- Key People:
- Carl I. Hovland
audiences
Television, radio, newspaper, and website viewers and readers are usually referred to as audiences. These are the people who make any media product matter: They are the targeted recipients of most media products, especially advertising. Media products such as newspapers, magazines, television shows, and radio programs are often designed to attract particular types of audiences, so they can sell advertising to companies that want those same people to learn about and buy their products and services. For media companies that rely on advertising, any money generated by subscriptions is not nearly as much as that gained from selling advertising space and audiences to advertisers.
How audience members relate to and negotiate with the media and its products has long been an interest of researchers, and the topic is generating new interest as new information and communication technologies (NICTs) change the relationship between media and audiences. Most media companies rely on market research to know their audiences, something that might be problematic if they rely on off-line customer surveys when most of the readers have moved online.
Academic research on audienceāmedia relationships has involved multiple methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks, including psychoanalytical and psychosocial approaches. The psychoanalytical approach is concerned with text analysis and the inner processes that take place in the minds of the audience. Psychosocial research paradigms address how psychological and social worlds interact in the reading and viewing experience. These approaches represent attempts to understand, at depth, the multifaceted relationship and engagement between the media text and audiences. This entry discusses the relationship between audiences and media and ways in which NICTs have changed this relationship.
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Media Relationships and Consumption
For some audiences, media consumption is a daily ritual and any disruption of their consumption patterns can generate complaints. This occurred in 2014 in South Africa, when the cast of the popular television soap opera Generations refused to go on set over a contractual dispute. Viewers used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to express their displeasure at the producersā failure to resolve the dispute and to urge them to come to a resolution. Social media comments suggested audience members felt they were stakeholders in the public broadcaster and the show who felt entitled to daily episodes because they were paying television licenses. The executive producer of Generations ultimately fired the 16 actors who were on strike and replaced them with new ones, which at least initially brought more complaints on social media as audience members expressed disappointment with the new cast and plot changes.
Imagine Communities
Audienceāmedia relations also cement the notion of imagined community of viewers of that certain program. According to Benedict Anderson, consumers of media products usually imagine that their media consumption patterns are being replicated elsewhere by others, even when they have no proof that others are consuming the same media as them. Disruption of certain programs and nondelivery of media products such as newspapers sometimes affect interactions between audiences. News articles can spark debates among friends, colleagues at work, and even families, creating sites of conversation that are interrupted once the product delivery is interfered with.
Tabloid Journalism and Audiences
Tabloid newspapers not only differ in size from broadsheet newspapers but in the way articles are written; tabloid articles are typically written in a colloquial and sensational style. These newspapers feature pithy, sensational human-interest stories with bold and screaming headlines. Rather than privileging official statements on events, tabloids tend to privilege comments from ordinary people. They also tend to emphasize stories that are sensational, including bizarre occurrences, celebrity gossip, and political scandals. Audiences may relate differently to tabloid journalism than to other forms of journalism. Although tabloid journalism tends not to focus on issues with broad socioeconomic impact, when these issues are covered audiences may relate to them more easily because they are discussed in colloquial, accessible language.
Encoding/Decoding Model
Stuart Hallās encoding/decoding model is one of the most influential theories explaining how audiences understand news. Audiences may read the news as dominated reader, negotiated reader, or as oppositional reader. The dominated reader decodes messages in a way that supports the way the producers encoded the messages. Here, the reader is dominated by the news and sees his condition and that of the world represented in the news as natural. Negotiated readers understand the dominant readings embedded in a particular text but do not accept them in their entirety, instead accepting certain elements and rejecting others. In an oppositional reading, the reader understands the dominant ideology expressed in the text but rejects it and interprets the text in an alternative way.
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Citizen Journalism: Changes in Audience Roles
The advent and spread of NICTs into media and journalism has caused some transformations that have made the standing of audiences in the information flow problematic. Audiences could, because of NICTs, also be called news actors because they now not only consume media products but can collect, package, and disseminate information. NICTs allowed for new forms of interactivity in media and new ways for audience members to participate in the production and dissemination of news. Through NICTs, audience members can give journalists story leads, and to some extent, audiences are setting the agenda for news media using these tools.
Audiences are now challenging the mediaās monopoly and the top-down lecture modes of addressing viewers and readers, which in some cases can present ethical challenges. Scholars such as Mark Deuze suggest mainstream professional journalists have found it professionally challenging that those Jay Rosen calls āthe people formerly known as the audienceā sometimes break what are seen as orthodox rules or ethical standards of journalism. This deprofessionalizing of news gathering, processing, and dissemination has led to the interrogation of journalism as a profession.
Many who see journalism as a profession also argue that training and certification is necessary for practitioners, just as with fields such as law or medicine. That audience members, by virtue of access to a camera, keyboard, and the Internet, can capture, compile, edit, frame, and package an event as news without any regard to journalistic ethics is liberating and constraining at the same time. It is liberating in that individuals can tell stories from their perspective without gatekeeping. However, there is the risk that individuals may fail to gauge what is of public interest, leading, for instance, to potential security breaches.
Audiences have, through participating in news production, critiqued the status quo of the newsroom, conversed with each other, drawn intertextual links of trending events to others that provide background information, and distributed what they see as newsworthy to their networks on such social media platforms as Meta, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Thus, a news product, especially on TV or online, is never a complete story as the NICTs afford audiences to add, opine, analyze, and present their own assessment of what is going on and how others may think about issues. Professional media outlets nowadays have hashtags and Twitter handles where they encourage audiences to engage with them.
Reader comments on television news bulletins, live programs, online newspapers, and blogs have given audiences some form of power to raise their voices on certain issues. Reader comments are underresearched in media studies. Some scholars have argued that these are just uncontrolled public rants of little intellectual value from unknown people (as most commenters use pseudonyms). Comments pose challenges to the gatekeeping office of a news medium but the opening up of these digital public spheres has given people an opportunity to address certain issues in an unfettered fashion. Comments can be revealing, especially in societies that are closed and authoritarian in nature where media access to public information is limited by draconian laws and freedom of expression curtailed.
While audiences have become, to a certain extent, coproducers of news through setting the agenda for professional journalists, they have remained news consumers since the power relations have tended to favor a trained journalist in a professional newsroom. The power of the audiences cannot be overrated, however. It is important and integral to the practice of journalism to realize that as NICTs colonize the news production rituals, audiences are aware of their power, take opportunities to give feedback to media professionals, and in many instances see media as deliberative platforms where they can freely discuss and find solutions to problems.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.