Towards a New Typology of Journalist-Audience Relationships

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is the excellent Wiebke Loosen, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences; this has long been understood as a monolithic relationship, but there is now a repertoire of relationships to the different constructions of their audiences that journalists may hold. This paper developed a typology of journalist-audience relationships, therefore, and it is based on 52 interviews with journalists of various backgrounds, beats, and organisations in Germany. The interviews sought to determine the communicative figurations between journalists and audiences.

This produced a typology of 11 relationship forms. Constructions of actors ranged from the general public through social groups to individuals; communicative practices from imagination through observation to interaction. Combining these two, relationship forms include several combining interaction with social groups and individuals, and several combining imagination with the general public.

From these, Wiebke singles out four specific relationship repertoires: are there specific patterns of relationship forms that any given journalist may hold? Of these, the truth-seeking repertoire predominantly involves distantly informing citizens, gaining the trust of knowledge-holders (i.e., sources, who are also considered to be part of the journalistic audience), and debating with discussion partners (e.g. correcting factual errors in audience responses); this accounted for the largest cluster of 16 journalists in the study. These journalists are close to knowledge-holders and distant from the general public.

The second repertoire is value-seeking (10 journalists): here, journalists are distantly catering to customers, optimising for a quantified aggregate audience, and enabling co-creators. The third repertoire (11 journalists) involves (to an extent) supporting the affected, coping with troublemakers, and nurturing a specific community. The fourth repertoire involves distantly informing citizens and optimising for a quantified aggregate, but also nurturing a community, coping with troublemakers, and cultivating fans – the 15 journalists in this cluster mostly worked for journalistic start-ups.

This audience-oriented journalism research responds to the audience turn in journalism research, but retains a focus on journalists and their practices; it shows the different relationship forms and repertoires of varying breadth and distance to the audience. This disaggregates the audience into social groups and individuals and leads to an expansion of journalists’ relationship practices from imagination and observation towards mediated interaction – and vice versa. The further question is how this affects journalism’s overall construction of the public, then.