Journalism and its audience: The re-figuration of a relationship and its influence on news production

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Wiebke Loosen
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413631037

Project B investigates the re-figuration of the journalism-audience relationship and its influence on news production. While different forms of audience monitoring and measurement, participation, and engagement have long been part of many journalists’ daily routines, the re-figuration of the journalism-audience relationship has stimulated a fundamental expansion of the journalistic function of creating and distributing content with new tasks such as facilitating and managing follow-up communication, connectivity, interactions, and collaboration with and among users. These developments profoundly affect how journalism, its societal function, and the content it produces are thought of, produced, distributed, and received. However, the re-figuration of the journalism-audience relationship does not take place simultaneously and uniformly within all journalistic organizations or for all individual practitioners. Here, it is particularly striking that new media startups seem to place a new understanding of the journalism-audience relationship at the very heart of how they conceive and practice news work.This project considers these phenomena as interrelated, a consideration that is reflected in its three-step empirical-analytical process. Firstly, we will reconstruct journalists’ relationships with audiences in all their facets (journalistic role conceptions, audience images, participation, datafication, etc.). Secondly, we will examine how these relationships affect journalists’ work and their output. Thirdly, both these aspects will be examined comparatively, contrasting the variety of organizational contexts in which journalists work; established media organizations or journalistic start-ups where deeply re-figured journalism-audience relationships may already be common practice. Methodologically, this will be achieved through the use of a multi-method design that combines reconstruction-interviews with journalists, a diary app that they will use to log their contacts with audience members, content analyses of the participants’ news stories and the corresponding audience feedback, and network analyses of how audiences further distribute the examined stories in social media.With reference to the overall package’s objectives – that is to investigate the re-figuration of public communication in times of deep mediatization – Project B brings in the analysis of the re-figuration of a producer-user constellation constitutive for public communication. For the other two projects, Project B will provide theoretical and empirical evidence on the influence organizational models have on audience relations and news production within both established media operations and start-ups (for Project A’s look at pioneer journalism) as well as findings on what kind of audience contributions find their way into the journalistic production process (for Project C’s investigation into individuals’ public connection).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants