spend their time with the
news. As a result, the choices journalists make— in the stories they tell and
the ways that they tell them— are molded and constrained by the assumptions
they form about the people they hope to reach.
These assumptions have always mattered, but they have grown even
more important in recent years. As the news industry attempts to over-
come its ongoing crises of diminishing revenue and public trust, its focus
has increasingly shifted toward embracing a public it was once all too happy
to largely ignore. Many within journalism now believe that, in a digital
Introduction 3
era where audiences enjoy a seemingly endless spectrum of media choice,
news publishers must become more deliberate in their efforts to earn au-
dience loyalty. Additionally, persistent attacks on journalism’s credibility
from distrustful citizens have forced those in the profession to acknowledge
that their relationship with the public is in bad shape. There is an emerging
consensus among journalism publishers, funders, and researchers that the
news industry needs to improve its relationship with the public to overcome
its greatest challenges. As a result, journalists across the globe have begun
investing more time and resources into understanding, measuring, and en-
gaging with their audiences than they ever had in the past.
This intervention goes by a number of names—s uch as “engaged,”2 “par-
ticipatory,”3 “reciprocal,”4 and “public-p owered”5 journalism— all of which
trace the profession’s problems to the notion that audiences are no longer
willing to tolerate a one- sided relationship in which the power dynamic is
skewed and their input is rarely solicited or valued. The rationale underlying
the news industry’s embrace of the audience lies in part in the idea that doing
so will remove the marker of elitism that many now believe to be one of the
most distasteful aspects of the profession among the public. News publishers
have also begun transitioning from advertising-s upported to audience-
supported revenue models, which means their efforts to understand and
engage with news audiences are seen as not only intuitively appealing but
also financially necessary.6 As the desire to more deliberately understand,
engage with, and profit from news audiences continues to gain momentum
throughout the news industry, so does the need to understand the beliefs
journalists hold about whom their audiences include and what they want
from news.
The connection between how journalists perceive and pursue their
audiences raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize
their audiences? Who gets included in these conceptualizations, and who is
left out? Perhaps most important, how aligned are journalism’s “imagined”
audiences with the real ones?
Outline of the book
In the pages that follow, I explore these questions. Chapter 1 offers a com-
prehensive examination of journalism’s relationship with its audience as well
as the impact of that relationship on the practice of journalism. Chapter 2
4 Imagined Audiences
introduces readers to the concept of “audience engagement,” an increas-
ingly common term within journalism research and practice used to refer
to attempts to improve the relationship between news producers and con-
sumers. The chapter argues that the growing appeal of audience engagement
among journalists is at least partially a response to the pressing problems
the profession currently faces—n amely a lack of public trust and economic
stability.
The next three chapters draw on ethnographic data collected from three
news organizations: the Chicago Tribune, City Bureau, and Hearken. Both
the Tribune and City Bureau publish news, while Hearken offers tools and
services to newsrooms interested in improving their relationship with their
audiences. As Chapter 3 reveals, each has its own distinct take on what
people expect from news. Though the employees I spoke with at each of the
organizations share the belief that audiences are disenchanted with the news,
their conclusions about the source of that disenchantment differ dramati-
cally. Chapter 4 examines the origins of the imagined audiences to under-
stand how perceptions of the news audience can vary significantly among
journalism professionals living within the same city.
Chapter 5 explores how differences in the way journalists imagine their
audiences shape their self- perceptions, which consequently shape their audi-
ence pursuits. Journalists at the Tribune are ambivalent about engaging with
audiences more than they have in the past. They see an upside but also ample
potential for aggravation. Because those at Hearken and City Bureau believe
audiences have much to offer journalism, they adamantly pursue— and ad-
vocate for— a more “engaged” approach to news production that emphasizes
collaboration and communication between journalists and the public. These
engagement- focused approaches to news audiences seek to ensure that
journalists draw on a more diverse set of voices to more accurately reflect the
people they attempt to reach.
However, as Chapter 6 reveals, audience engagement is complicated and
can create as many questions as it seeks to answer. For example, although audi-
ence engagement was not mandated at the Chicago Tribune, some journalists
felt compelled to pursue it regardless. Yet those who did described feelings
of uncertainty, frustration, and even fear as a result of their interactions with
the audience, which often were much darker than expected. Furthermore,
as Chapter 7 explores, even when audience engagement leads to journalism
that reflects a wider array of viewpoints, that does not necessarily mean the
same as journalism that reaches an audience willing to pay to support it.