2.9: Who are the audience?

Journalism is one type of mass communication. There are various others – advertising and propaganda are also forms of mass communication. Our focus in this textbook is on journalism. Being a journalist means creating news content for an audience. Your audience are the people who consume the journalism you produce.

Whether you distribute your content through printed, broadcast (radio and television) or internet-based mass media, you want an audience to see your content. Audience studies help us understand who the audience are.

According to Media Texthack Group (2014), audience studies have been around for as long as there has been commercial mass media – producers needed to prove to potential advertisers that their message was received by a certain number (or certain type) of people. By knowing who your audience are, you also know what interests them so that you can give them relevant content.

For the mass media, a number of different tools can be used to identify the audience. Some examples are simply counting readers, focus groups, eyeball tracking, and digital analytics. Counting viewers or readers help to identify prime advertising space for advertisers. Focus groups (i.e., where audience members are asked to discuss what they think) are employed to see how the target audience are receiving a particular text, and adjustments are made accordingly. In the digital era, analytics are very important; there are programmes that measure electronically when and how people access stories, how much time they spend on stories, and even what sections they read. We can even use a system such as eyeball tracking to identify audience viewing habits.

Keeping up to date with changes in audience behaviour is a challenge. This is as much a result of changing concepts surrounding audiences as it is a result of changes in the media itself. In the digital era, audiences create their own content while also reading other people’s content. In the past, news users simply read a newspaper or listened to a radio programme. Now they can participate in the discussion; they can publish their own comments or views. They can even create their own, alternative presentations of news.

These people are sometimes called prosumers (persons who produce and consume content, for example, Instagram users, who create their own posts but also read posts on Instagram pages of news companies).

With eyeball-tracking hardware and software it is possible to see exactly which part of a page attracts readers the most. This helps track what interests readers. Picture: Von Tschneidr – Original Work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=60655049)

You will remember that we discussed the concepts of senders and receivers above. In mass communication, we use the label of receiver to describe those whom the message targets. Even if we leave aside the reality that receivers often become senders too, we should remember that receivers are not merely passive sponges of information – they can interpret material, bring to bear their own experiences, and “read” messages in a number of different ways. The mass media have certain effects on people, and these effects differ, depending on how people receive the information. People are different and receive and process information in different ways.

When thinking about mass communication and broadcasting to a large number of people (this is called many-to-many communication), we need to keep in mind that the audience are not homogenous (all the same). People have different viewpoints.

A new concept of the audience has come to the fore in communication research. There are a few different labels given to similar concepts, so let’s start with the idea of the user. A user has a number of definitions given the context, but to start with, we can define a user as an active agent who uses available tools to interact with information.

Users are of interest to us because they move through a number of different communicative positions simultaneously. They can be both senders and receivers, audiences and producers, engaged in interpersonal communication that is also public performance. Users form networks and act as nodes which both pass on and reinterpret information taken in from multiple sources, often other users. Users interact with other users to form networks along which information is not only sent and received but also modified and interpreted. These messy networks quickly go beyond any simple, linear (straight) model that we might use for understanding audiences. The rise of the user in both the interpersonal and mass communication landscape has been enabled to a large extent by information communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. But there have always been networks between people, even in small villages in pre-colonial Africa, where messages were sent and received. What has changed now is the scale and speed of the network connections.

If users can be both senders and receivers, produce and consume (and reproduce) texts, and always have, at least in theory, equal capacity to play either sender or receiver, then the flow of cultural capital is not only sped up; it is also partially removed from the hands of capitalist content producers (i.e., those producing content to sell advertising around or for monetary gain). You might recall that we already discussed above how anyone can now produce journalism. It is not necessarily large mass media companies creating the most popular content and monetising it now. Ordinary people can do that as influencers or bloggers or entrepreneurial journalists running their own platforms. In the introduction of this book, we spoke about the need to decolonise the media in South Africa, which includes allowing ordinary or marginalised people to have voices. This has already happened on social media, which is almost completely decolonised in terms of who creates and sends content (Mirzoeff & Halberstam, 2018).

The fact that our audience are now people who can send messages themselves is an important aspect of being a journalist in the 21st century. This affects the way journalists should think about their audiences. As journalists, we should remember that our audiences have more freedom than ever before to select where they will find the news that interests them, and they can even create their own news. Hence, it is important to know who our audiences are, and we should do everything we can to maintain the loyalty of our audiences.

Nelson (2019), writing in The Conversation, suggests a number of ways for journalists to improve relations with their audiences. This will help journalists attract a wider audience and maintain their loyalty. These strategies include digital tools to measure what the audience like and dislike, as well as tools to “talk to” their audience and hear what they think, such as gatherings where journalists and the public come together to talk about the news. This is something that many newsrooms in South Africa use. Daily Maverick and News24, among others, regularly host live webinars where editors and journalists, on the one side, and the audience, on the other side, meet to discuss the news.

According to Nelson (2019), digital metrics are useful, but sometimes newsrooms focus too much on numbers (the number of people viewing a site or a story) and not necessarily the types of stories the audience want or who the audience actually are. Engaging with audiences by hosting webinars or inviting comments and questions appear to offer deeper insight into the needs of the audience. Nelson suggests that whichever method you choose should primarily be aimed at improving your relationship with your audience. It is better to talk with the audience in some way (comments, webinars, questionnaires) than merely to count numbers. In a world dominated by social media where users regularly talk to one another, it makes sense to talk to your audience. It will be easier to get to know your audience if you create some opportunities for interaction and real feedback.