The Mass, The Audience, and The Public: Questioning Pre-Conceptions of News Audiences. In Glowacki,...

Preprint version of Heikkilä, Heikki; Ahva, Laura, Siljamäki, Jaana & Valtonen, Sanna (2014). The Mass, The Audience, and The Public: Questioning Pre-Conceptions of News Audiences. In Glowacki, Michal & Jackson, Lizzie (eds.) Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century: Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction. New York/London: Routledge, 161-179

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CHAPTER 9:

The Mass, Audience, and Public: Questioning Pre-conceptions of News

Audiences

Heikki Heikkilä

University of Tampere, Finland

Laura Ahva

University of Tampere, Finland

Jaana Siljamäki

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Sanna Valtonen

University of Helsinki, Finland

Introduction

In the face of the rapid changes in the media environment ‘innovators’ are often associated

with pioneers. Innovations will not emerge unless we acknowledge that old trails lead us

nowhere, and familiar concepts fail to inform our attempts to solve uncertainties over the

future. An alternative strategy suggested here proposes a self-reflexive analysis on how the

‘audience’ has been understood in newsrooms and media organisations on the one hand, and

within academic audience research on the other.


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In the classic newsroom ethnographies of the 1970s, it was noted that there was a

missing link, and a structural lacuna, between the producers and consumers of news

(Schlesinger, 1992: 106 [orig. 1978]). Journalists at the BBC observed by Schlesinger – and

those monitored by Gans (2004 [1979]) in the USA – did not regard this gap as a significant

problem. In their view, the missing link was effectively substituted by journalists’

professional judgment; a body of thought informed by journalistic norms, tricks of the trade

embedded in the newsroom cultures, and empirical evidence drawn from incidental

encounters with the ‘typical public’.

In the 1970s and for some time afterwards, the insular professional attitude

towards the audience at many news organisations was epitomised by radically reduced images

of default viewers or readers. The references to the Sheffield bus-driver’s wife at the BBC

(Schlesinger, 1992: 125) as the imagined addressees of news highlighted the contrast between

journalists and audiences. Not only were the default viewers understood to be women, while

journalism – at least discursively – was deemed a very masculine domain. In addition, the

public was also regarded as geographically peripheral and lacking institutional positions that

would render them useful for journalists as authoritative sources. In a word, bus-driver’s

wives and their peers were designated as people to whom journalists spoke through media

texts only.

Since then, three lines of development have been instrumental in gradually

altering the ways in which journalism practitioners relate to their audiences. Firstly, in the

face of the declining circulation figures of newspapers, as well as increasing calls for higher

profit margins by media owners, journalists have begun to see the audience as a critical

lifeline for their economic survival and public legitimacy. This realisation sweeping across

media organisations, has prompted increasing awareness of the segmentation of audiences.

Segmentation has helped direct special attention to the socio-economic and demographic


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variables of the population, and raised the importance of trying to address the desired target

audiences in a better way. The groups singled out as those the traditional news media strive to

‘win back’ include non-subscribers, young people, and affluent niches connected to the so-

called creative class (Willig, 2010).

Secondly, and this connects to the first set of issues, news organisations have been

introduced to new means of audience research that aim to bring greater empirical rigor and

theoretical insights into the understanding of audience behavior (Napoli, 2011). One such

instrument is the international market research tool RISC Monitor, which was widely used,

for instance, in many Finnish news organisations at the beginning of the 2000s (Hujanen,

2006).

Instead of charting the socio-economic groups, RISC Monitor aims to map out

social atmospheres and attitude groups, and analyse the changes in them. One of its outputs is

a typology that has aggregated survey respondents into four personality types based on their

attitudes towards social change, individualism, and consumption. This typology has proved

useful for news editors to assist them to formulate distinct strategies in selecting topics to

cover, framing individual news stories, and envisioning specific news policies. All these

activities aim to extend reach and to draw the attention of audiences. RISC-based practices are

said to have increased the influence of media owners and advertisers in defining what

journalists do. Hence, they have also triggered professional reflexivity on the normative and

political implications of news policies (Ibid.: 195–196).

Thirdly, journalists’ conceptions of the audience have been transformed by the

interactive technologies that enable Internet users to give their feedback to the newsrooms via

e-mail and social media, or by publishing comments to online news. In addition to merely

providing a platform for audience comments, media organisations of all types and sizes are

increasingly investing in the development of user-generated content (UGC), whereby users


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are encouraged to contribute to the production of news by providing breaking news

photographs and videos about events and topics outside newsroom agendas (Wahl-Jorgensen

et al. 2010: 178–179).

Online technologies also allow reporters, editors and newsroom executives to

monitor readers’ behavior on their websites, even if users are not necessarily aware of being

observed. It has been argued that this bird’s eye perspective reduces the status of the audience

to quantifiable, rationalisable, and largely consumptive aggregates. This framing has little in

common with the rhetorical invocations of the news audience as a “productive and generative

entity” (Anderson, 2001: 551). Recently a Finnish editor-in-chief who has been pioneering

uses of metrics analysis, described this situation as revolutionary for journalistic practices:

“When asked by a researcher, readers say they mostly read political news. Nonetheless,

the Web metrics suggest that the mostly read online news often have something to do

with sex. (…) [Compared to other means of knowing about audiences] the metrics

analysis is the one with the greatest integrity. This method gives newsrooms a direct

access to what readers are actually interested in” (Janne Kaijärvi quoted in Journalisti

15/2011: 13).

As a result of three lines of development described above, the days of insular

professionalism seem to be over. Nonetheless, it remains questionable whether the missing

link between producers and consumers of news has yet been found. Instead, it seems clear that

a number of new rationalizations of audiences (Napoli, 2011: 30–31) have been proposed for

replacing or redefining the old images of default viewers.

Some of these rationalisations have yielded only minor updates to the old

metaphors. For instance, in the Danish public service broadcasting company Danmarks Radio


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(DR), a strategy for TV news was introduced for the period of 2007–2009 suggesting that the

early evening news should be addressed to a default viewer, named ‘Birthe’ and the main

news items to ‘Rene’. As induced from ratings analysis and qualitative audience research,

Birthe was described as a “49 years old district nurse, who is interested in local issues and

expecting that news items would resonate with her personally” (Hjarvard, 2009: 6–7). On the

other hand, Rene was conceived as a “35-year-old financial expert, who is taking interest in

politics, foreign affairs and business and who wants to be challenged and provoked by the

news” (Ibid, 2009: 6–7).

Whilst journalists aim at redefining their understanding of audiences through

updated images of default viewers, media managers tend to utilise the rationalisations of

audiences in order to foresee broader changes in the media environment. In their view, the

strategic goal for the future is not merely to upgrade the images of default viewers, but more

ambitiously to overcome the missing link by establishing a partnership with the audience (see

Bardoel and Lowe, 2007: 14). The objective is most clearly spelled out in connection to

public service media but it tends to inspire most media organisations operating on the

Internet.

The changes in the journalism–audience relationship at the level of journalistic

practices and media management appear to be well-grounded. Nonetheless, it may be too

straightforward to assume that they would be automatically successful. It should be noted that

both changes – updating the images of default viewers and drawing media partnerships – are

initially production-driven projects. Thus, these will have to be evaluated against the interests

and expectations of recipients of the media. This objective calls for empirical but theoretically

informed audience research that would help unravel and challenge the rationalisations of

audience that inform the working definitions of default viewers and the attempts to draw

partnerships with media users.


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Towards discursive approach to audience research

Discussion about audiences is always loaded with conceptual and methodological problems.

For example, what is meant by the ‘audience’? Is it a social being; an unknown, but knowable

set of people (Ang, 1991: 2)? Or, is it a discursive construct produced by a(ny) particular

analytic gaze (Alasuutari, 1999: 5)?

Default viewers represent attempts to reduce audiences into tangible individual

human beings: a bus driver’s wife, Birthe and Rene etc. Also, the references to socio-

economic and demographic segments of the population – such as young people, women, or

non-subscribers – conceive audiences as constituted of ‘real people’. These images of

audiences are based on rough aggregations and rather straightforward rationalisations. Their

usefulness tends to stem from their resonance to common sense. ‘Audience’ as concept

simply denotes people ‘out there’.

Rationalisations based on understanding audiences as social beings run into

problems when it is acknowledged that there may be a number of different and overlapping

audience segments. Seeing audiences as social beings locks audience researchers into a

situation where they typically need to study a particular segment at a time and need to defend

their findings against other views that can claim to be equally valid. For journalists and media

managers, the idea of ‘audiences-as-social-beings’ prompts uncomfortable choices: If

journalists are to address young and innovative consumers, how will the old and loyal viewers

react to that? Is it viable for public media managers to encourage partnerships with people

who are already socially active and technologically-savvy?

Costera Meijer’s (2009) study about the ‘quality audience’ of the public service

media in the Netherlands demonstrates this dilemma. In empirical terms, it is pointed out that


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the ‘quality audience’ – constituted of “future leaders, managers and members of the creative

class” (Meijer, 2009: 205) – wants to be addressed as global citizens and expect public

broadcasters to draw a compassionate rather than critical approach to social reality.

While this finding is encouraging for journalism professionals seeking audience

engagement and partnership, strictly speaking, the results appear empirically valid merely in

the confines of the particular audience segment. Whether the findings would more generally

resonate with audiences’ media routines, lifestyles and expectations, can always be contested

by calls for further empirical evidence.

A different strategy for audience research would begin with treating the audience

not as a social being but as a discursive construction. In this manner, audience refers to a

distinct mode of activity or behavior related to media use, which can be separated from other

roles pertaining to media use (Pietilä and Ridell, 2010: 313). In order to avoid taking the

category of audience as ontologically given, we draw inspiration from a group of early

modern sociologists and their contemporary reinterpretations. A brief historical account of

this background may be helpful.

In the early 20th century, communication researchers, particularly in the USA,

became concerned about the negative implications of modern society. It was seen that

modernity did not merely bring about prosperity and industrial innovations but it also

removed people from their social ties and exposed them to pervasive powers of manipulation.

This anxiety was partly triggered by the advent of radio (Pietilä, 2005.)

An alternative understanding of communication was introduced by theorists like

Park, Dewey and Blumer focused on abstract frameworks that would enable the analysis of

social change independently from actual events. This led them to think about communication

as a constitutive force in society. In this line of thought, society exists not by transmission or

by communication, but in transmission and in communication (Dewey, 1991 [1927]). This


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framework triggered a scholarly interest in the varying forms of interactions, which in turn,

helped distinguishing analytical categories of social formations, such as mass and public

(Blumer, 1961 [1946]). Against this framework, audience can be seen as another social and

analytical category that does not refer to social beings but rather to a mode of activity and a

social role ensuing that agency.

These concepts have undergone a dramatic change since those days. In

contemporary usage, ‘the mass’ has practically ceased to exist as an analytical category. This

is related to the erosion of mass communication as the dominant framework of

communication (Livingstone, 2004: 76). The ‘public’ in turn, is predominantly used as a

normative concept: it is a reference point for something that the media industry and especially

journalism should reach for and reinvigorate. Within audience research, this framework is,

however, marginalized since ‘audience’ has become an all-encompassing category in making

sense of whatever takes place at the receiving end of mediated communication (Pietilä and

Ridell, 2010: 304).

Following this argument, we suggest that the concepts of mass, audience and

public constitute a valid and useful point of departure for empirical audience research, if seen

as analytical categories. This would help us to discuss and problematise the validity of

prevalent audience rationalisations. We also think that the idea of media partnership can be

fruitfully considered in relation to each of the three concepts separately in order to see the

various dimensions involved.

The argument we put forward draws from the audience research project entitled

Towards Engaging Journalism1. In the project we have analyzed how the relevance of

1 Towards Engaging Journalism was a three-year project (2009–2012) funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Its main component was an audience research project focusing on nine ‘real world’ social networks in different parts of Finland. Three of the networks were work-based (a group of high school teachers, employees of a multicultural centre and staff members of a state-run bureau), two interest-based (an association for home owners and a local association for the unemployed) and four leisure-based networks (a book club, members of a student theatre, members of a chamber choir and a network of old friends). Demographically, our sample was


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journalism (or its absence) is defined by people involved in particular social networks. While

our key concept and object of study is social networks (see Heikkilä et al., 2012), the vast

amount of data gathered in the project – 74 qualitative interviews with individual participants

(including journalists) and 77 focus group discussions conducted between August 2010 and

October 2011 – enables us to focus on different positions related to media use. In addition the

participants also kept media diaries, a useful further source of information, and triangulation.

In the remainder of this chapter our aim is to reflect upon our empirical data against the

concepts of mass, audience and public and we discuss their contributions to the quest for

appropriate rationalisations of audience for journalists and media managers.

The mass: A concept and analysis

Mass as a concept of communications studies dates back to the analysis of propaganda and

media influence. In the history of audience research, it is emphasized that this tradition

regarded recipients of mass communication as passive. The dominant model of understanding

communication was that of one-directional transmission. Later, this figure of thought has been

eschewed for a number of well-established reasons. It was noted, for instance, that the

communication process was more complicated both theoretically and empirically, and that the

scope of relevant research questions pertaining to uses of media reached way beyond the

question of influence (Jensen and Rosengren, 1990: 218).

In addition, the concept of mass was shunned for political reasons. It is hard to

find anyone who – ironic uses notwithstanding – would dare to publicly refer to ‘ordinary

people’ as a mass and expose oneself to plausible accusations of being undemocratic and

overrepresented by females (67 % women/33 % men), and the middle-aged ranging from 35–50 years (50%). The level of income of participants varied within and across our sample, but in general they situate above the median of the whole population. The empirical data consists of individual interviews (N=74), focus group meetings (N=77) and media diaries (N=49).


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elitist. Nonetheless, if we maintain that mass is an analytical category only, we may see that

many features associated with the concept are still relevant. According to Blumer (1961),

people act like a mass, for instance, when watching a national or global event on television. In

that role, they are aware of what they are feeling and doing at that moment, but they have

little or no interaction with others. Thus, the members of the mass are anonymous to each

other. The mass also lacks social organisation, hierarchies and leadership.

Blumer argues that the mass does not have established rules or routines, but with

regard to the current media-saturated environment, it seems more useful to think that it is

precisely in the routine uses of the media whereby the mass position is most likely taken. The

media diaries (N=49) gathered at the end of our field study, suggest that media uses are

typically adjusted to the rhythms of day-to-day life, such as leafing through the newspaper at

the breakfast table every morning, or routinely switching on the car radio on the way to work.

Here the media are used as a means to turn one’s focus away from the immediate

surroundings, but the media consumption remains undifferentiated.

In the mass position, the media are primarily regarded as material objects, and the

contents they provide come secondary. People in our data described listening to the radio

during the work day ‘with just one ear’, or setting a news website as the home page of the

Internet browser to get regular updates without the trouble of browsing. Also social media

(mostly Facebook, in our data) is checked with the sole purpose of seeing if there is anything

new, without any intention of submitting content. It seems obvious that mass-like uses of the

media have not ceased to exist – merely the variety of instruments that enable such uses have

multiplied.

Our interviewees often described their media routines as introverted: in that mode,

other people and their lives remain at a distance. Thus the anonymous mass position does not

invite a social orientation to other people, but instead it triggers mediated attention towards


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the myth of the centre of society (Couldry, 2003). This means that, on the one hand, the media

is regarded as providing a privileged access-point to ‘what is going on’ in society. On the

other hand, the media supports another myth about social order, the idea that societies and

nations have not just physical or organisational centres – places that allocate resources – but

that they also have generative centres that explain the social world’s functioning (Couldry,

2011: 8). Thus, in the role of the mass, recipients pay attention to this imagined centre, they

recognize prime ministers, sports heroes and celebrities displayed in the media, and make

sense of the domains and institutions that these people are related to.

The myth of society’s centre may also explain why elementary routines of media

use are so persistent. In our data, daily or habitual media consumption was often coupled with

a sense of duty, even compulsion. A female participant, aged 55, explained that she had

subscribed to the local paper for twenty years, and another interviewee (male, aged 57) noted

that he had put another one of his newspaper subscriptions on hold for a while, but resumed it

soon after, as he noticed how accustomed he and his wife had become to having two

newspapers in their daily routines. Thus, the mass position seems to grant people elementary

forms of orientation to the media and public matters (Couldry et al., 2007: 7), an orientation

that is a necessary basis for citizenship and public participation – even if citizenship cannot be

built on the mass position alone.

Discursively, the mass pertains to a bundle of the most rudimentary routines of

media use, where the emphasis is on drawing a mental orientation to issues and

representations and paying attention to them. In this framework, it is possible to conceive that

media users in that role are not motivated or interested in articulating informed opinions about

public affairs or policies. This is simply because the circumstances shaping the media use at

that given moment are not designed for deliberations. Instead, these circumstances may be

feasible for simpler forms of participation and partnership such as crowdsourcing.


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Consider, for instance, that news organisations want to define the geographical

range within which households have been subjected to a storm. Simple processes of

interaction and feedback via digital technology would enable people affected by the storm to

participate anonymously in the generation of information about where the storm had hit, and

even help in estimating the extent of the damages. In this manner, the individually and

anonymously produced inputs can produce a corpus of evidence for aggregation and

journalistic processing. It is evident, however, that partnership which builds on the mass

position needs to be centrally coordinated by journalists. This highlights another important

feature of the mass noted above: the mass lacks social organisation, hierarchies and

leadership.

Ontological understanding of the mass offers different sorts of rationalizations.

At their core is an assumption that ‘the mass’ pertains to the seemingly authentic layers of

society populated by unorganized and often unpolitical aggregations of people. Not long ago,

journalists attempted to make contacts with ‘the mass’ by interviewing incidental people at

village bars. Today, news organisations give ‘the voice of the mass’ a chance to be heard

through online discussion boards or digital voting.

The outcome of these initiatives are often treated with suspicion by professionals

and citizens alike (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2010: 185–187). This may stem from the fact that

the Vox Populi, aggregated through anonymous votes or comments, are often taken out of

their context. These comments may not be processed as immediate reactions, taking place at

the simplest level of media use and reception. Instead, they may be treated as the seemingly

authentic expression of the public opinion. Drawing from our discussion here, it would be

more appropriate to call it ‘mass opinion’.

The audience: A concept and analysis


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Counter to previous understandings of the mass, we follow the view that the recipients of

media as audiences are active, not passive. This line of thought dates back to the uses and

gratifications studies in the 1940s, but even more vigorously the notion of the active audience

has been stressed and elaborated within cultural studies. Nonetheless, the activity ascribed for

the notion is not boundless. As a discursive position, the audience still remains locked at the

receiving end of mass communication (Ridell, 2006: 241). In other words, audiences exist

only in relation to representations produced by other actors than recipients.

In our study, the role of ‘audience’ appeared to be predominant among

recipients. Even if the ‘audience’ position is habitually that taken by the viewer, listener, or

lurker, it is rarely based on duty or compulsion, but involves a strong sense and anticipation of

pleasure. Pleasure and gratification are not automatically attained by recipients but preceded

by a process of selection. Outside of the acts of merely connecting to the mediated centre,

recipients in the role of audience tune in or out depending on their own choice. In our data,

the participants described their favorite TV-shows and genres as well as the types of media

contents they wished to avoid.

Modes of selection and questions of taste are central to how respondents perceive

themselves as audiences. Our participants described themselves, for instance, as active,

critical, selective, and fact-oriented media users. Questions, such as “what are we like” and

“how do we differ from others”, seem important with regard to audiencehood.

In this type of identity work, conceptual figures of audiences are often understood

as social beings, even if they are not. Participants conceived configurations of audiences they

were able to either identify themselves with, or dissociate from. For example, a ‘highbrow

cultural audience’ or a ‘Big Brother audience’. It seems clear that how recipients (of media


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texts) see themselves and others as audiences is heavily influenced by how media

organisations perceive them.

In addition to selection and identity work, the role of the audience assumes a set

of interpretative skills from recipients not used or necessary in the role of mass. In this mode,

recipients no longer regard the media as material objects or conduits (e.g. printed newspaper)

but as constructed representations (e.g. news stories written by journalists). As audiences, the

participants in our study said they take pleasure in evaluating and criticising media contents.

In the focus group discussions, and arranged meetings with journalists, the participants were

very keen on showing that they do not take the media as face value.

In our data, the main criticism towards news journalism was directed at the

gradual and implicit trend whereby journalists were seen to fail to maintain journalistic

standards such as ‘relevancy’ and ‘accuracy’. When faced with this criticism, the journalists

interviewed recognised the trend but suggested that a more appropriate word would be

‘flexibility’. From their perspective the move towards more flexibility in news coverage

towards relevancy and accuracy resulted from feedback from their audiences. When our

participants doubted this conclusion, the journalists argued that the feedback had been

received from ‘other audiences’.

This explanation is valid to the extent that there are, of course, different opinions

about news and journalistic norms. At the same time, the journalists’ argument discloses they

evaluate the criticism against the notions of audiences-as-social-beings. Thus, the validity of

the criticism depends on the representative status of those who criticise journalists. The

question is then, whether or not these people ‘stand for’ the population as a whole. This view,

again, reiterates the assumption of the audience as social being and effectively undermines

attempts to understand the criticism against the distinct role of audience, which would prove

to be much more fruitful.


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Another typical feature concerning the audience position is the strong awareness

of the structural distance between the realms of reception and production. For the most part,

strong calls for partnership were rejected because it would require users to break from the

division of labor between producers and recipients, and leave their comfortable position as

audiences.

The structural gap between recipients and producers in ‘traditional media’ also

correlates to the Internet. The respondents described using the Web predominantly from the

audience perspective; they read online news services, watch clips from YouTube, scan blogs,

and skim discussion boards, but do not typically contribute to them. Furthermore some

respondents saw no point to the attempts of the media industry to encourage user-generated

content.

This suspicion may partly result from the fact that experiments with UGC have

not been quite clear for producers either (see, Wardle & Williams, 2010: 787). More

importantly, the evidence drawn from our study suggests that the intersection between the

concepts of audience and producer is difficult to grasp for people using the media. Indeed, if

recipients in the role of audience are relatively happy with their subordinate role with regard

to producers, why would they want to change orientation just because it is technically

feasible?

The predominance of reception, not production, sets limits to the potential success

of strategies which foreground audience partnerships with media producers. One aspect,

though, came across clearly in our study; in the role of audiences, media recipients appear

competent and interested in media criticism. In our study, this potential was understood and

recognised by the journalists, as the focus groups were provided with an opportunity to

present their specific criticisms about news practices to journalists.


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Another way of utilising the audience role in terms of partnership with the media

outlet deals with selection, interpretation and identity work. Recipients seem rather reluctant

to engage in demanding activities such as those related to media production, but there may be

less taxing activities that would be more compatible with the audience position. Many

participants told us that they do not merely select and interpret media contents on their own,

but also share and circulate video clips and news stories to their friends and relatives.

Currently, sharing may take place predominantly online. Nonetheless, the practice itself is

rooted in the offline environment, too, as explained by one of our participants:

“A: My eldest daughter very actively follows what’s going on [in the news]

and she often draws circles around news stories or clips something out of

the newspaper. [- -] Last spring she took her final exam in high school and

first I thought that this habit was about preparing for that. But it didn’t stop

there, and I think that is good. [- -]

Q: Does she want to draw other people’s attention to the stories, or is it just

her personal habit?

A: Well, I think she wants to draw attention, even if it is for herself, really.

She wants to show them to me, and then sometimes we discuss them”

(Heikkilä et al. 2012: 217–218.)

As the interview suggests, in the process of sharing, the media texts become tagged or

attached with comments. This practice illustrates how people in the role of audience operate

as distribution mechanisms for news and other media products, and by doing so they may add

their own meanings to the original media texts. This type of ‘production’ is rather elementary


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and it takes place often within closed, internally-connected, and local, audience groups. Thus,

the audience production tends to serve private rather than public purposes.

Media organisations facilitate sharing by rendering their contents easily

spreadable. Green and Jenkins (2011: 120–121) note that the cultural processes set in motion

by audiences through ‘spreadable media’ are difficult to control. Audiences may agree to play

along with the organisational or corporate interests of media firms, but they may also turn out

to be highly critical or even derogatory towards the media institutions facilitating such

audience-driven activities. Thus, if media managers aim at establishing partnerships with

audiences, they should take into account – and appreciate – the critical and sometimes unruly

features associated with the role of audience.

The public: A concept and analysis

Historically, ‘the public’ denotes a set of qualities that elevate the concept above other social

formations, such as mass and audience. In the normative and functionalist sense, the public is

taken to refer to well-informed, responsible and interested citizens who are expected to inform

public opinion, thus enabling a society to observe itself (Jackob, 2006). Throughout its

conceptual history, the question of who qualifies as ‘the public’ has been a contested issue. In

line with liberal and progressive ideas about democracy, the exclusiveness of the concept has

diminished radically.

To be able to resolve the difference between these two very different

interpretations of the concept of ‘the public’ (exclusive-inclusive), we will turn again to

symbolic interactionism introduced by the sociologists of the Chicago School. In this context,

the public can be seen as a mode of activity or a role that people assume every now and then.

For Dewey (1991, 12–16 [1927]), publics consist of all those who identify a problem, are


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affected by it, and deem it necessary that the problem should be solved. As publics, people are

willing to discuss such issues with others and potentially also act upon them.

Blumer (1964) emphasizes that a public is not a fixed group of people. Publics are

spontaneous, they are constantly arising and dissolving. It is therefore possible to think that

publics emerge without any connection to the media. However, in the current mediated

landscape, where most of the issues come to our attention via the media, it is likely that the

role of a public is also mediated – it may ensue from the role of audience, and probably from

that of mass as well. Thus, a shift from audience to public presumes a change of orientation:

from spectator to stakeholder or public actor.

Empirically, the position of the public was more implicit than the other two, but it

also tended to be most valuable one for participants themselves. Groups imagined themselves

as publics through identifying issues they had a stake in, and often related to participants’

immediate social environment, or the services they used. The act of problem-solving typically

evoked emotionally charged reactions, and almost by definition, they triggered questions

geared around abstract and value-based concerns about political responsibility, parenting,

morality, injustice, and power. According to our participants, the abstract and value-based

concerns they deemed salient are only occasionally covered in the news media, and,

furthermore, that this coverage often doesn’t encourage public agency.

Nonetheless, our participants are well aware of the range of possible practices

enabling mediated public participation. In their media diaries (N=49) collected at the end of

the project, three participants reported that they had written to a ‘letter-to-the-editor’ section.

One or two of the others had contacted local media to have their (work-related) causes

covered by the newspapers. In addition, two participants had invested some of their spare time

in designing and publishing a Web page related to their leisure time activities. The media

diaries also disclosed a usage pattern relating to filling in Web questionnaires designed for


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and shared by Facebook users. These examples suggest that options for mediated public

participation have been acknowledged and sometimes utilised by media users, but that this

type of agency was not as typical as those relating to the roles of mass and audience.

Given construct of the role of the public does not directly stem from the media but

from issues recipients feel they have a stake in, we need to take a look at the broader context

of media use. This perspective enables us to note that all the diarists tended to incorporate

other people in their media use. Thus, even if media use routinely appears as a private or even

solipsistic act (e.g. reading the newspaper, or surfing on the Internet) the relevance of media

coverage seems, to a great extent, to stem from the social; the events of discussion and debate

with one’s partner, children, friends, neighbours, and colleagues etc. Or, as Couldry et al.

(2007: 116) put it: “News consumption intersects with ‘putting the world to rights’” .

The significance of these social situations is easily ignored by journalists and

researchers, as they often take place in private locations that are far removed from the actual

moments of media consumption. Thus, in order to understand how the role of the public

relates to news and other media forms, media consumption needs to be studied and theorized

at the level of social networks and interpersonal communication (cf. Jensen, 2010: 14). This

sort of analysis should not merely focus on what takes place at social networking sites but we

should also bear in mind that many ‘traditional’ offline social networks are still important

hubs of discussion and agency at the level of everyday life.

To understand that media use expands and dissipates into a variety of social

networks makes it very difficult to think about media users in terms of default viewers.

Instead, it suggests that journalists and media managers should tap into issue-based ‘pre-

political’ discussions taking place where people meet and exchange views with each other.

Not all events or discussions result in the emergence of publics, of course. This brings us back

to the fundamental problem of the public, which is, according to Dewey (1991: 126),


276

primarily and fundamentally an intellectual and methodological one: how are we to identify

publics and make their concerns accessible for others to evaluate?

Since the early 1990s, this problem has been addressed within the public

journalism movement. One of its strategies is the piecemeal approach that attempts to

improve the quality of public discourse through amplifying citizens’ voices in the news. Or as

Rosen wrote: “We can try to find ways to engage more citizens in public life while we make

public life more engaging. We can encourage serious discourse to become ‘more public’

while we make public discourse more serious” (Rosen, 1991: 269). This strategy has

prompted some significant changes in the professional culture among journalists, not merely

in the USA but also elsewhere (Haas, 2007). Nonetheless, the intellectual and methodological

difficulties in grasping ‘the public’ in and for journalism have not been resolved as yet.

It should be noted that as publics, recipients of the media will at some point have

to give up the relatively peaceful realm of media consumption and expose themselves to the

attention, scrutiny– and perhaps suspicion – of social institutions. These do not merely pertain

to media but also to local and national governments. Thus, the emergence of publics will

depend on a variety of action contexts whereby publics should be recognised and taken into

account Couldry et al. (2007: 127).

In rhetorical terms, recognition of public participation may be easily granted by

media organisations. As token of this, online newspapers have bestowed portions of their

publishing space on the Web to the service of bloggers and citizen journalists. Nonetheless,

this participative context remains narrow in so far as the contributions of bloggers and citizen

journalists are separated from the mainstream news agenda, and furthermore, from decision

making in the news-setting agenda. Given the fact that newsroom cultures have been

developed at a distance from audiences and publics, the recognition of the public would call

for radical changes in the ‘political theories’ of news organisations. If we also accept that


277

publics are - at some level - political, this would mean that news organisations fostering and

facilitating public participation would make journalism political as well.

Conclusions

The current atmosphere within media and journalism is charged with ideas of public

participation and peer production. In this situation, journalists are compelled to update and

upgrade their default image of viewers and readers. At media management level the objective

is to abolish the structural gap between producers and the recipients of news through

envisioning new forms of partnership with media users.

In so far as the reforms in either news practices or media management pertain to

users of the media, these strategies need to rely on some sort of rationalisations of the

audience. As ratings analysts put it: “Audiences are elusive. [They are] dispersed over vast

geographic areas, tucked away in homes, businesses and automobiles; they remain unseen by

those who try to know and manage them” (Webster et al., 2006: 1). The rationalization of the

audience within media organisations involves three stages: Firstly, there is an attempt to

simplify and generalize the concept; secondly, there are moves to probe, analyze and measure

audience behavior empirically; and thirdly, the results need to be adapted to the overall

functions and objectives of the given media organisation.

Despite the fact that a number of alternative rationalisations of the audience have

recently been proposed, most of them have tended to reinforce the underlying assumption of

the audiences as social beings. In this framework, journalists and media managers may get

easily carried away with the logic of fragmentation and segmentation, resulting in the ability

to conceive an overarching understanding about the audience being more difficult than ever.

In this situation, it seems that the most appropriate metaphor for media audience is the


278

kaleidoscope: a tube with mirrors producing ever-changing patterns of colors. These patterns

are surely fascinating to watch, but it remains questionable whether they provide valid

descriptions of the changes in users’ consumption, production, overall orientations to, and

even relationships with the media.

A different sort of rationalisation is provided by our empirical audience research,

whereby media consumption is theorised to consist of distinct roles. In this framework, we

distanced ourselves from analysing what particular media users are like, and focused instead

on what media users do while using the media. Three discursive positions – drawn from the

interpretative sociologists of the early 20th century – have been at the core of our study: the

mass, audience, and public.

Our analysis suggests that all three discursive positions prove to be empirically

valid. The role of the ‘mass’ tends to be connected to elementary or routine uses of media.

Practices related to the mass position help recipients to become connected to the public world.

It seems obvious that mass-like uses of the media have not ceased to exist – only the variety

of instruments that enable such uses have multiplied.

Correspondingly, the role of ‘audience’ tends to incorporate a set of familiar

practices associated with media consumption, namely, the intrinsic pleasure offered by

selected moments of reception, the identity work associated with becoming accustomed to

distinct media formats and genres, as well as competencies in criticising the media.

Nonetheless, the audience position has its boundaries. As audiences, recipients situate

themselves at the receiving end of mediated communication; they are receivers, not

producers.

The third discursive position relates to media consumption, and it highlights the

participatory qualities in recipients. The role of the public proved to be important and

amorphous at the same time. On the one hand, participants showed a sustaining interest in


279

social and political affairs, and a significant part of their news consumption was motivated by

these interests. On the other hand, the participants’ deliberations as publics tended to take

place at a distance from the news media. Their concerns are rarely covered in the news, nor

are their experiences systematically listened to by journalists.

In our view, audience research based on the understanding of media consumption

as a discursive practice provides two important insights for journalists and media managers.

Firstly, it helps carve out a less frantic perspective to the current media environment, from the

perspective of media users’ practices, everything is not changing overnight, a number of the

well-known routines of media uses and gratifications are still intact. Despite the fact that the

ways people use the media are undoubtedly diverging, the media remain an important source

for culturally shared texts, meanings and practices. This seems to be the position in the highly

media-saturated culture of Finland at the moment.

Secondly, the discursive analysis of media consumption practices assists us in

providing an antidote against excessively reduced images of audiences. Furthermore, the three

distinct set of practices in media consumption which have been identified suggest that masses,

audiences and publics exist, but they do so as roles and practices. This is important to note as

rationalisations might over-emphasise the mundane qualities of ‘presumed media users’ (the

bus-driver’s wife from Sheffield used by the BBC in the 1970s as a guide to programme

makers). Other simplifications tended to over-emphasise the participatory impulses most

presumed to characterise the younger generation and their adoption of ‘interactive’ media.

These sort of overly-optimistic accounts of media users can be found in new concepts such as

wikinomics and we-think (see, Tapscott & Williams, 2008; Leadbeater 2008).

Instead of these simplifications, our analysis leads us to recommend media

managers and media scholars conceive default viewers or media partnerships separately, that


280

is by considering these very different orientations: the mass, the audience and the public (see

Table 9.1).

TABLE 9.1 (NEAR HERE)

Rather than suggesting news organisations should subscribe to any single notion

of audiences, journalists and media managers should consider their strategies in the form of a

matrix template. In this template, the mass, the audience, and the public would be treated as

independent variables. With regard to potential media partnerships this would mean that

instead of one overarching strategy, media managers and journalists might discover a variety

of different modes and nuances of partnership-working to develop and experiment with; a far

more subtle approach.

Developing strategies for new kinds of media–audience relationships against three

rationalizations instead of just one does not make the work of journalists and media managers

easy. However, this method of conceptualising media-audience partnerships may prove to be

empirically more robust than the others previously available.

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Acknowledgements

The work behind the chapter is related to findings from Towards Engaging Journalism - a

three-year project (2009–2012) funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

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