"Journalism Audiences and Emotion" Presentation given at ICA Journalism Studies Division panel on "The Audience Turn in Journalism" San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 22, 2015

1. Journalism Audiences and
Emotion
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen,
Cardiff University
ICA 2015, San Juan, Puerto Rico

2. Overview
• Context: Growing interest in the role of
emotion in journalistic story-telling and
audience engagement
• Audience engagement: Predicated on
emotional involvement
• Role of empathy and solidarity
• Complicating accounts of journalistic
objectivity

3. Journalism and its audiences
• Our panel: Premised on redressing
relative neglect of the audience in
journalism (cf. Madianou, 2009)
• “Audience turn”: Turn to taking
seriously reconfiguration of
relationship between journalism
and its audiences
• Opportunity to revisit journalistic
story-telling practices

4. The audience turn and the affective turn
• The audience turn accompanied and informed by an
“affective turn” (Clough and Halley, 2007) in journalism
studies: Turn to questions of emotional expression in, and
engagement with, journalistic texts
• Emotion as “bad object” of journalism studies (e.g. Pantti,
2010; Wahl-Jorgensen, forthcoming)
– Journalistic ideal of objectivity; liberal democratic underpinnings
of journalism as profession
• Recent years: Growing recognition of emotion as
epistemological “blind spot” in journalism studies emotion
(e.g. Pantti, 2010; Peters, 2011; Richards and Rees, 2011;
Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013a, 2013b)

5. The affective turn in journalism
studies
• Long-standing interest in relationship between public
discourse and popular culture forms (including journalistic
ones)
– E.g. Bird, 1992; Lunt & Stenner, 2005; van Zoonen, 2005)
• Social sciences and humanities: Taking emotion seriously as
motivations for action
• Digital era: Shift in relationship between journalists and
audiences
– Emergence of citizen journalism/UGC
– Rise of social media logics

6. Emotion in public story-telling: Changing
paradigms?
• Social media logics: Emotion as central to
architecture (Papacharissi, 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen,
forthcoming)
– Role of marketing and PR (e.g. Bernays, 1928)
– Emotional expression and elicitation structurally
encouraged to monetize engagement
• E.g. Facebook “Like” button and sentiment analysis.
• Affordances of new media enabling new forms of public
discourse (user-generated content, social media sharing)

7. Emotion in public story-telling:
Changing paradigms?
• Citizen journalism and social media: More personalized and
emotional forms of expression
• “New authenticity” (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013): New
system of truth claims
• Audience contributions: Raw, immediate and subjective
(Allan, 2013)
• Professional content: Seen as less engaging because it is
“cold,” detached,” “objective” and “distanced” approach
(Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2010)

8. Emotion in public story-telling:
Changing paradigms?
• New opportunities for solidarity and
empathy?
• “Injunction to care” about the suffering of
distant others (Cottle, 2013)
• “Affective news streams” (Papacharissi and
de Fatima Oliveira, 2014; Papacharissi,
2014)
• Today’s ambient news environment:
Forms of public expression no longer
tightly regulated by professional norms

9. Conclusion
• Relationship between the audience turn and the affective
turn in journalism studies
• New epistemologies of news premised on questioning
opposition of rationality and emotion
• Emotion as central to audience engagement
• New forms of storytelling may generate empathy and
solidarity
• Professional ways of knowing no longer automatically
privileged