In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience ...behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.
Although the ‘audience turn’ (Costera Meijer, 2020) in journalism has been extensively discussed in studies, and journalists acknowledge the need to improve their relationship with their audience ...(Nelson and Lewis 2022), the audience’s perspective on journalistic roles remains underexplored (Riedl and Eberl, 2020). Generally, the examination of journalistic roles has been from a production perspective (Hanusch 2019). We aim to address this ‘gap’ by examining journalism as a discursive institution (Zelizer 1993), and focusing on audience-oriented roles, defined in the Worlds of Journalism-study as accommodative roles (Hanitzsch et al. 2019). We surveyed a representative sample (N = 1577) of Flemish respondents about their news use, news attitudes, and their views on audience-oriented journalistic roles. Regression models were used to predict differences in how different subsets of news users view the importance of these journalistic roles. Our findings reveal that subsets of users have diverse expectations of what journalists should do, for instance, younger audiences expect journalists to act less as explainers than older audiences. Incorporating the audience’s views in the discussion of journalistic roles could be a useful approach to strengthen the audience-journalism relationship.
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for ...research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that audience studies’ perspective allows viewing SAOE as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.
In public communication, in the absence of a clear sense of one's actual audience, a communicator relies on a mental image of an imagined audience. But where does one's image of the audience come ...from, and how might that matter for how people evaluate their audience? The case of journalists and their perceptions offers an instructive lens for examining this question, particularly given the digitally mediated changes in the way news audiences are known (e.g., via digital metrics and encounters on social media). Through a survey of U.S. journalists (N = 544), we find that journalists' views of their audience spring from a complex variety of sources, including interactions via email, social media, and comment sections, as well as relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. These sources carry differing consequences for the evaluations of those audiences-namely, regarding whether journalists perceive their audience as smart (rational) and/or similar to them (homophilous). Results suggest that the origins of journalists' imagined audiences are a significant factor in shaping journalists' perception of the people with whom they are communicating, with the concomitant potential to influence the communication itself.
Reputation and Status as Motives for War Dafoe, Allan; Renshon, Jonathan; Huth, Paul
Annual review of political science,
01/2014, Volume:
17, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Justifications for war often invoke reputational or social aspirations: the need to protect national honor, status, reputation for resolve, credibility, and respect. Studies of these motives struggle ...with a variety of challenges: their primary empirical manifestation consists of beliefs, agents have incentives to misrepresent these beliefs, their logic is context specific, and they meld intrinsic and instrumental motives. To help overcome these challenges, this review offers a general conceptual framework that integrates their strategic, cultural, and psychological logics. We summarize important findings and open questions, including (a) whether leaders care about their reputations and status, (b) how to address the tension between instrumental and intrinsic motives, (c) how observers draw inferences, (d) to whom and across what contextual breadth these inferences apply, and (e) how these relate to domestic audience costs. Many important, tractable questions remain for future studies to answer.
As news organizations struggle to overcome losses in revenue and relevance, academics and professionals have pinned their hopes for salvation on increasing ‘audience engagement’. Yet few agree on ...what audience engagement means, why it will make journalism more successful, or what ‘success’ in journalism should even look like. This article uses Williams and Delli Carpini’s ‘media regimes’ as a theoretical framework to argue that studying the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding it – is vital to understanding journalism’s transition from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is yet to fully emerge. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It concludes with a call for more research into audience engagement efforts to better understand what journalism is and what it might become.
Theories explaining the impacts of online media often swing between the actions of empowered individuals and the distribution structures put in place by powerful corporations. To explicate how these ...factors interact, we adapt the concept of audience flow to highlight the temporal dimension of web use and demonstrate how digital architectures subtly nudge masses of people into online attention flows. We identify sequential usage patterns through a network analysis of passively measured clickstreams, combined with data on website ownership and website architectures. Our sample, based on a panel of 1 million users, includes 1761 websites that reached at least 1% of Internet users in the United States. Our findings reveal previously unseen patterns of online audience formation, which have implications for studying media effects and understanding institutional power on the Internet.
Women are increasingly present in the field of engineering, but despite a significant female presence, it has been found that the programs continue to make no reference to women scientists. In ...chemical engineering, for example, all the names of scientists mentioned in the programs belong to men only. To test this hypothesis of over-representation of men in the programs, a series of random opinion surveys were launched among 600 students from 5 universities to find out whether they had noticed this over-representation and what they thought about it. The results showed that the vast majority did not realize that the scientists presented as examples in classes were all men. In fact, 90% of the student panel were unable to identify a woman in the chemical engineering field, and the remaining 10% could cite only one or twowho were among the most recent and had received the most attention from the media. The issue of inequalities between girls and boys and between women and men in education remains central to understanding and combating gender inequalities and enabling people to develop as persons free from the limitations imposed on them by gender stereotypes. However, these inequalities cannot only be explained exclusively by the issue of access to education but must also take the type and content of education into account. This article is a call for reflection on the content of university curricula and has a twofold objective: on one hand, to raise awareness of this imbalance in representation among students, both male and female, and, on the other hand, to launch reflection on this “invisibility of women” and to propose some avenues for debate.
News organizations are placing a greater emphasis on knowing their audience as a route to facilitate engagement and generate revenue. Drawing on a national survey of individuals working for U.S. news ...organizations, we examine how newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience. Combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses, we find that the majority of U.S. newsworkers use some combination of demographics or psychographics to describe the audience for their work—representing a substantial uptake of marketing segmentation language compared to earlier research on how journalists understand their audiences. However, that marketing-like sophistication comes with a cost: Newsworkers' target audience descriptions are shaped by financial imperatives, emphasizing white, older, high socioeconomic status groups. These findings are discussed in terms of the journalism industry’s lack of diversity, suggesting that this issue also extends to the imagined target audiences of news media organizations.
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