Audience Research Methodologies

Between Innovation and Consolidation

Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic, Jakob Linaa Jensen, Jelena Jurišić, Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic, Jakob Linaa Jensen, Jelena Jurišić, Jelena Jurisic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134064823
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The transformations of people's relations to media content, technologies and institutions raise new methodological challenges and opportunities for audience research. This edited volume aims at contributing to the development of the repertoire of methods and methodologies for audience research by reviewing and exemplifying approaches that have been stimulated by the changing conditions and practices of audiences. The contributions address a range of issues and approaches related to the diversification, integration and triangulation of methods for audience research, to the gap between the researched and the researchers, to the study of online social networks, and to the opportunities brought about by Web 2.0 technologies as research tools.

Part I

Audience Research Methods between Diversification and Integration

1 Audience Conceiving among Journalists

Integrating Social-Organizational Analysis and Cultural Analysis through Ethnography

Igor Vobič

INTRODUCTION

As the news becomes digital, journalists of traditional media struggle with their authoritative role as news providers (Boczkowski 2010; Dahlgren 2009; Deuze 2007; Lee-Wright, Philips and Witschge 2012; Robinson 2010). In recent years much has been written on transforming news making (Domingo and Paterson 2011; Meikele and Redden 2011; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009; Paterson and Domingo 2008) and on transforming audiences' news consumption (Allan and Thorsen 2009; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2010; Rosenberry and St. John III 2010), which sits at the intersection between continuity and change. Only recently has attention (again) been put to the journalist-audience relationship regarding how contemporary journalists conceive their presumably empowered audience and how the conceived audience from generative and quantifiable sources is echoed in news making (Anderson 2011; Hujanen 2008; MacGregor 2007). The way newsrooms search for, imagine and describe their audiences not only shapes the news delivered in an important way but also brings implications for societal life. However, it appears that the “audience as an abstraction” (Min 2004, 452) has rarely been of primary scholarly concern, as it has been mostly in the background of inquiries into journalists' attitudes, market pressures on journalism and news values (MacGregor 2007, 280). This leaves many analytical and methodological questions open: How are the audiences conceived in transforming the news making of traditional media? How should scholars investigate contemporary journalists' relations to the “people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen 2006)? What has journalism scholarship learned from previous studies that can be reused or revisited? How should scholars reappropriate their analytical and methodological frames to counter contemporary contingencies in the journalist-audience relationship?

Recent research on the “perceptions of the audience” (Min 2004), the “constructed audience” (Hujanen 2008) or the “visions of the audience” (Anderson 2011) in newsrooms have revisited conventional wisdom about the journalist-audience relationship derived from newsroom studies conducted between the 1960s and 1980s suggesting that “audience images” seem to have “minor influence on journalistic performance relative to other potential influence sources” (Ettema, Whitney and Wackman 1997, 40). Namely, contemporary theoretical and empirical explorations of audience conceiving in newsrooms (Anderson 2011; Boczkowski 2004, 2010; Cassidy 2008; Hujanen 2008; Lowrey 2009; MacGregor 2007; Outing 2005; Robinson 2010) signify far more extensive and complex relations among and between journalists, information sources and audience members, and emphasize their implications on “deciding what's news” (Gans 1979). These studies argue that organizational structures shape particular forms of technological adoption, which are further negotiated through institutional visions of that technology, ideal-typical principles and practices of journalism, and visions of the audience. However, besides common profound acknowledgements of the rising complexity of journalist-audience relations, these studies—with rare exceptions (Anderson 2011; Boczkowski 2010)—only partially reflect on their methodological frameworks and hardly provide an integrative analytical basis for research of audience conceiving in journalism. Therefore, this chapter attempts to fill this gap by reconsidering the analytical stances and methodological frameworks of existing research on how contemporary journalists conceive their audience and how the conceived audience is echoed in news making. The chapter attempts to develop further the methodological approaches to audience conceiving in journalism by integrating social-organizational analysis and cultural analysis through ethnography.

In this sense, this chapter critically argues that ethnographic investigations of newsroom processes, relations and perceptions might help in exploring the role of the audience in contemporary news making more thoroughly. Namely, by overviewing the existing empirical works, the first part of the chapter addresses methodological developments in the transition from early “newsroom-centric sociological studies”, as Zelizer (2004) labels them, to recent ethnographic studies into audience conceiving performed in journalists' working environments, as exemplified in Anderson (2011). The second part discusses profits and perils of newsroom investigations in studying audience conceiving among journalists and implications for news making. The third part draws upon a large ethnographic study conducted in the online departments of two Slovenian traditional print media organizations, Delo and Dnevnik, in late 2010 and early 2011, in order to continue the discussion on the need for integrative methodological and analytical stances in journalism research. By elaborating on case studies, the conclusion expands on further methodological implications and sketches new paths of scholarly audience conceiving research.

ANALYZING AUDIENCE CONCEIVING IN NEWS MAKING: LITERATURE REVIEW

Research into structure-agency dynamics analyzing how journalists conceive the audience and how the conceived audience is echoed in news making sits at the intersection of three themes (MacGregor 2007, 280): studies of journalists' attitudes towards their audiences (Gans 1979; Schlesinger 1978/1987; Tunstall 1971); investigations into market pressures in journalism and industrial construction of audience perspective (Ang 1991; Ettema and Whitney 1994; McManus 1994; Napoli 2010; Turow 2005) and explorations dealing with news values among journalists (Fowler 1991; Fuller 1996; Outing 2005). Works of these three lines of inquiry have often analyzed audience conceiving among journalists as a secondary matter and have used a variety of methods—quantitative surveys, text analysis, in-depth interviews, observation—which are not integrated for a purpose of making a comprehensive study but are rather limited in scope. Moreover, only some of these studies dealt with the conceived audience in regards to the processes of news making. Thus, this part of the chapter only reviews the methodology used in studies that aimed at analyzing news making processes in context in order to gain knowledge of audience conceiving in news making.

The relation between how journalists conceive their audience and how this in turn shapes their news making has not yielded a vast amount of literature, but it is indeed an issue that has been investigated over the past few decades. Two waves of inquiries into research of audience conceiving among journalists can be identified. The first wave goes back to newsroom-centric studies taking socio-organizational approaches to news making from a few decades ago. The second wave of more recent newsroom investigations adopts an ethnographic approach and comes closer to the cultural analysis of news making.

The first wave of research (e.g., Atkin, Burgoon and Burgoon 1983; Burgoon, Burgoon and Atkin 1982; Flegel and Chaffee 1971; Gans 1979; McQuail 1969; Schlesinger 1978/1987), falling within “the golden age” of newsroom studies (Zelizer 2004), argues that journalists do not really know their audiences and see the journalist-audience relationship “as an understanding grounded in ignorance and filtered through a lens of professional judgment” (Anderson 2011, 553). In this sense, on the basis of his observations, Schlesinger (1978/1987) stresses that there is a “missing link” between journalists and the audience, implying that “journalists write for other journalists, their bosses, their sources or highly interested audiences” (Schlesinger 1978/1987, 107), whereas “the total audience remains an abstraction” (Schlesinger 1978/1987, 109). Furthermore, in their observational study, Flegel and Chaffee (1971, 649) note that journalists “feel that their own opinions guide their reporting more than do those of their editors; readers' opinions are even less important”. Similarly, Atkin, Burgoon and Burgoon (1983, 60) acknowledge that newsroom staffs have a “patronizing and unflattering view” of the audience that appears distant and anonymous. In a similar context, in order to cope with the “uncertainty” of news making (McQuail 1969), journalists self-construct their audiences, while having little idea of the respective entity and taking “the congruence of their own and the audience's feelings for granted” (Gans 1979, 237).

These works are valuable also from a methodological perspective, serving as role-model newsroom studies in several respects: They take observation and interviews as research methods and develop analytical frameworks for studying what has later been labeled as “social construction” (Tuchman 2002) or “social organization” (Schudson 2005) in journalism. Indeed, despite the fact that they only provide few methodological considerations, the works of the first wave use newsroom observation to get what Altmeppen (2008, 135) calls an “unfiltered view on the social reality”, and they employ in-depth interviews to generate knowledge on audience conceiving among journalists. By adopting a social-organizational approach to the phenomena in question, the authors analyze the data through the lenses of “organization”, “structure”, “routines” and “roles”. What decisively defines gathering, assembling and analyzing data in these studies is, first, the emphasis on constraints imposed by organizations despite journalists' individual intentions; second, the inevitability of social construction of reality in any system; and third, the attempt to empirically bridge societal, organizational and individual levels of inquiry (Altmeppen 2008; Schudson 2005; Tuchman 2002). Yet, as in other sociological newsroom studies from the 1960s to 1980s, these works favored the study of “dominant” practices over “deviant” ones, thereby “freezing moments within the news making process for analysis rather than considering the whole phenomenon” (Zelizer 2008, 256).

A review of recent studies indicates a substantial shift from inquiries of the first wave, suggesting that audience conceiving in news making has changed not only as a social phenomenon but also as an object of research. The studies of the second wave from the mid-2000s onward (Anderson 2011; Boczkowski 2004, 2010; Hujanen 2008; Lowrey and Latta 2008; MacGregor 2007; Robinson 2010) show that audience conceiving among journalists and its consequences for news making have become much more complex as interactive online technologies enable closer, even participatory, journalist-audience relationships and as contemporary metrics used additionally shape journalists' constructions of audiences. For instance, Boczkowski (2004) and Robinson (2010) reveal that audience conceiving plays a diverse range of roles in news making. Boczkowski (2004, 175) shows that on the one side, the more journalists describe online users as technologically unsavvy, the more they rely on one-way communication; on the other side, the more they see audience members as technologically savvy, the more they use interactive capabilities. Robinson (2010, 125) writes about “significant internal conflict” among journalists, dividing them into “traditionalists”, who want to maintain a hierarchal journalist-audience relationship, and “convergers”, who would like to see audience members closer to the newsroom. Additionally, Anderson (2011) points out a tension between the “vision of audience empowerment” in terms of a productive and generative entity, on the one hand, and the “growth in audience quantification” in the sense of a quantifiable, rationalizable and largely consumptive aggregate, on the other hand. This is unlike some other inquiries into the relationship between audience metrics, conceived audience and news making that suggest persistence of ideal-typical principles among journalists (Boczkowski 2010; Hujanen 2008; MacGregor 2007). Anderson's findings indicate progressive quantification of audience understandings.

The second-wave studies also bring a new dimension in developing further methodological issues that were underexplored in the first-wave studies. Namely, despite the fact that these studies range from variously standardized interviews (Hujanen 2008; Min 2004; Robinson 2010) to more or less unstructured observations (Anderson 2011; Boczkowski 2004) to highly systemized exercises of data collection and analysis (Boczkowski 2010), they have taken an ethnographic approach to studying audience conceiving among journalists, thereby strengthening the “cultural analysis” tradition in the field (Zelizer 2008). Beyond the diversity of analytical stances, such as grounded theory (Anderson 2011; Robinson 2010), discourse analysis (Hujanen 2008), or “rule of a thumb” (MacGregor 2007, 285), it is apparent that the cultural perspective is strengthened in the second wave. Indeed, these ethnographies imply the notion of culture that refers to the domain of ideas as well as to social practices. This enables the authors to look beyond the structure of the newsroom organization and gives them an opportunity to investigate sets of unwritten rules, tacit norms and shared values by appreciating symbolic determinants of technol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Cases, Or Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I Audience Research Methods between Diversifi cation and Integration
• Part II Bridging the Gap between the Researched and the Researcher
• Part III Studying Online Social Networks
• Part IV Web 2.0 Technologies as Research Tools
• Part V Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index