Expanding Journalism Theories to Address User Participation

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2010 is Mirjam Gollmitzer, whose interest is in audience participation in journalism. Such participation can take any number of different forms, of course – from commenting to the creation of whole new articles and other forms of content. Such types of participation can be conceptualised in relation to the degree of audience control over content, can be categorised into different forms of interaction and creation of content, and can be evaluated with reference to the overall visibility of audience contributions, for example.

What is interest here is what happens when such typologies enter into a dialogue with various established journalism theories – Bourdieu’s field theory, which examines the media as a field with its own structures and institutions; Habermas’s public sphere theory which establishes an ideal of public communication and political debate; and Shoemaker & Reese’s hierarchy of influences, which postulates concentric circles of influence extending from the media content at the centre through journalists, their routines, organisations, and extra-media influences, to ideology as the wider background. The impact of the audiences could be mapped at every level here, for example.

In field theory, there is a division between audiences and the media, and audience members could be included in the media field and the production of news; also, ‘new agents’ (for example, citizen journalists) may be said to enter the media field, introducing their own routines, and symbolic power can be understood to be shared with audiences.

In public sphere theory, active citizen participation is already a cornerstone, as journalists facilitate citizen deliberation. For audience media to gain a role here, user-to-user visibility needs to be included here, and the style and content of contributions as well as the question of who is allowed to participate in public sphere engagement need to be considered in public sphere theory, which (historically) has not always been the case.

This may enable us to better trace any possible moves towards a more multiperspectival journalism and an emerging norm of transparency in journalism; however, the research tools which examine audience participation are currently perhaps largely limited to online activities, which limits research approaches. The democratising potential of increased space for audience participation and emancipation needs to be further explored.