Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

(RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE

The relationship between journalism and audience in networked digital
media

Wiebke Loosen & Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

To cite this article: Wiebke Loosen & Jan-Hinrik Schmidt (2012) (RE-)DISCOVERING
THE AUDIENCE, Information, Communication & Society, 15:6, 867-887, DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2012.665467

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.665467

Published online: 07 Mar 2012.

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Wiebke Loosen & Jan-Hinrik
Schmidt

(RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE

The relationship between journalism and
audience in networked digital media

Current technological, organizational and institutional changes fundamentally

alter the relationship between journalism and its audience – with consequences
not only for journalistic practice, but also for theoretical and methodological
issues of media research. After briefly recounting three perspectives on the audience,
the paper outlines key aspects of the sociological theory of inclusion and explicates
them in a novel and comprehensive heuristic model of audience inclusion in journal-
ism. It introduces two constructs which apply both to journalism and the audience:
(1) inclusion performance subsumes inclusion practices and their manifest results,
and (2) inclusion expectations subsume attitudes, norms and perceptions with
respect to audience inclusion in journalism. The degree of congruence between per-
formances of journalists and audience members is interpreted as inclusion level; the
degree of congruence between the expectations is interpreted as inclusion distance.
This model can serve as a heuristic for empirical operationalization, helps to system-
atize existing and future research on digital networked media and journalism into a
coherent sociological framework and is also open for comparative research on
participation in other social systems.

Keywords journalism; audience; Web 2.0; inclusion; audience

participation

(Received 30 September 2011; final version received 1 February 2012)

1. Introduction

Over the last 20 years, technological innovations both in hardware and software
have lowered the barriers to make information accessible. They include
improved means to transmit ever larger amounts of data (e.g. optical fibre

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 15, No. 6, August 2012, pp. 867 – 887
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.665467
868 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

and satellite connections), innovative devices for capturing, storing and retriev-
ing digital information (e.g. digicams and smartphones) and services which
provide interfaces to digital information (e.g. the World Wide Web and search
engines). In sum, networked digital media, of which the Internet is the most
common manifestation, contribute to fundamental changes in communication
by transforming the context in which information is selected, presented, aggre-
gated and distributed. They have become not simply an alternative channel or
technology for news production and consumption (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski
2009), but have changed the conditions of (public) communication by changing
the material basis, roles and funding of journalism (Heinonen & Luostarinen
2008), as well as eroding the established sender –receiver relationships including
the monopoly of journalistic ‘gatekeepers’ (Bruns 2005).
Both academia and broader social discourse have scrutinized and debated
these developments under labels such as ‘participatory journalism’ (Lasica
2003; see also Singer et al. 2011), ‘citizen journalism’ (Lewis et al. 2010), ‘grass-
roots journalism’ (Gillmor 2004) or ‘participatory news’ (Deuze et al. 2007).
These concepts may vary in particular nuances, but usually agree on the obser-
vation that we are witnessing new combinations of professional, participatory
and technical intermediation (Neuberger 2009). Institutional journalism online
is complemented by new forms of participation via user-generated content
and social filtering, and all this happens within a technological context where
relatively new intermediaries such as Google or Facebook select and structure
information via algorithms and software code. Thus, digital networked media
continue and accelerate deep structural changes in the way public spheres are
(re)produced (Marjoribanks 2000).
This paper discusses a particular aspect of these developments by focusing on
the changing relationship between institutional journalism and its audience. It
starts by outlining three perspectives on that relationship in Section 2 and
placing it within the broader framework of a sociological theory of inclusion
in Section 3. We then specify this framework in a heuristic model of the relation-
ship between journalism and audience, analytically separating inclusion perform-
ance and inclusion expectations and discussing their components in Section 4, and
conclude with an outlook in Section 5.

2. Journalism and audience

The relationship between journalism and its audience has always been compli-
cated, even paradoxical in a way: On the one hand, journalism provides a
public service for which it needs an audience – media coverage of current
events largely depends on audiences. On the other hand, this audience only
plays (or used to play?) a subordinate role in everyday newsroom routines: ‘In
the midst of daily journalistic work ‘audiences’ and ‘public’ have tended to be
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 869

abstractions rather than an active presence in the newsroom’ (Heinonen 2011,

p. 34). Journalists are often criticized for their ‘in-group orientation’ (Donsbach
2008, p. 68; see also Donsbach & Patterson 1996; Reinemann 2008), meaning
that other journalists (colleagues and superiors) and the coverage of opinion
leading media are the most influential references when it comes to deciding
what counts as news. This has led to the pointed conclusion that journalists
are disregarding the audience and suffer from self-orientation and self-reference
(Weischenberg et al. 2006, p. 194) – or as Deuze (2008, p. 857) puts it:

journalism has somehow succeeded in taking its traditional public service

role perception extremely seriously, while at the same time, and largely
because of this, it has established a position for itself in contemporary
society that seems almost completely out of touch with the lived reality
of its constituencies.

Nevertheless, the audience always plays a role, of course, in journalistic

practice (Witschge 2012). For instance, about a quarter of the German journal-
ists perceive the audience to have an important impact on their job, which makes
the audience by far the most important external influence according to journal-
ists views (Weischenberg et al. 2012).
Like journalism itself, media research on the journalism/audience relation-
ship has also been based on assumptions rooted in mass media systems, where the
asymmetry between journalism and audience is a defining characteristic. With
respect to the analytical status of the audience, two main conceptions can be dis-
tinguished: First, the audience as recipients-perspective which conceptualizes the
audience as the sum of receivers of media content. This perspective includes
various paradigms, which differ in the extent to which they conceptualize the
audience as homogeneous or heterogeneous, and in the extent to which they
assume media reception as passive or active (see Carpentier 2011; also Bolin
this issue). They range from early and simple cause– effect models of media
effects over general theories modelling the active selection of media content
(e.g. in the uses-and-gratification approach; see Katz et al. 1974) to studies
looking at the various ways in which the seemingly passive audience of mass
media products is actually engaging in complex activities of decoding meaning
(Hall 1973/1980), participating in interpretative communities around soap
operas or science-fiction movies (e.g. Ang 1985; Jenkins 1992), or ‘making
sense of the news’ (Bruhn Jensen 1986) when watching TV newscasts.
Common to these approaches, however, is the positioning of the audience as
opposed or even subordinate to media organizations: It receives the institution-
ally selected and distributed content without the technological means to send
back on the same scale.
The second conception of audience started from a very different assumption.
Instead of seeing the audience as the receiver of media products, the audience as
870 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

product-perspective is asserting that it is the audience itself that is produced by the

media industry (Smythe 1977; Ang 1991). Rooted in critical Marxist theory, this
perspective stresses a different kind of audience activity or ‘audience labour’,
where media consumption is reproducing the capitalist workforce and evoking
consumption desires (see Caraway 2011 for a recent critique). And even if one
does not follow the original Marxist assumptions, the audience-as-product-
perspective emphasizes that media systems always include and rely on regimes
of audience measurement. Complex constellations of actors, technologies and
practices ‘manufacture the audience through a set of measurement procedures
that are shaped both by industry dynamics and the technological and usage patterns
of the media whose audience is manufactured’ (Bermejo 2009, p. 138; also Ander-
son 2011; Bourdon & Méadel 2011).
Both perspectives acknowledge that information about the audience is flowing
back into the newsrooms, because journalism has to take information about its audi-
ence into account in order to produce news that will be noticed. Thus, the relation-
ship between journalism and its audience is structured by reciprocal expectations
about what journalism should and will deliver, and what the audience should and
will receive. Images of audiences are regarded as an important factor shaping jour-
nalistic routines and are (tacitly) embedded in the news making process (DeWerth-
Pallmeyer 1997). Theoretically, this constellation is part of the dynamic-transac-
tional approach of media effects developed by communication scholars such as
Früh and Schönbach (1982, 2005) and Schönbach and Früh (1984) (see also
Jeffres & Scheufele 2009). It stresses the transactional character of the communi-
cation process and differentiates between inter-transactions (between communicator
and recipient) and intra-transactions (intrapersonal information processing).
With respect to the relationship of journalism and audience, inter-transactions are
most important: they refer to the reflexive relationship of more or less stable expec-
tations and images both sides have of each other as well as to routines and patterns for
producing and receiving news. Empirically, this concept has been operationalized,
for instance, as the communication distance between journalists and audiences
(Weischenberg et al. 1989; for pioneer studies in this field see also Atwood 1970;
Martin et al. 1972). It expresses the congruence or incongruence of the audience’s
communication expectations with the journalists’ communication expectations,
including expectations about the audience’s expectations.
In journalism studies, most research has focused on journalists’ perceptions
and images of the audience and found, for example, that ideas about the audience
differ among journalist from different media, even from different editorial
departments or sections (Andersson 2009; Weischenberg et al. 2012). A comp-
lementary perspective is looking at the image of professional journalism among
the general population (Lieske 2008; Donsbach et al. 2009). But even though
images and expectations about the audience guide journalistic routines, under
conditions of mass media they are usually not based on direct interactions and
experiences, but remain, as ever, ‘newsmen’s fantasies’ (Pool & Shulman
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 871

1959) instead. They are relying on indirect and filtered exposure, most often
mediated either through market research and audience measurement or
through those selected parts of the audience that choose to write letters to
the editor or call in a broadcast station, expressing their preferences and
giving feedback (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; Coleman & Ross 2010, p. 45 –71).
So for a long time, the relation between journalism and its audience, as well as
a lot of research from journalism studies, remained grounded in the classical dis-
tinction between the communicator and recipient, between the production and
reception of news. Gradually, however, a third conception is emerging which
sees the audience as empowered networks – not a disperse mass of people engaging
in the appropriation of media content or being appropriated by the media industry,
but rather actively and collaboratively producing and disseminating information
with the help of networked digital media. Various scholars have suggested new
theories and models to account for the consequences of this ‘convergence
culture’ (Jenkins 2006) on media and public spheres. Structural analyses have
shown that ‘networked public spheres’ (Benkler 2006, p. 11; see also boyd
2008; Papacharissi 2010) are characterized by a particular communicative architec-
ture which affords the distribution, aggregation and retrieval of information on
different scales and with varying degrees of collaboration. On the one end, we
find large-scale public spheres of mainstream media websites which serve a disperse
mass audience. Additionally, digital media facilitate more or less stable ‘issue
publics’ which might emerge, for example, in topical and subcultural communities
or around specific Twitter-Hashtags. On the other end, we find the ‘personal
publics’ of Facebook accounts or blogs, where people share personally relevant
information with the rather small audience of their social network (Schmidt 2011).
Networked public spheres rely on new modes of communication afforded by
digital media. These have been called, for example, ‘mass-self communication’
(Castells 2009, pp. 58 – 70) or ‘produsage’ (Bruns 2008; also Bruns 2012 this
issue), all pointing at the blurring separation between a few ‘senders’ and a
large disperse audience of ‘receivers’. Instead, ‘producers’ are contributing to
networked public spheres by filtering, commenting, liking, retweeting, blogging,
evaluating and distributing information from various sources. These develop-
ments are often normatively discussed as examples for the empowering potential
of digital networked media which will increase participation and level power dis-
parities for ‘the people known as the audience’ (Rosen 2006). For example,
Benkler (2006, p. 220) argues that within networked public spheres ‘the
social practices of information and discourse allow a very large number of
actors to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as
potential actors in political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of
mediated information who occasionally can vote their preferences’.
Empirical evidence on this ‘cyberoptimist position’, however, shows that
technological potential does not necessarily equal actual participation. Not all
users navigating these networked public spheres do actually contribute actively
872 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

to them, and not all of those who do also participate to the same extent (van
Dijck 2009; Witschge 2012). Moreover, digital interactive media have been
shown to provide ‘places of boundary work for the journalist-audience relation-
ship’ (Robinson 2010, p. 126), where institutional journalism defends and delin-
eates its own practices more or less successfully. While this is, as Lewis (this
issue) suggests, a common reaction of many professions to technological
change, within journalism, the tension plays out in a particular way, since con-
cepts such as deliberation or civic participation have always been important parts
of journalistic ideals and self-images.
Thus, in order to accurately assess these alleged participatory potentials of
networked digital media and to avoid utopian or cyber optimistic fallacies, it
seems necessary to first develop analytical models which help us understand
the journalism/audience relationship and advance existing theories in light of
the changing conditions of (public) communication. We suggest that the socio-
logical theory of inclusion can provide adequate concepts and start with outlining
its general aspects.

3. Inclusion theory and journalism

Inclusion theory is rooted in systems theory and the concept of functional differ-
entiation as developed by the sociologist Luhmann (1995).1 The general idea
behind Luhmann’s theory is that ‘modern society organizes itself by delegating
different functions to specialized societal systems in order to cope with societal
problems’ (Görke & Scholl 2006, p. 647). Even though Luhmann’s theory of
social systems has been discussed controversial within journalism research
(Löffelholz & Quandt 2005; Löffelholz 2008), its general outline is widely
accepted.2 It has led to a definition of journalism as a social system that provides
ongoing introspection of society and its different social systems such as politics
and economy. Thus, journalism provides ‘information brokering for public com-
munication’ (Blöbaum 2007, p. 7), but becomes public communication only if its
communicative offers are accepted by an audience.3 The relationship between
journalism and its audience is therefore ‘circular and mutual’, forming ‘a com-
municative unit called the public’ (Görke & Scholl 2006, p. 651).
Like systems theory, inclusion theory is not restricted to journalism
or public communication, but can be used in general to consider how social
systems such as economy, politics, education, health care, etc. include persons
by taking them into account for their own systemic operations and logics
(Stichweh 1988, 2005; Burzan 2003; Burzan et al. 2008). In all social
systems, one can identify system-specific performance roles and complementary
audience roles (Stichweh 1988, 2005). With respect to education, for example,
a performance role is the teacher, while the student represents the audience
role; with respect to politics, one can distinguish between the politician and
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 873

the voter. Thus, ‘audience’ is a general term within the theory of inclusion and is
used whenever a person benefits from or makes use of a performance of a social
system, and in doing so, becomes a part of that system’s relevant environment.
Both roles, the performance role as well as the audience role, are constitutive for
a social system, its emergence and its operations.4
Specific to the system of journalism under mass media conditions, the jour-
nalist acts in the performance role and the recipient in the audience role – with
the semantic coincidence that the same term is referring to the abstract general
concept of the role and the particular collective of recipients acting within that
role. We can also specify the observations mentioned above: under the conditions
of mass media the monopoly of journalism was based on the asymmetry between
its performance role and an audience role that was restricted to the selective use
of communicative offers. In that sense, inclusion in journalism does not – at least
not in the first instance – mean to participate, but only to accept communication
offers (Scholl 2004).
This perspective also reveals the problems of inclusion in journalism, since
the asymmetry between the performance role and audience role can no longer be
maintained in networked digital media for two reasons. The first is the restriction
of journalism’s ability to include the audience. Even though mainstream media are
still very important, they are facing decreasing trust in their communicative
activities and declining audiences and revenues, especially in print newspapers
(for the United States, see e.g. Downie & Schudson 2009; for Germany, Kolo
& Meyer-Lucht 2007; for Sweden, Westlund & Färdigh 2011).5 The second
reason is the drive towards inclusion of the audience, which is supported by new
technological affordances (e.g. personal publishing tools and interactive fea-
tures), the integration of these technologies into changing news consumption
habits (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press 2010), but also by
general expectations and practices, forming in various social systems besides
journalism, such as politics (e.g. ‘digital democracy’, Hague & Loader 1999)
or economy (e.g. ‘commons-based peer production’, Benkler 2006).
To conclude, ‘the audience’ is a highly important point of reference for jour-
nalism - and as a consequence also for theory-building and empirical research
within journalism studies. Inclusion theory introduced the differentiation
between the performance role and audience role, which needs to be reconsidered
in light of recent media developments. The most basic condition of inclusion in
journalism – the acceptance of journalistic communication offers – is still valid,
but has to be supplemented by other modes and aspects of inclusion which trans-
cend the asymmetry of mass-mediated communication and acknowledge the
significance of the at-least partly symmetrical relationship. Over the last
years, journalism research has produced various empirical studies reconsidering
the relationship between journalism and audience. The remaining part of this
paper is outlining an analytical framework to systematize these findings within
a broader theoretical context.
874 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

4. A heuristic model of inclusion

Combining assumptions of inclusion theory with established concepts such as

audience image, communication distance and journalists’ role perceptions, we concep-
tualize the audience inclusion in journalism as a reciprocal co-orientation and
interaction in two general dimensions (see Figure 1): Aspects of inclusion perform-
ance, subsuming practices and their manifest results and aspects of inclusion expec-
tations, subsuming attitudes, norms and perceptions. Both dimensions have to be
identified on the side of journalism and the side of the audience, to account for
(potential) instances of communicative symmetry. To actually assess the degrees
of symmetry or asymmetry, we introduce the concepts of inclusion level,
expressing the degree of (in-)congruence between the inclusion performance
of journalism and audience, and inclusion distance, expressing the degree of
(in-)congruence between their respective inclusion expectations.6
Inclusion performance in journalism can be assessed through various indicators
and aspects. Among these are, first of all, the actual features of audience partici-
pation journalism provides (e.g. Domingo et al. 2008; Thurman 2008; Neuberger
et al. 2010; Rebillard & Touboul 2010; Hermida 2011). These consist of the
different venues and channels to interact with journalists, ranging from, for
example, letters to the editor and dedicated phone hotlines to E-mail, blogs, dis-
cussion boards or Twitter accounts. Particular channels might be open to allow
one-to-one feedback and interaction with journalists, while others might be
offered to facilitate interactions among the audience. The particular features of
audience participation rely on technological means, the shape of which is
usually outside of journalists’ control but rather provided by IT professionals
who develop the software tools. The channels also differ with respect to the

FIGURE 1 Heuristic model of audience inclusion in journalism.

 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 875

depth of interaction and contribution they afford: Is it ‘only’ feedback and com-
ments on already published information, is participation encouraged in order to
generate ideas or gather material for unfolding and upcoming stories, or does
participation even include (co-)producing content which is then distributed by
the journalistic media?
The second aspect pertains to the manifestation of audience participation in
journalistic output or products (e.g. Kperogi 2011; Williams et al. 2011). This
can be operationalized, for example, by looking at the share of user-generated
content among all output of a news organization, or at the frequency with
which audience participation is mentioned and encouraged. More sophisticated
analyses concentrate on the place audience participation has within journalistic
communication – is it used to complement and confirm stories or positioned
in juxtaposition to journalistic practice? Is it explicitly acknowledged or only
implicitly mentioned?
Inclusion performance on the side of journalism is finally assessable in terms
of professional work routines within newsrooms, which (re-)produce forms and
manifestations of participation (e.g. Domingo 2011). Options for audience par-
ticipation will generate at least some amount of feedback and interaction, which
needs to be reacted upon. This includes, for example, answering to, aggregating
and forwarding feedback to the appropriate people in the news organization, but
also taking comments and information into account when investigating stories.
Thus, audience participation not only influences individual work routines, but
also the institutional and organizational structure of journalism. New job
positions (e.g. community manager or social media editor) emerge, and news
organizations need to provide settings to coordinate the flow of information
between different parts of the organization or from outsourced divisions into
the organization (Erdal 2007; Paterson & Domingo 2008).
Turning to the audience side of the model, we can also identify participatory prac-
tices as being part of the inclusion performance. These include, for a start, the
amount and intensity with which opportunities offered for participation are actu-
ally taken: just because the technological features exist, people do not necessarily
write an E-mail to the editor or comment on an article. The actual performance
of audience participation differs between groups and with respect to different
media (Chung 2008). And with the emergence of social media, interacting
with journalism is not confined to the features of audience participation that insti-
tutional media provides. Rather it can happen through other venues as well, since
personal publishing tools such as blogs and Twitter, video platforms, wikis, social
news aggregators and social network sites are all spaces where users can also
interact with and comment upon journalistic information (Messner & DiStaso
2008; Thorsen 2008; Purcell et al. 2010).
Participatory practices also differ with respect to their addressees and their
place within journalistic practice. While they might inform journalistic investigation
or even specifically occur to be part of journalistic content, thus addressing
876 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

journalism itself, most audience participation is ‘follow-up communication’, which

comments, evaluates, rates or forwards professionally produced information. In this
respect, participating users are addressing their own audiences – their extended
social networks on Facebook, their followers on Twitter or other users within an
online community.
These differences point to a second dimension of inclusion performance on
the audience side. The degree of community orientation manifesting in these practices
is in itself an important aspect of audience inclusion, since it is tied to the shift
from a disperse audience of mass communication to the networked audience of
online-based public spheres. Participatory practices include interactions with
other users and references to their contributions, both affirmative and critical.
Thus, inclusion in journalism can be on the individual level, when a user just
reacts to a certain news item, but it can also happen on a collective level
when users participate as and locate themselves within a group, network or com-
munity (Kopp & Schönhagen 2008). Assessing inclusion performance has to take
these different modes of collective inclusion into account, for example, by ana-
lysing whether the audience organizes itself as an opposition to journalism (e.g.
by criticizing practices or quality standards), acts as ‘interest group’ in articulat-
ing desires and preferences (e.g. requesting to bring certain shows back on air),
or should best be understood as ‘brand communities’ forming around certain
shows or personalities.
While inclusion performance expresses itself in (and can be empirically
assessed by looking at) factual practices, audience inclusion as a whole is also
framed by inclusion expectations, meaning the sum of cognitive patterns guiding
the practices of journalism and the audience, respectively. Starting again with
journalism, inclusion expectations consist first of conceptions of one’s own pro-
fessional role and the place audience participation takes within that profession
(Thurman 2008; Singer 2010; Heinonen 2011). These self-conceptions result
from professional socialization and previous experiences with audience partici-
pation that are molding journalists’ (self-) perception. They also include expec-
tation-expectations, that is, expectations about the degree to which the audience
(or groups within) expect to be able to participate in journalism. These aspects
contribute to more or less specific images of the audience and the functions ascribed
to it in relation to one’s own profession (Jones & Himelboim 2010; Anderson
2011; Heinonen 2011; Weischenberg et al. 2012): Is the audience to be
informed, even enlightened by journalism? Should journalism encourage the
audience to participate, in order to channel public opinion, even to advocate
public interests towards more powerful political or economic actors? While
self-conceptions and images of the audience remain often implicit, they might
also be made explicit, for example, in specific social media guidelines or com-
menting policies (Robinson 2010).
But inclusion expectations will also form as strategic rationales which guide the
allocation of resources and structural decisions within media organizations
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 877

(Vujnovic 2011). In this respect, within organizations, audience participation

might be seen, for example, as an instrument to improve the quality of journal-
ism or to expand the distribution and reach of content via viral spreadability and
sharing features on social platforms. From an economic perspective, audience
participation can be seen as imposing additional costs for community manage-
ment and moderation, even including legal risks regarding libel or copyright
issues that might surface. On the other hand, audience participation can be lever-
aged to reduce costs (e.g. relying on citizen reporters instead of professional
correspondents) or to improve loyalty to a media brand.
Inclusion expectations among the audience, on the other hand, are also
formed through a combination of situated motivations and previous experiences.
Motivation for participation can be grounded in a variety of personal and social
needs, for example, expressing one’s opinion, taking part in discourse and delib-
eration, asking for additional information and orientation, wanting to contribute
expert knowledge, sharing personal experiences or affirming individual and
social identity (Leung 2009; Ekdale et al. 2010). With respect to inclusion
into journalism, an important distinction is if these motives are directed
towards institutional journalism and its functions (e.g. to comment an article
in order to participate in public discourse), directed towards other members
of the journalistic audience (e.g. to flag another user’s comment as inappropriate
in order to improve quality of user discussions) or towards other people or audi-
ences (e.g. forwarding an article in order to inform one’s colleagues).
Previous experiences with participation performance influence the assessment of
audience contributions. Since journalism can react in different ways to user feedback
and other forms of user-generated content (including ignoring, exploiting or pro-
hibiting it), users form different opinions and expectations about the impact of
their activities. As with inclusion performance, this aspect of inclusion expectations
does also include a dimension of individual versus collective action; participation
might be assessed by the audience as mere individual comments or as part of
the collective ‘wisdom of the crowd’ (Surowiecki 2004; in similar veins also Sun-
stein 2006; Shirky 2009), which gets articulated into networked public spheres.
To sum up the analytical argument: Audience inclusion in journalism relies
on inclusion performance and on inclusion expectations, which can be identified
both on the journalism and the audience side. Inclusion performance consists of
practices which use mediating technologies to stimulate, articulate and aggregate
interaction between journalism and audience. This interaction can become mani-
fest directly in journalistic output, but can also take place in communication
spaces ‘outside’ journalistic media outlets by referencing its output. Within jour-
nalism, these practices have become part of professional routines and structures;
within the audience, these practices form networked audiences which exhibit
different degrees of collective orientation.
Inclusion performance is framed by inclusion expectations, which in turn are
(re-)produced or changed through participatory practice. Within journalism,
878 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

these expectations are an important part of professional self-images, which

consist of conceptions of the journalistic role and the place of the audience
within journalistic practices, but also of frames and criteria guiding strategic
decisions of media organizations. Among the audience, expectations are mediated
by motivations for participation and assessments of the impact these contributions
might have on journalism, both as individual and collective practice.
Both dimensions of inclusion, performance and expectations, can be assessed
separately for journalism and audience, respectively. When analysing specific situ-
ations or constellations – for example, in case studies of news organizations as well
as on an aggregated level – we can also assess the congruence of these dimensions.
Inclusion performance contributes to the general inclusion level which can be more
or less uneven, when either journalism or audiences exhibit more or stronger
forms of participation. Inclusion expectations, on the other hand, contribute to
the inclusion distance, which will be small, if expectations about the amount and
nature of participation are rather similar between journalism and audience, and
will be larger, the more these expectations differ.
The proposed perspective sheds light on the complex relationship between
journalism and its audience. It can account both for increasing participatory
activities as well as for tendencies or strategies of boundary work and demar-
cation, thus identifying areas of decreasing asymmetry or blurring boundaries.
The concepts of the inclusion level and inclusion distance, in particular, can
help to understand and empirically map the different tensions journalism is
facing due to the rise of digital networked media. It does not, however,
abandon the very basic differentiation between professional roles and audience
roles which is fundamental to journalism, its societal function and identity.
While the exact relationship between those roles is mutable (and currently
undergoing changes), the end of that constitutive differentiation would also
mark the end of journalism as a social system. Whether this will happen and
journalistic functions will be taken over by ‘functional equivalents’ (Neuberger
& Nuernbergk 2010, p. 321) is an empirical question, though.

5. Conclusion and outlook

Journalism has always been about the audience. As the social system which pro-
fessionally selects and distributes information within public spheres, journalism
is not conceivable without the complementary system of the audience towards
which the communicative offers are directed. Journalism studies have always
acknowledged this relationship. But similar to their research object, they
have been embedded into conditions of mass media, where audiences were
either conceptualized as the sum of (more or less active) recipients of media
content, or as the result of audience manufacturing in regimes of audience
measurement.
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 879

Technological innovations of digital networked media have a profound

impact on how this relationship is organized and socially structured, and they
should also have an impact on the theories and models of media research. We
are just beginning to understand the social implications of the rise of networked
audiences and the resulting tensions – which are not only a challenge to
journalism itself, but also to journalism research, since they call for a revision
and possible re-formulation of established theories and models.
This paper has argued that sociological inclusion theory can provide a suit-
able contribution to assess these shifts, and it has proposed an analytical frame-
work to separate as well as to integrate different aspects of audience inclusion in
journalism. As has been demonstrated, this heuristic model can be useful to
systematize existing research findings and to organize them in a more compre-
hensive theoretical framework. Additionally, it can serve to stimulate, instruct
and structure further research. In October 2011, we have started a research
project which is analysing audience inclusion in contemporary news journalism.
Six case studies of different news media in Germany, acting within the conver-
gence areas of TV-Online and Print-Online, respectively, will not only provide
information about inclusion levels and inclusion distances, but also allow com-
parisons between different media traditions and different kinds of news journal-
ism.7 In principal, the analytical framework is also open to other forms of
comparative research which might focus, for example, on the analysis of
news journalism compared to audience inclusion in fictional media content.
It is also possible to use the model to investigate inclusion in other social
systems such as politics or economy that are increasingly able to communicate
with their audiences directly bypassing journalism. A historical perspective
might compare the emergence and stabilization of audience inclusion in
earlier stages of press and broadcast media (e.g. Wahl-Jorgensen 2007;
Simmons 2009) with current developments in online communication. And
an international perspective might compare media organizations and their
audiences in different countries, or look at audience inclusion by global
media companies and their audiences.
The shift away from the ‘“we write you read” dogma of modern journal-
ism’ (Deuze 2003, p. 220) is connected with high expectations – as an
advancement for democracy, and as a chance for journalism to reconnect
with declining audiences. Advancing our scientific understanding of this shift
might eventually also contribute to our understanding of contemporary net-
worked public spheres.

Acknowledgement

The paper has benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions by Nele Heise,
Julius Reimer, Oscar Westlund, Tamara Witschge and two anonymous referees.
880 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

Notes

1 The concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are not limited to systems

theory, but serve as central dichotomy in various sociological theories
and paradigms (Stichweh 2009).
2 We acknowledge that this is only one of various ‘heterogeneous, multi-
dimensional and competing’ (Löffelholz 2008) theoretical approaches
to the question ‘what is journalism?’. Whether journalism is modelled
as social action, as social system, as popular culture or with the focus on
journalism’s normative role, will in addition make a difference on how
the relationship between journalism/journalists and publics/audience
is conceptualized. What all these different approaches have in
common, however, is the need to account for the shifts brought
about by digital interactive media.
3 While we concentrate on journalism in this paper, it should be noted
that public communication is not restricted to journalism, but also
includes for example public relations and advertising.
4 This does not mean, however, that the particular relations between
these roles are immutable. For example, by applying inclusion
theory to West German history from 1960 – 1989, Gerhards (2001)
shows how demands of citizens for participation in the social
systems of medicine, education, law, politics and economics have
increased in what he calls ‘the rebellion of the citizens’.
5 In fact, declining readership and revenue are phenomena predomi-
nantly observed in Europe, Australia and the United States. In its
annual report on ‘the state of the news media’, the Pew Research
Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (2011) pointed out
that ‘US newspapers suffer more than others’ anywhere else in the
world. However, in India, Egypt and Lebanon print papers are thriving
with respect to advertising revenues, and in Africa paid newspaper
circulation in 2009 rose by 4.8 per cent (see the special report on
international newspaper economics within the report: http://
stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey/international-newspaper-
economics/).
6 We recognize that these categories and dimensions rely on analytical
distinctions: both within journalism and audience, actual communi-
cation always includes aspects of performance and expectations.
Additionally, ‘journalism’ and ‘audience’ are broad roles which
contain various actors, organizations and interests.
7 Additional information and findings are available at http://jpub20.
hans-bredow-institut.de/.
 (RE-)DISCOVERING THE AUDIENCE 881

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Wiebke Loosen is Senior Researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media

Research, focussing on journalism research, online communication and
methods of empirical communication research. Address: Hans-Bredow-Institute
for Media Research, Warburgstr. 8/10, Hamburg 20354, Germany. [email: w.loos-
[email protected]]

Jan-Hinrik Schmidt is Senior Researcher for digital interactive media and

political communication at the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research.
Address: Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research, Warburgstr. 8/10,
Hamburg, Germany. [email: [email protected]]