Audience Adjustment
The Columbia Journalism Review has published an interesting essay by David Cay Johnston called “Attitude Adjustment.” It’s about how the internet is good for journalism. The essay is worth your time.
Johnston focuses mostly on consumer news. The theory that supports his idea, however, is useful in understanding what has gone wrong in political reporting and how to make it better (i.e. make political reporting fit the primary purpose of journalism: to give people the information they need to be free and self-governing). Here it is:
But the larger trick here is a change in perspective about what is news, a move to frame it more in terms of audiences than sources. When you examine the way newspapers tend to frame some stories, it prompts questions about what audience is being addressed, and whether the way the news is written builds audiences or, by appealing primarily to narrow interests, shrinks them.
Exactly. The audience for political reporting is not citizens. How could it be? There’s very little in “horse-race” or “inside baseball” reporting that citizens can put to use in making political decisions. The audience for such reporting is people inside the process, i.e. journalists and politicians.
I have a solution. Been talking about it for a long time now. And it fits Johnston’s idea: Tell a different story; tell the story of citizens’ experiences with governance.
Part of the problem here is that journalism has done a poor job of developing audiences (yes, plural). No one seemed to notice the problem until the internet exposed the faulty thinking: There is no such thing as a “general” audience.
In the epistemology of the old MSM, sources are the “knowers”–the ones who say what reality is. Journalists are then conduits of sources’ knowing. The internet has taught people to talk back, taught them to expect to talk back, taught them to fight for what they know. So a whole new crop of knowers is showing up to the media party. And if they don’t see themselves in the products of the MSM, then they aren’t going to buy the products of the MSM.
Tags: journalism, rhetoric, politics
The homogenizing of the audience goes hand-in-hand with the homogeneous community of A-word journalists.
It’s incredibly simplistic (and easy!) to uderstand/define your journalistic role as a straight line between two points. Even easier when the line only points in one direction.
Tim… I was talking to my into students today about audience. Most of them are already content providers of some kind on the internet. They get it.
Andy, I don’t doubt your students get it and were it up to me your course would be required for all students.
But I don’t see journalism schools getting it nor curmudgeons sucking the life out of newsrooms.
Tim… Well, the battle is surely uphill. Change is happening.
Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School