This change in perspective about the audience is everywhere in the industry and in the academy. News executives are focused on growing reader revenue<\/a>. Journalists are tracking a vast<\/a> array<\/a> of digital metrics that provide a real-time window into reader preferences. And many journalism<\/a> scholars<\/a> have made an \u201caudience turn\u201d of their own, shifting some research attention away from news production and toward the complexities<\/a> yet to be understood about news<\/a> consumption<\/a> and related questions about, say, how trust in news actually works<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the board, there\u2019s a heightened awareness of what has long been obvious but wasn\u2019t such a pressing concern decades ago: the truism that because journalism can\u2019t exist without an audience, it therefore matters to understand how news can be made more meaningful and valuable to more people. This is particularly true at a time when news media are fighting an uphill battle for attention in a digital world offering all manner of YouTube, games, Netflix, and everything else more interesting than, well, traditional news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But how, exactly, did we arrive at this point? How did the audience go from being something of an afterthought to a front-and-center fixation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To say it\u2019s simply a matter of the changing economics and technology of news is too simple and only partially true. Instead, we get a more nuanced and well-developed answer from a new study<\/a> by Irene Costera Meijer<\/a>, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the foremost experts in this area. Costera Meijer was studying news audiences before it was cool<\/a>. That wealth of experience is apparent in her new article in Journalism Studies<\/em>, \u201cUnderstanding the Audience Turn in Journalism: From Quality Discourse to Innovation Discourse as Anchoring Practices 1995\u20132020<\/a>.\u201d Partly a personal reflection and renewed synthesis of Costera Meijer\u2019s own two decades of research, this article shows how the journalistic conversation about what counts as \u201cquality\u201d in news is a revealing lens through which to see how journalists have shifted their approach to news users \u2014 to the point that, these days, \u201cbecoming more audience responsive is no longer automatically condemned as the highway to popularization and sensationalism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How is it possible, she asks, \u201cthat for a long time, and almost by definition, honoring quality meant excluding audiences from having a say about quality?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Costera Meijer traces several \u201ctipping points\u201d between 1995 and 2020 that, while grounded in the Dutch journalism context, have broad resonance elsewhere, particularly in countries with strong public broadcasting media. These key moments illustrate a gradual transformation from the 1990s idea that \u201cnews is news\u201d and doing quality journalism meant not having to reckon with the audience, to a growing professional emphasis in the early 2000s on \u201cinformed citizenship\u201d through quality news, followed by digitalization trends that made the audience trackable and thereby essential to journalism\u2019s survival in moving from print to online. A fourth and final stage has been the recent embrace of audience engagement, which Costera Meijer describes as part of a broader turn in the journalistic discourse away from \u201cquality\u201d and toward \u201cinnovation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This analysis sets up a way of thinking about where matters of quality fit in a future of journalism increasingly oriented around the audience. \u201cIf as scholars we want to keep excellent journalism alive,\u201d Costera Meijer notes in conclusion, \u201cwe should \u2026 improve our understanding of the experience<\/em> of quality by news users \u2014 when do they actually feel<\/em> informed \u2014 and how such experience changes in relation to time, place, need, habit, mood, device, medium and platform.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Actualmente \u00e9 um dado adquirido que os media devem preocupar-se (e fazem-no) em compreender e comunicar com a sua audi\u00eancia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opiniao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clubedejornalistas.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/ci3.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/yNaE-fz_I-saELA21FfoOcisyZMksx-F3-II_VC3Lyc00An-qPdUN1LpuCFEFdAplHMoZ6aVi7G4oyUoQ4iPHx3Bq_0bUyzeDZOlGk1a_tlhp2jhWFbu4tB1idM8fKj3bFUpnJ85M16brM1sh1z570xotmOYwvho5nLPt7is_C6Jk0nA0cvIK6YM0nL110KutexBVUjORXK6pR-8VR92zwspy0KeGynMZ9JXXf7lEAE5M4uR14eVCnTzxm0UsnmB141d437YRuQyUmlMecno5FUA4hNlDUOJXYjmJbWbJfuJSa2qiv8sSdlUKLfsn4kij6NKkRjfevUgM4AunIs=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/cdn.substack.com\/image\/fetch\/w_72,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94f9ec37-56f9-4848-8129-c96be3e48dcd_72x72.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"