Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer & Louise Sprengelmeyer: "Journalism and its audience: the re-figuration of a relationship and its consequences for news production", presentation held at the "Dreiländertagung für Kommunikationswissenschaft (DACH21): #Kommunikation #(R)Evolution. Zum Wandel der Kommunikation in der digitalen Gesellschaft", 8th April 2021, Zurich (virtual conference).

1. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
DACH21
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021
Journalism and its audience.
The re-figuration of a relationship and its consequences for news production
Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, Louise Sprengelmeyer
Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut

2. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
Project perspective: Audience relationships
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Key interest:
• How do journalists’ re-figure their audience-relationships in times of deep
mediatization, and how does that influence their news production?
Key concept:
• Theorizing journalism│audience as a social relationship and communicative
figuration
Key arguments:
• The journalism-audience relationship operates on an individual, organizational, and
societal level.
• Media organizations and individual journalists differ in how (fundamentally) they re-
figure audience relationships in terms of frames of relevance, actor constellations,
communicative practices, and effects on output.
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

3. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
(Testing new) methods
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Reconstruction interviews (e.g., Brüggemann 2013; Reich/Barnoy 2016)
Mapping of actor constellation & audience information repertoire
Diaries of audience contacts (in progress)
Sample
• Target n = 50–60; current n = 32
• Diversity, e.g. in terms of:
• Organizational affiliation (established media, incl. innovation departments vs. news
startup)
• Employment status (permanently employed vs. freelance vs. both)
• Distribution medium (TV, radio, print, online, incl. podcasts, Instagram, YouTube,
Newsletter, etc.)
• Subject (from politics to science to lifestyle to local journalism to civic engagement)
• Genre (from tabloid to data to broadsheet journalism)
• Presentation form (from news report to feature to commentary)
• Gender
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

4. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
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Communicative practices & related media ensemble
• “Journalism as multichannel communication” (Neuberger et al. 2019)? → Not necessarily: focus on favoured
channels due to personal preferences, habits, lack of time, rational-functional considerations
• Freelancers cut off from streams of audience feedback: no access to office grapevine, conferences/meetings,
systems for audience data & feedback → importance of materiality & place despite datafication & mediatization
Frames of relevance
• Emotional dimension: relationship figurations are framed with reference to & evoke the whole array of human
emotions → deep mediatization significantly increases journalists’ emotional workload (Huxford/Hopper 2020;
Lünenborg/Medeiros 2020; but also gratifications) → necessitates additional coping strategies
• Topics as ‘relational topics’: COVID-19 as a shared and dominant frame of relevance → temporary reduction of
the typical “news gap” (Boczkowski/Mitchelstein 2013), increased interaction
Actor constellation
• The ‘special’ audience: protagonists, subject experts, potential informants & interviewees; sometimes
overlapping with circle of acquaintances & friends; particularly loyal & active users
• Mapping actor constellations & audience-information repertoires →
Through the lens of communicative figurations:
The extended “property-space” of journalists’ audience-relationships
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

5. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
Mapping actor constellations & audience-information
repertoires
Total (n = 26)
Number of actors/sources
of at least some importance:
• M = 10.9 (SD = 1.94)
• Min = 7
• Max = 13
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

6. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
Cluster 1 (n = 15)
Mapping actor constellations & audience-information
repertoires
Cluster 2 (n = 4)
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

7. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
Conclusion and Outlook
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• “Which relationship type am I?” Towards a typology of journalists’ audience-relationships
• The journalism-audience relationship on three interrelated levels:
• individual level: emotional work & gratifications → personal coping strategies
• organizational level: structures, processes and constraints (incl. path dependencies)
• societal level: self, other-expectations, and expectations-expectations of journalistic
functions and performances
• Topics (of society/journalistic reporting) represent a central ‘boundary object’ when it
comes to public (inter-)connection of/with audiences/users/protagonists/sources
• Topics & resonance to them unequally distributed across different platforms and different
parts of the audience → differentiation (re-figuration?) of public (inter-)connection?
• Evidence for (increasing?) anticipation of (emotional) effects of own journalistic stories
→ self-silencing or ‘only’ increasing awareness & precautions (cf. Obermaier et al. 2018;
Post/Kepplinger 2019; Springer/Troger 2021)?
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021

8. COMMUNICATIVE FIGURATIONS
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Brüggemann, Michael. 2013. “Transnational Trigger Constellations: Reconstructing the Story behind the Story.” Journalism
14 (3): 401–418. doi:10.1177/1464884912453284.
Huxford, John E., and K. Megan Hopper. 2020. “Reporting with Emotion: A Comparison of Journalists’ Engagement in
Emotional Labour across Media Types.” Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies 9 (1): 39–60.
doi:10.1386/ajms_00010_1.
Lünenborg, Margreth, and Débora Medeiros. 2020. Journalism as an Affective Institution. Emotional Labor and the Discourse
on Fraud at Der Spiegel. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. doi:10.17169/refubium-28985.
Neuberger, Christoph, Christian Nuernbergk, and Susanne Langenohl. 2019. “Journalism as Multichannel Communication: A
Newsroom Survey on the Multiple Uses of Social Media.” Journalism Studies 20 (9): 1260–1280.
doi:10.1080/1461670X.2018.1507685.
Obermaier, Magdalena, Michaela Hofbauer, and Carsten Reinemann. 2018. “Journalists as Targets of Hate Speech. How
German Journalists Perceive the Consequences for Themselves and How They Cope with It.” Studies in
Communication | Media 7 (4): 499–524. doi:10.5771/2192-4007-2018-4-499.
Post, Senja, and Hans Mathias Kepplinger. 2019. “Coping with Audience Hostility. How Journalists’ Experiences of Audience
Hostility Influence Their Editorial Decisions.” Journalism Studies 20 (16): 2422–2442.
doi:10.1080/1461670X.2019.1599725.
Reich, Zvi, and Aviv Barnoy. 2016. “Reconstructing Production Practices through Interviewing.” In The SAGE Handbook of
Digital Journalism, edited by Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida, 477–493.
London et al.: SAGE.
Springer, Nina, and Franziska Troger. 2021. “„Du stehst unter genauer Beobachtung, unangenehmer Beobachtung“.”
Publizistik, February. doi:10.1007/s11616-020-00637-w.
References
Journalism and its audience Ι 4/2021