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While digital networked media contribute to a substantial shift in the relationship between journalists and their audiences, current research still largely focuses on one side or the other. This paper aims to overcome this conceptual and empirical deficit by presenting findings from two case studies on German news journalism (a daily TV newscast and a weekly political talk show). They operationalize the concept of inclusion distance, which aims at the (in-)congruence of mutual expectations between journalists and audience members, in a series of standardized surveys among newsroom staff as well as their online users. The paper introduces three different comparative dimensions which this study design affords and illustrates them with findings (1) on journalistic role conceptions and (2) the (assumed) motivations for participation. Besides demonstrating the value of such a multi-level comparison, our findings also provide substantial and nuanced evidence concerning the relation between journalists and their...

The audience has always been an important reference for journalism although, under mass media conditions, it remained an “operative fiction” for its practitioners, reflecting a clear distinction between sender and recipients. Recent shifts in mediated communication towards networked public spheres and the increasing implementation of participatory features force media organizations, journalists and scholars alike to rethink the journalism–audience relationship. We introduce the concept of audience inclusion in journalism, to provide an analytical framework to investigate the relationship between journalists and (their) audience. The article presents the results of a multi-method case study of the German television newscast “Tagesschau” and its online platform tagesschau.de, and compares the attitudes of journalists and audience members towards the role of journalists, the relevance of participatory functions, the motivations for participation, and their general assessment of audience participation. By and...

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 journalism. 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 performances 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...

The concept of produsage developed from the realisation that new language was needed to describe the new phenomena emerging from the intersection of Web 2.0, user-generated content, and social media since the early years of the new millennium. When hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of participants utilise online platforms to collaborate in the development and continuous improvement of a wide variety of content – from software to informational resources to creative works –, and when this work takes place through a series of more or less unplanned, ad hoc, almost random cooperative encounters, then to describe these processes using terms which were developed during the industrial revolution no longer makes much sense. When – exactly because what takes place here is no longer a form of production in any conventional sense of the word – the outcomes of these massively distributed collaborations appear in the form of constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one, by the community of contributors as a whole but by none of them as individuals, then to conceptualise them as fixed and complete products in the industrial meaning of the term is missing the point. When what results from these efforts is of a quality (in both depth and breadth) that enables it to substitute for, replace, and even undermine the business model of long-established industrial products, even though precariously it relies on volunteer contributions, and when their volunteering efforts make it possible for some contributors to find semi- or fully professional employment in their field, then conventional industrial logic is put on its head.