Series editors: Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Nikki Usher, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Journalism and Political Communication Unbound seeks to be a high-profile book series that reaches far beyond the academy to an interested public of policymakers, journalists, public intellectuals, and citizens eager to make sense of contemporary politics and media. “Unbound” in the series title has multiple meanings: It refers to the unbinding of borders between the fields of communication, political communication, and journalism, as well as related disciplines such as political science, sociology, and science and technology studies; it highlights the ways traditional frameworks for scholarship have disintegrated in the wake of changing digital technologies and new social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics; and it reflects the unbinding of media in a hybrid world of flows across mediums.
Other books in the series:
Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young
Imagined Audiences
How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public
JACOB L. NELSON
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nelson, Jacob L., author.
Title: Imagined audiences : how journalists perceive and pursue the public / Jacob L. Nelson. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Series: Journalism and pol commun unbound series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045400 (print) | LCCN 2020045401 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197542590 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197542606 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197542620 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: News audiences—United States—History—21st century. | Journalism—United States—History—21st century. | Online journalism z United States—History—21st century. | Journalism—Technological innovations.
Classification: LCC PN 4784 N 48 N45 2021 (print) | LCC PN 4784 N 48 (ebook) | DDC 071/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045400
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045401
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197542590.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Talia Grey
Preface
In summer 2010, I began work as an editor for a local news website. The site’s owners aspired to solve a problem that had perplexed local news publishers since the advent of the internet: In an online environment, where profit comes from huge audiences, how do you make news with a geographically confined readership financially sustainable? The company’s answer was to develop strong bonds between local communities and the journalists hired to cover them. The owners believed that doing so would make ads on their sites more valuable than those found anywhere else online because they would be reaching a more devoted and attentive group of people.
How were these community bonds pursued? The tactics varied wildly from quarter to quarter. At first, editors were given budgets so we could hire freelancers to cover as much local news as possible. The budgets soon disappeared, and editors were given video cameras and told to make a lot of short videos. We tried photo galleries. Then audio-slideshows. We held events. We sponsored local debates. We enlisted residents to write columns for a small amount of money. When those budgets dried up as well, we encouraged the same residents to blog for free. It sometimes felt like our executives had assembled a list of journalism innovations cited in the trade press or discussed at industry conferences, thrown them into a bag, and plucked a new one out each month.
In 2013, the company tried another approach to profitability: It laid off half its editorial staff.
Since then, journalism’s problems have only grown more complicated and its fate has grown more uncertain. This book is about the people confronting that uncertainty.
Introduction
There is never a single answer to the question of “What do audiences want?”
Anthony Nadler1
In a cluster of cubicles in the middle of the Chicago Tribune’s downtown newsroom, Tom Palmer holds an iPad to his face and stares.
As one of the paper’s digital editors, he has been tasked with reviewing an investigative report that’s about to run to see how it will look on mobile platforms when it gets published.
“We try to replicate our users’ experience,” Palmer explains.
A few moments later, he gives the okay to his team. They send out a breaking news alert that immediately reaches 60,000 people. The other digital editors begin posting the story to the paper’s homepage and social media pages, changing the photos and headline that had been chosen for the print version in an effort to make it more appealing to each medium-specific audience.
“We massage it for an online readership,” one of the editors says.
“How do you know what each audience wants?” I ask.
“It’s educated guessing,” he replies. Then, while gesturing to an open tab on his computer browser that lists an elaborate set of online audience metrics, he adds, “Combined with some tools to kind of check your work.”
Ten miles south of Tribune Tower, the four journalists behind City Bureau arrange tables and chairs while waiting for people to arrive. They are preparing for one of their Public Newsrooms, weekly events that invite community members from Chicago’s South and West Sides to meet with and speak to local journalists.
“When people think of journalists, they think of this nameless, faceless other,” says Bettina Chang, City Bureau’s co-founder and editorial director. “Trying to bring them together with journalists in a collaborative
environment, or just an environment where everybody is learning together, is so important.”
Public Newsrooms are intended to provide an opportunity for community members who feel left out of traditional journalism to share their thoughts and questions with reporters. They also enable reporters to learn from community members about how their work is received.
“We are trying to tell communities that we care about them, that they can see us face to face, and that they can interact with us in lots of different ways,” Chang explains. “For City Bureau, community engagement is a two-way street that’s always occupied.”
At the Tribune, the audience comprises numbers on a screen. At City Bureau, it comprises people in a room. For the former, the pursuit of the audience is a battle for attention. For the latter, it’s a quest for connection.
The journalists behind both organizations believe they understand the people they hope to reach, and this understanding motivates the decisions they make to reach them.
The truth is that no one ever knows for sure.
The changing role of the audience in journalism
Like all forms of media, journalism’s success depends in no small part on its reception. An article that includes the most scandalous of scoops accomplishes nothing if no one reads it. And a newspaper can’t hope to pay its staff and generate a profit if its offerings don’t compel people to become subscribers. All news publishers, be they television, magazine, print, or online, thus depend on finding and maintaining an audience to survive. Journalists know this to be true, and that knowledge affects how they approach their work. What they do not know, however, is whom precisely that audience comprises, and what compels them to spend their time with the news. As a result, the choices journalists make—in the stories they tell and the ways that they tell them—are molded and constrained by the assumptions they form about the people they hope to reach.
These assumptions have always mattered, but they have grown even more important in recent years. As the news industry attempts to overcome its ongoing crises of diminishing revenue and public trust, its focus has increasingly shifted toward embracing a public it was once all too happy to largely ignore. Many within journalism now believe that, in a digital
era where audiences enjoy a seemingly endless spectrum of media choice, news publishers must become more deliberate in their efforts to earn audience loyalty. Additionally, persistent attacks on journalism’s credibility from distrustful citizens have forced those in the profession to acknowledge that their relationship with the public is in bad shape. There is an emerging consensus among journalism publishers, funders, and researchers that the news industry needs to improve its relationship with the public to overcome its greatest challenges. As a result, journalists across the globe have begun investing more time and resources into understanding, measuring, and engaging with their audiences than they ever had in the past.
This intervention goes by a number of names—such as “engaged,”2 “participatory,”3 “reciprocal,”4 and “public-powered”5 journalism—all of which trace the profession’s problems to the notion that audiences are no longer willing to tolerate a one-sided relationship in which the power dynamic is skewed and their input is rarely solicited or valued. The rationale underlying the news industry’s embrace of the audience lies in part in the idea that doing so will remove the marker of elitism that many now believe to be one of the most distasteful aspects of the profession among the public. News publishers have also begun transitioning from advertising-supported to audiencesupported revenue models, which means their efforts to understand and engage with news audiences are seen as not only intuitively appealing but also financially necessary.6 As the desire to more deliberately understand, engage with, and profit from news audiences continues to gain momentum throughout the news industry, so does the need to understand the beliefs journalists hold about whom their audiences include and what they want from news.
The connection between how journalists perceive and pursue their audiences raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences? Who gets included in these conceptualizations, and who is left out? Perhaps most important, how aligned are journalism’s “imagined” audiences with the real ones?
Outline of the book
In the pages that follow, I explore these questions. Chapter 1 offers a comprehensive examination of journalism’s relationship with its audience as well as the impact of that relationship on the practice of journalism. Chapter 2
introduces readers to the concept of “audience engagement,” an increasingly common term within journalism research and practice used to refer to attempts to improve the relationship between news producers and consumers. The chapter argues that the growing appeal of audience engagement among journalists is at least partially a response to the pressing problems the profession currently faces—namely a lack of public trust and economic stability.
The next three chapters draw on ethnographic data collected from three news organizations: the Chicago Tribune, City Bureau, and Hearken. Both the Tribune and City Bureau publish news, while Hearken offers tools and services to newsrooms interested in improving their relationship with their audiences. As Chapter 3 reveals, each has its own distinct take on what people expect from news. Though the employees I spoke with at each of the organizations share the belief that audiences are disenchanted with the news, their conclusions about the source of that disenchantment differ dramatically. Chapter 4 examines the origins of the imagined audiences to understand how perceptions of the news audience can vary significantly among journalism professionals living within the same city.
Chapter 5 explores how differences in the way journalists imagine their audiences shape their self-perceptions, which consequently shape their audience pursuits. Journalists at the Tribune are ambivalent about engaging with audiences more than they have in the past. They see an upside but also ample potential for aggravation. Because those at Hearken and City Bureau believe audiences have much to offer journalism, they adamantly pursue—and advocate for—a more “engaged” approach to news production that emphasizes collaboration and communication between journalists and the public. These engagement-focused approaches to news audiences seek to ensure that journalists draw on a more diverse set of voices to more accurately reflect the people they attempt to reach.
However, as Chapter 6 reveals, audience engagement is complicated and can create as many questions as it seeks to answer. For example, although audience engagement was not mandated at the Chicago Tribune, some journalists felt compelled to pursue it regardless. Yet those who did described feelings of uncertainty, frustration, and even fear as a result of their interactions with the audience, which often were much darker than expected. Furthermore, as Chapter 7 explores, even when audience engagement leads to journalism that reflects a wider array of viewpoints, that does not necessarily mean the same as journalism that reaches an audience willing to pay to support it.
Taken together, the data reveal that journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. They also show that, despite the rise of granular, sophisticated measures of audience behavior, there remains an extraordinary amount of variation in audience assumptions throughout the news industry. By examining the origins and implications of that variation, this book illustrates the important role that audiences play in journalism, how that role has—and has not—changed, and what the changes and consistencies mean for the profession and the public.
I conclude that discussions surrounding what audiences want from journalism always are inherently limited by journalists’ incomplete conceptualizations of whom their audiences comprise in the first place. This was certainly the case in a pre-digital age, when journalists had few sources of audience data to draw from. However, it continues to be the case even at a time when sophisticated measures of audience data are common in newsrooms across the world, to the contrary of those who argue we are entering an era of the “rationalization of audience understanding.”7 Audience measurement data show journalists how people behave but not why. Journalists then use the data, which reflect what audiences do, to make educated guesses about what they want. The guesses reflect how journalists imagine the audience more than they do the actual audience.
“Nobody knows anything”
How journalists imagine their audiences profoundly affects what they do to reach them. Journalists tend to perceive their audiences from a perspective that is understandably—albeit inaccurately—self-involved. They assume that audiences make decisions about news consumption based primarily on the quantity and quality of available news. In other words, journalists tend to see their relationship with audiences as a relatively straightforward equation with just two variables: what audiences want from the news and the degree to which the news is meeting those desires.
However, audience behavior stems in large part from structural- and individual-level factors that have little to do with news preferences or even the news itself. By drawing on the rich body of audience studies literature, I offer a counter-narrative to the notion that journalists play the primary role in determining how news gets received by the public. Instead, I argue that the degree to which journalists’ assumptions about their audiences are
aligned with what audiences actually want from news is just one part of the equation that determines how audiences ultimately choose to behave. Other variables, such as the language that people speak, the mechanisms by which they find and consume media, and the amount of time that they devote to media consumption on a given day, are likely just as important when it comes to shaping audience behavior. In short, journalists may have much less control over the reception of their work than they would like to believe.
I close the book by encouraging news scholars and publishers to acknowledge these limitations and, in doing so, embrace what I call journalistic humility the acceptance that journalists can never fully understand or control their audiences. Consequently, the audience-focused journalism currently being pursued is more likely to succeed as a means to improve journalism than as a means to increase readership. News that is more frequently and deliberately made by and for the people it hopes to reach would undoubtedly be an improvement over the way that journalism has traditionally been produced. When journalists more explicitly reach out to and solicit feedback from the public, they become better equipped to confront the blind spots that have long been detrimental to the quality of their reporting. This is particularly apparent when it comes to efforts to include members of marginalized communities, who have historically been underrepresented when journalists report the news.8
However, better news will not necessarily lead to more popular news. Journalists’ conceptualizations of and approaches to their audiences are important elements of what journalism ultimately looks like as well as what it ultimately accomplishes. But they are just one piece of the process that determines the extent to which journalists actually build an audience and reach economic stability.
This distinction is an important one that unfortunately often gets overlooked in discussions about how best to improve journalism’s dismal economic situation. As this book’s chapters reveal, the unfolding efforts among journalists to more explicitly engage with their audiences are frequently framed as a means by which journalists will improve not only the quality of the news but also the economic prospects of their newsrooms. This framing overlooks the powerful roles that outside forces play in shaping where people turn for news, the amount of time they spend with news, and even their awareness of available news outlets. By assuming that journalistic quality and reception go hand in hand, news organizations inadvertently perpetuate a
misunderstanding about the connection between their reporting and their audiences that is likely detrimental to their very survival.
In short, when journalists assume that repairing their relationship with the public will not only improve the quality of their work but also increase their newsroom’s popularity and, consequently, its revenue, they set themselves up for disappointment. The sooner that journalism stakeholders realize this, the sooner they will realize that returning the profession to some degree of economic sustainability is not simply a matter of growing more attuned to their audiences’ desires. It is a matter of drastically transforming journalism’s relationship with and approach to funders, advertisers, big tech companies, and, in all likelihood, the government. As journalism scholar Victor Pickard wrote: “The economic threats facing journalism . . . comprise a structural crisis for our news media system. But this crisis is also an opportunity to entirely reinvent journalism.”9
To be clear, my motivation for making this distinction is not to discourage journalists from striving to improve their relationships with their readers. Journalism practitioners, funders, and researchers pursuing the admirable goal of improving the craft and its impact on society should continue to do so. However, they should also accept that the results of their efforts are largely out of their hands. To quote the late screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to predicting audience behavior.10 Although Goldman was discussing the movie business, the assertion applies to all media—including journalism. So, when journalists make claims about what audiences want, what they are really doing more than anything else is revealing their own assumptions about the people they believe those audiences comprise. As the pages that follow show, these assumptions matter: They shape how the news gets produced and whom it gets produced for.
Acknowledging the important role these assumptions play in motivating how journalists ultimately pursue their audiences allows journalism researchers and practitioners alike to come to terms with the inherent contradiction within the profession’s call for more audience participation in news production: It is a demand to give the public more of a voice delivered by journalists who claim to speak for the public. To be sure, journalism stakeholders have no choice but to draw on a combination of available data and their own intuition to determine how to serve the people they hope to reach. As a result, those who advocate for this audience-focused, democratic form of journalism must reckon with the fact that the conviction underlying
its pursuit stems from the very thing that they dislike most about journalism in its current form—the implicit assumption that those who publish the news know what’s best for those who consume it.
Defining the “audience”
Indeed, even as many throughout the industry grow increasingly focused on audiences, the very meaning of the word “audience” remains far from clear-cut. Some see the term as a strictly passive one, using it only to refer to people who consume media as compared to those who actively engage with it. For example, those who watch a news broadcast are part of the news “audience,” while people who comment on or share an online article are news “participants” or “users.” Others who discuss journalism and its relationship with the public shirk the question of audience entirely, focusing instead on its impact on society as a whole.11 In this book, I use the term in the most general sense, to describe the people whom media producers reach—or intend to reach—with their content.
Within this book, I also distinguish among audiences, communities, and the public. Journalists have an audience in mind when they report the news, and the audiences may or may not include the communities that their news is about. For instance, although I am part of the New York Times’s audience, the Phoenix community I live in rarely makes it into that paper’s pages. All of these people—the journalists, their imagined audiences, and those living within the communities included or excluded from those perceived masses—are members of the public. This distinction is increasingly important, especially for the growing number of news publishers who want to eliminate the gap between the people they write about and those they write for.
What this book is, and what it isn’t
A final word about what this book is and what it is not. This is an academic book. It builds off of and contributes to scholarly conversations about journalism, its relationship with the public, and its role in society. However, the book also is intended to be helpful and relevant to the people it focuses on and to the news industry at large. I entered academia because, while working as a journalist, I stumbled onto questions about the profession I knew I could
only hope to answer from outside of it. So, while this book clearly draws on theory to make sense of its findings, it also focuses on the implications of these findings for news industry stakeholders, news audiences, and the connection between the two.
Any book about contemporary journalism is inevitably a book about journalism in crisis. However, this book is not about the crisis itself. Much has already been written about the profound challenges facing the profession.12 Nor is this book about whether the attempts to overcome the challenges will succeed. First, success is a relative term—a thriving news media environment means one thing for Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and something else entirely for Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News. Second, as others have concluded in their analyses of recent journalistic interventions,13 it is simply too early to tell whether any of them will work. Instead, this book uses the news industry’s varied attempts to adapt to a challenging set of circumstances as an opportunity to explore something more enduring: the relationship between those who make the news and those who consume it.
1 The Journalist–Audience Relationship
On a cold December morning in 2016, Kurt Gessler offered a surprising argument for how to fix the news industry: Journalists should act more like car salesmen.
The Chicago Tribune’s deputy digital editor made his case in a crowded Peet’s Coffee on Michigan Avenue, across the street from the newspaper’s headquarters. American journalism was about eight years into a devastating and seemingly endless financial crisis. Newspapers lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017.1 The newspaper industry’s financial strain was obvious within the Tribune’s newsroom, a sprawling space littered with empty cubicles, leaking ceilings, and a roach problem.2 Indeed, less than two years after my interview with Gessler, the Tribune sold the building it had called home for nearly a century and left it for leased office space about a half mile south.3
As if the economic challenges weren’t enough, journalists recently had discovered another reason to worry. The election of Donald Trump, who routinely disparaged established news organizations as “fake news,” shocked reporters and editors nationwide. Many assumed that the news media’s rigorous coverage of Trump’s sordid professional and personal past—combined with the candidate’s often offensive comments throughout the campaign— meant he surely would lose the U.S. presidential election to Hillary Clinton. His victory forced journalists to reckon with the unwelcome idea that not only were people unwilling to pay for news, they might not even believe it in the first place.
This period of institutional self-reflection had just begun when I met with Gessler, who had been working in Chicago journalism for more than 25 years. He spoke quickly and excitedly, in a way that suggested that, despite its challenges, he still found his profession fascinating. He made his unexpected comparison between the news and auto industries after I asked how the Tribune balanced publishing stories people needed—such as investigative, watchdog reporting—with the stories that people wanted—such as
celebrity and sports coverage. In essence, how did the paper balance its pursuit of “important” journalism with the kind required to keep the lights on?
“I don’t necessarily think that those interests are competing,” Gessler said. He used an example to explain. Earlier that morning, his team had posted an investigative story in a prime spot on the paper’s homepage. At first, not many people clicked on it. Before replacing it with something else, however, he decided to change the headline, which originally read “Illinois Universities Grapple with ‘Sanctuary Campus’ Efforts.”
“That headline is garbage,” Gessler said.
He made the headline more specific so that readers would have a clearer idea of what the story was about, and also so that the link would appear more prominently in search engine results. Soon after, the piece went from the site’s 40th most read to its fifth. To Gessler, this illustrated an important misperception in journalism: the idea that investigative journalism is less popular than other forms of news simply because people don’t like it as much. It’s not about preferences, he said. It’s about presentation
“You don’t just come to the car dealer one day and say, ‘Oh, look. There’s a new Ford’,” Gessler said. Car dealerships don’t take public demand for their new models as a given. Instead, they attempt to create it through a relentless barrage of promotion. Gessler believes journalists should follow suit, by devoting more of their thought and energy to marketing their work: “We’re not selling a car, but at the same time we do a terrible job of selling anything.”
This is how the Tribune’s digital team goes about finding an audience. The people behind City Bureau take a different approach. Founded in 2015, City Bureau is a lean, nonprofit news organization focused specifically on the Chicago’s South and West Side communities. City Bureau’s four founders agree with Gessler that audiences are not innately uninterested in political and civic issues. The similarities end there. When it comes to hard news, Gessler thinks that the Tribune puts out a good product, but falls short in marketing it. The people behind City Bureau disagree.
“Anybody can pick up the Trib. That’s not the problem,” said Harry Backlund, a City Bureau cofounder and its director of operations. “The problem is what’s in it.”
The people who run City Bureau believe traditional journalism frequently falls short by falling back on simplified, skewed narratives, especially when it comes to communities that primarily comprise people of color. From their perspective, the South and West Sides of the city—where a majority
of Chicago’s Black and Latino residents live—are vibrant, multifaceted neighborhoods, yet they are often portrayed as little more than the settings for violent crimes by predominantly White journalists who show up when shootings unfold and then leave.
“There are people that have never trusted the Tribune,” said City Bureau cofounder and community engagement director Andrea Hart. “If you’re not consistent and you’re not showing up . . . and then you’ve come in and you’ve said something really problematic about my neighborhood, or you only talk about the problems, there’s an inherent distrust.”
City Bureau’s founders believe that traditional journalism published by daily newspapers like the Tribune does an inadequate job accurately representing what goes on in areas where the bulk of the city’s non-White residents live, and those residents know it. So, City Bureau has set out to produce journalism about these communities in a way that is deliberately more collaborative. To do so, the organization hosts weekly events that bring together journalists and South and West Side residents, trains community members to document public meetings on their own, and mentors a mix of professional and amateur reporters—most of whom are themselves people of color—to be more conscious of the ways they think about, report on, and eventually write local news stories. In short, City Bureau’s team hopes to win its audience over by more explicitly bringing it into the news production process, thus resulting in what they believe will be more honest—and, consequently, better received—journalism.
“We talk a lot about community engagement,” Hart said, “because audiences and the public seem to want that.”
These examples reflect one of the most important—yet least studied— aspects of journalism: the connection between how journalists perceive and pursue their audiences. Because the Tribune’s digital editors believe that their newspaper’s audience comprises people who are interested in—but sometimes unaware of—its most important reporting, they devote their time and resources to finding novel ways of getting Tribune stories in front of people they hope to reach. City Bureau’s founders, conversely, believe their audience comprises people who justifiably distrust traditional journalism produced by outlets like the Tribune. Their perception of the audience leads them to focus their energies on finding novel, collaborative ways to report the news. For the former, journalism’s problem is one of distribution. For the latter, it’s representation.
Journalism’s imagined audience
How is it that journalists working within the same city, and attempting to reach many of the same people, are able to come to such different conclusions about who those people are, and what they want from news? The answer to this begins with an important, yet infrequently discussed acknowledgment: Journalists, like all media producers, can never possibly know precisely who sees what they publish. Instead, they create what communication scholar Eden Litt calls an imagined audience that includes the people with whom they believe they are communicating.4 As the New York Times’s global analytics director James G. Robinson observed, “A central irony of the newsroom is that while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind, the audiences for their work often remain unfocused, imagined abstractions.”5
This conceptualization of audience perception stems from political scientist Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, which he describes as the way that citizens make real an otherwise abstract membership to the nations in which they reside. He wrote: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their communion.”6 News publishers similarly will never know or hear from all their readers and must instead come up with an idea of who those readers are.7
When journalists imagine the audience, there are typically two audiences that they have in mind: the audience of a specific news outlet and the news audience as a whole. How a news organization imagines its specific audience significantly affects the way in which it shapes its coverage. A Phoenix-based newspaper is unlikely to publish a story about a block party in Miami, just as a food and dining magazine is unlikely to publish a story about college football. In either case, the publisher assumes the outlet’s audience comprises people united by a specific trait (for example, geography, interest), which limits the topics that they will be interested in reading about. As journalism scholar C. W. Anderson wrote: “All media projects have a tacit vision of who their readers are and of what their audiences look like, and this shapes their organizational behavior.”8
Journalism’s general imagined audience is, as the name suggests, much broader. This refers to how journalism stakeholders consider the public at large, independent of any particular news outlet. For example, it is
conventional wisdom throughout the news industry that older people consume more television news, while younger people consume more news online. As media scholar Anthony Nadler noted, many throughout the profession also imagine the news audience “as distracted and hurried by busy routines,” and looking for news that is “easily scannable, graphically depicted when possible, and presented in bite-size bundles.”9 More recently, many within journalism have embraced the notion that news audiences prefer political news that aligns solely with their own ideologies rather than those that put forth contradictory positions.10
Whether general or specific, imagined audiences all share one unifying characteristic: They are manmade. All audiences are artificial attempts by media stakeholders to understand macro-level reactions to their offerings. While audiences comprise real people, they are inevitably what communication scholar James Webster has called “a theoretical abstraction of one sort or another.”11 Yet, as Nadler points out, despite the fact that audiences are mental constructions, they have “material consequences.”12 Once journalists imagine their audiences, their goals become not just producing the news but producing news in such a way that it will resonate with those they hope to reach.13 In other words, once audiences come into existence, “they can take on a life of their own.”14
First imagined, then ignored
Journalists typically have conceptualized the news audience as a nameless, faceless mass, bound only by their shared decision to read, watch, or listen to the news. Journalists throughout the 20th century knew their audiences existed, and had a vague idea of who they comprised, but simply chose not to think too much about them. Although people working within the marketing side of news organizations routinely conducted audience research throughout the years, journalists on the editorial side tended to unintentionally or willfully ignore it. By imagining audiences as “an undifferentiated and amorphous blob,”15 journalists were free to fall back on what they considered their own professional expertise when deciding what to write and how to write it.
In keeping with their efforts to ignore audiences, journalists also actively resisted audience feedback, which they feared would conflict with their own journalistic standards.16 Instead, they reported on topics that
appealed to them and their editors, as well as those that had been covered by their competitors. Newsroom ethnographers have observed this more dismissive approach to the news audience in studies of broadcast news and newspapers,17 as well as in studies of national and local news.18 In general, journalists perceived the audience’s role as a passive one. As journalism scholar Jane Singer has written, the traditional relationship between journalists and those they hoped to reach consisted “primarily of journalists producing and disseminating information in the public interest, a term broadly defined, often vaguely, and almost entirely by journalists themselves.”19 In short, mainstream, daily journalism throughout the 20th century was largely a one-way conversation driven by journalists who spent little time thinking about the people they intended to reach.
The primary reason journalists saw audience feedback as irrelevant to their professional knowledge was because they perceived audiences as uninterested in the sorts of “important” public affairs news that journalists view as essential for a functioning democracy. This long-held belief stems from the consistent observation that news audiences consume more sports, weather, and celebrity news than they do news about politics and foreign affairs.20 This industry-wide consensus is the reason local television news outlets focus so much on traffic and weather, and why online news outlets publish so much pop culture content and viral videos. It is also the reason that investigative journalism often gets described as a “loss leader” for news brands—the kind of content that may cause a stir or win a prize, but is unlikely to turn a profit.21
And it is understood as the reason why, in today’s media environment of seemingly limitless choice, audiences often choose lighter news stories over political ones, or simply tune out the news altogether.22
In the past, journalists could disregard this audience assumption without consequence because news offerings came bundled. If you wanted to read a newspaper’s sports section, you had to pay for the metro section as well. In a digital environment, there are no such restrictions. The result is a situation where journalists fear that acquiescing too much to audience demands will mean shirking their democratic duties. As one journalist told journalism scholar Nikki Usher: “On a certain level you just can’t give the masses what they want. You are selling your soul.”23
The fact that journalists who perceive their audiences as comprising people innately less interested in public affairs are consequently more likely to equate soliciting feedback from those audiences with “selling your soul” illustrates the powerful link between how journalists perceive their
audiences and how they ultimately pursue them. When journalists imagine their audiences as comprising people inherently uninterested in public affairs, the decision about how much to listen to or engage with them becomes fraught with the assumption that doing too much of either will “dumb down” the news that ultimately gets produced. Yet this assumption about the audience is far from universal throughout the profession. Indeed, as the following chapters reveal, while many at the Chicago Tribune feel this way about the news audience, the employees of City Bureau and Hearken see things quite differently.
The Lippmann–Dewey debate
This disagreement is nothing new. Instead, it is one piece of an enduring divergence among journalism professionals and researchers surrounding how much—or how little—the public cares to pay attention to or engage in civic life. Those on one end of this spectrum imagine the audience as comprising people who do not want to regularly keep up with the goings-on in democratic society. The reasons used to support this assumption vary. Some (such as the idea that people simply face too many demands on their time in the form of work and family obligations to follow political news) are more charitable than others (such as the idea that people are simply too self-involved or unintelligent to devote the attention necessary to keep up with and participate in democratic processes). Regardless of the differences within these underlying assumptions, the overarching perception of the public remains the same: that when it comes to the decision between following public affairs and doing pretty much anything else, most would choose the latter.
Perhaps the most notable and influential spokesperson for this belief is the reporter and political commentator Walter Lippmann, who first gave voice to it nearly 100 years ago when he wrote that the world is too complex for ordinary citizens to actively participate.24 Consequently, he concluded that it was journalists’ responsibility to draw on their own expertise to translate what unfolded in politics into more easily understandable language.25 As journalism scholar Michael Schudson put it, Lippmann offered:
[a] convincing exposition . . . that human beings have limited attention spans; that on the rare occasions when they do turn their attention beyond their immediate, personal worlds, they are guided more by emotion,
transitory circumstance, and mood than by reason; and that a vast new machinery of institutionalized persuasion was all too willing and able to exploit the situation for selfish ends.26
In light of the limitations faced by ordinary citizens, Lippmann felt that journalism’s primary role should be to translate that which unfolded in politics into language more easily understood by “a citizenry incapable of governing itself.”27
The opposition to this point of view can be traced nearly as far back as the view itself. The philosopher John Dewey wrote a response to Lippmann, arguing that the more actively journalists engaged with citizens, the more involved citizens would become in public life.28 As Schudson noted, Lippmann and Dewey actually saw eye to eye when it came to the challenges facing journalists who tried to keep the public informed about politics—people are increasingly distracted from such topics by their work, social lives, and other, more entertaining forms of media. However, they disagreed on what journalists should do about these circumstances. Lippmann argued that journalism should act as an observer on behalf of citizens, rather than as an engaged actor working alongside them, in the shaping of public discourse.29 Dewey believed ordinary citizens want to be —and should be—granted the means by which to participate in the news reporting process on their own, so that they could play a larger, more powerful role in the collection and dissemination of democratic information.
This ongoing debate illustrates an important point about journalism’s imagined audiences: They are not just a laundry list of assumed preferences and tastes but are representative of larger, more consequential assumptions that journalists hold about the people they hope to reach. Those who maintain Lippmann’s perception of the public hold an overarching perspective about humanity that is distinctly at odds with Dewey’s. On the one hand, you have people like Schudson, who has put forth a compelling—and compassionate—explanation for how most people tend to follow politics, which he refers to as “the idea of the monitorial citizen.”30 He argues that people mind civic life in much the same way that parents mind their children at a community pool. While they are not doing the lifeguard’s job, and while they might appear to be distracted by a book or their phone, they are still occasionally checking to see what’s happening. “The monitorial citizen is not an absentee citizen,” Schudson concluded, “but watchful, even while he or she is doing something else.”31
The other end of this spectrum comprises journalism scholars and professionals who perceive people as not only up to the task when it comes to actively following political news but also eager to participate in the very gathering of that news in the first place, and capable of doing so. This growing assortment of journalism scholars, funders, and professionals believes that the news audience does not suffer from any sort of innate lack of interest in public affairs, but is instead often discouraged by a political landscape and news media environment that treats them as passive bystanders rather than active participants. Consequently, they believe that if journalists become more willing to collaborate and “engage” with community members in the production, dissemination, and discussion of news, the results would include not only better journalism but also journalism that would be more trusted, more valued, and consequently more popular.
The appeal of objectivity
In addition to determining how much they should listen to their audiences, journalists’ imagined audiences also play a role in determining the form that their news ultimately takes. Journalists draw on their conceptualizations of their audiences to help determine the news value of the stories they might pursue,32 as well as the way in which those stories should be told. Or, as journalism scholars Andrew Duffy and Shrutika Mangharam succinctly put it, “The manner in which journalists imagine their readers influences what they write.”33 For instance, most journalists assume that the audience as a whole is more likely to trust the news if it is presented objectively, so they tend to write stories using what media critic Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere.”34 The pursuit of objectivity entails journalists going out of their way to appear as impartial as possible, regardless of the news they are reporting. As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote: “If journalists were not viewed as being objective, every story could be criticized as resulting from one or another journalistic bias.”35
The pursuit of journalistic objectivity has inspired a great deal of criticism from journalism practitioners and researchers. First, in their attempts to write “for everyone,” journalists often end up writing primarily for people like themselves: White, middle-class citizens.36 The logic underlying this criticism is that journalists—like all people—experience biases, and these biases affect the things they notice and how they describe them. Journalists
also happen to be overwhelmingly White, middle class, and male.37 So when journalists frame stories as though they were dispassionate presentations of fact, what they actually are doing is presenting their White perspective as if it were the most accurate one. The result is a situation in which, as Gans noted, “The news reflects a white male social order.”38
Furthermore, pursuing a narrow conceptualization of objectivity historically has led journalists to overly rely on government officials and bureaucratic records in the presentation of indisputable facts, while ignoring non-official sources, especially in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.39 For journalists focused on maintaining objectivity within their reporting, bureaucratic “facts” represent hard data, while accounts from non-bureaucratic sources represent little more than speculation—even in instances when the bureaucratic records are wrong. For example, the newsroom ethnographer Mark Fishman observed that reporters relied on police departments for information about crime, often to the detriment of the accuracy of their crime coverage.40 And in her study of how journalists reported on police brutality, political communication scholar Regina Lawrence concluded that citizens were “generally not granted the same place in news as those of police and other officials, and often are subtly undermined by ways that reporters frame news stories.”41
Journalism’s focus on objectivity has resulted in a news media environment that privileges White sources and White, male perspectives above all others. As journalism scholar Sue Robinson found in her study of White reporters covering race, “Objectivity and other hegemonic practices have reified a system of White supremacy for a White community that traditional Western reporters are not only a part of, but reporting for and within.”42 Objectivity endures as one of journalism’s most prized values despite these criticisms, in no small part because journalists take a mass audience approach to news, and assume that this mass audience values neutral, dispassionate reporting. Unsurprisingly, as the following chapters show, journalists who challenge the mass audience approach, which treats all readers as “interchangeable members sharing the same experiences and concerns,”43 are also more willing to challenge these norms of journalistic practice.
The way that journalists frame news stories profoundly affects not only their stories but also the impact of those stories. When journalists began framing stories about wrongfully convicted inmates on death row as part of a systemic problem rather than a random occurrence, public opinion on
the death penalty shifted from overwhelmingly in favor to overwhelmingly against.44 A similar, more recent phenomenon has unfolded in the coverage of unarmed Black men who have been killed by police, which has played a role in swaying public opinion toward more scrutiny of police departments across the United States.45 The journalistic frame is a powerful tool, yet how that frame is assembled often unfolds among a closed group of people who look little like the majority of the public they are trying to reach.
There are exceptions to this: Investigative reporters and community press journalists traditionally have given equal weight to sources perceived as “unofficial,” as a mechanism for either uncovering institutional corruption (for the former) or creating a stronger bond with their audiences (for the latter).46 Rather than reach out only to elite sources, these types of journalists instead make it a point to interview and feature more “ordinary” citizens— those who are affected by bureaucratic decisions rather than (or in addition to) those who actually make the decisions. Community press journalists specifically have made it a point to include people who get left out of national news sources with larger audiences. Yet this exception is itself simply another example of how audience perceptions shape the news production process: Because community presses are typically interested in smaller, more niche audiences (for example, people who live in a specific neighborhood or belong to a specific ethnic group), the journalists behind them are motivated to be more mindful of who those audiences comprise and more explicit about including their voices in the news.47
The origins of journalism’s imagined audience
The fact that journalists are able to maintain such varying notions of their audiences raises the question: What are the origins of these imagined audiences? Though the previous section might suggest that journalists draw solely on their own instincts when it comes to their imagined audience, the process actually includes substantial empirical data as well. News organizations—like all media companies—historically have invested significant resources into identifying their audience’s demographic backgrounds and media preferences.48 As Nadler wrote: “The ways that news organizations imagine their audiences’ interests do not simply reflect essential truths. Yet nor are the assumptions made by commercial media organizations mere imaginations.”49 In other words, journalists’ imagined audiences stem from
