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E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both a useful instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they find relevant. Building on existing pre-internet systems, e-petitioning websites are increasingly implemented to make it easier and faster to set up and sign petitions. However, little attention has so far been given to the relationship between different styles of usage and the causes supported by different groups of users. The functional difference between signing paper-based petitions vs. doing so online is especially notable with regard to users who sign large numbers of petitions. To characterize this relationship, we examine the intensity of user participation in the German Bundestag’s online petitioning platform through the lens of platform data collected over a period of five years, and conduct an analysis of highly active users and their political preferences. We find that users who sign just a single petition favor different policy areas than those who sign many petitions on a variety of issues. We conclude our analysis with observations on the potential of behavioral data for assessing the dynamics of online participation, and suggest that quantity (the number of signed petitions) and quality (favored policy areas) need more systematic joint assessment.

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...

This chapter provides an overview on approaches to conceptualize and research the journalism/audience relationship. It addresses theoretical issues in more detail and discusses some ways the journalism/audience relationship has been conceptualized in empirical studies. The chapter focuses on the proximity and distance between journalism and audience and the role of journalism research in this respect. Paradoxically, the relation between journalism and its audience as a topic is both classical and emerging in journalism research. The most common approach to assess the journalism/audience relation in an integrated research design relies, however, on survey data. Online media have introduced new modes of observation to journalists, including monitoring and aggregating digital traces of audience members which reveal information about news preferences, appreciation, engagement, or recall. In particular, the integration of social media into the media repertoires of individuals and media organizations urges us to rethink these categories, which are so fundamental, even constitutive, for journalism and audience research alike.

This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge-that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basis for systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.

In this working paper, we address the new forms of governance emerging within the technological and social spaces of Social Media. The overall aim of the underlying research project is to identify and examine the governance factors that regulate the user's behaviour in Social Media, to discover the governance structure formed by these factors, to analyse the normative intensity of the factors concerning the user's behaviour in Social Media, and, thereby, to uncover the interplay and interdependencies of the factors among each other. In doing so, the governance background of user behaviour in Social Media shall be revealed. As a first step, we approach this task with a pilot case study on the governance background of a certain user behaviour ("uploading a photo") in a certain Social Networking Service (Facebook) whose theoretical foundations, methods, and initial findings we present in this working paper.

E-Petitions have become an important aspect of political participation via the Internet, allowing citizens to publicly support political issues. This paper reports findings from a study on the E-Petition Platform of the German Bundestag, combining an analysis of the platform's database (period: October 2008 to January 2013; n = 2,653 petitions) and an online survey among the platform users (Fieldtime: August/September 2013, n = 244 participants). It reports findings on signature patterns over time as well as between different topical areas, among them evidence for a very uneven distribution of signatures across petitions, for a “spill-over effect” where popular petitions draw attention to the platform to the benefit of other petitions, and for a higher activity of male users. The study also investigated the effect of the introduction of the pseudonymous co-signing option in 2012: No significant change in the amount of signatures was observed, but the majority of co-signers are having a pseudonym rather than their real name displayed in the public list of signatures. This seems to be mainly a “default effect”, but results from the survey also show that users consider pseudonymous signatures as serious as real-name support.

Weblogs (or blogs for short) are a prototypical application of the Social Web. They lower the barriers for participating in online conversations and the dissemination of information, blurring the basic dichotomy that is at the heart of traditional mass communication: the separation of roles between sender and receiver, or between producers and users of information (Bruns 2008). Intertwined with this development, blogs (and their younger sibling the microblogs) are also one of those online formats that challenge the classic dichotomy of the private and the public, because they make it feasible to share information of personal relevance with an audience over time and space.