The September article by Clara Juarez Miro from University of Barcelona, Sandra Banjac from University of Groningen, and Folker Hanusch from University of Vienna, used an audience-centric approach to examine the audiences’ demands, beliefs, and assessments of journalists in Austria.
Audiences have gained far more opportunities to engage with journalistic work than before as shown in numerous research articles. But ironically, as news consumption has declined and trust has eroded, audiences and journalists are actually drifting further apart (Newman et al. 2024).
Much of the research has focused on journalists rather than audiences. Even research on audiences has tended to focus on investigating how audiences can be important for journalism, rather than on how journalism may serve audiences. This study approaches the topic through the concept of expectations (Biddle 1979; Burgoon and Jones 1976).
Expectations in turn, have been categorized in three by Biddle (1979). First, there are prescriptive expectations, which state that others “should” or “must” behave in a certain manner. Second, descriptive or predictive expectations are grounded on observations of behavior and make predictions based on them, typically expressed by “was”, “is”, or “will be” linguistic markers. Third, cathectic expectations have an emotional dimension, using language such as “like” or “dislike”.
Based on this theoretical framework, the authors pose two research questions:
RQ1: What are audiences’ prescriptive, descriptive, and cathectic expectations of journalists?
RQ2: How do the diverse modes relate to one another in audiences’ expectations of journalists?
The authors adopted an observation-centered qualitative methodology and combined think-aloud, watch and discuss, and in-depth interviews. The recorded sessions lasted an average of roughly 2,5 hours. There were 35 participants, 19 of whom were female, 15 male, and one identified as non-binary. The average age was 46 and most had a higher education degree (21), and most were left-leaning (also 21).
It turned out that descriptive and cathectic emerged as particularly pervasive, which highlighted their importance in addition to the prescriptive expectations. There were a total of seven categories of expectations uncovered here: “(1) information, (2) interpretation, (3) investigation, (4) activism, (5) emotional connection between audiences and journalists, (6) audience interaction, and (7) societal relevance”.
The analysis unearthed that while journalists and audiences had similar expectations on good journalism, there were differences in the evaluation of journalists’ performance. The authors managed to uncover the beliefs and emotions stemming from these differences. The audiences’ expectations were “highly complex” and encompassed all types of expectations of Biddle (1979).
Some of the expectations were seemingly contradictory: for example, the participants had a prescriptive expectation that journalists should be adversarial toward politicians, but when they observed such interactions, their reactions were negative. However, the authors stress that this should not be interpreted as confused expectations, but as inherent complexity.
The results of the study have practical implications on creating news that best serves audiences. First of all, the news should have emotional engagement and reduce the social distance between the journalists and audiences. Second, technology should be utilized to create bidirectional communication that shows that the journalists are embedded in the communities. Third, transparency is a requirement. The authors hope for more research on other countries with different media systems.
The article “Audience Expectations of Journalists: Demands, Beliefs and Assessments” by Clara Juarez Miro, Sandra Banjac, and Folker Hanusch is in Digital Journalism. (Free abstract).
Picture:
Woman’s hand writing the word “audience” on a whiteboard, with arrows. By Melanie Deziel @storyfuel
License Unsplash.
