The Problem of Audience Orientation

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the digital journalistic focus on audiences: metrics, comments and primarily the participatory emphasis of the field. While journalism has always been strongly tied to its audience, digital journalism amplifies this through its emphasis on micro-targeted audiences. But what happens when this audience ends up being, well, a terrible one? And what happens if the audience you have isn’t the audience you thought you had? This chapter examines audience orientation noting that the focus on giving the audience what it wanted in digital reporting in some cases facilitated the worst impulses of the audience. Furthermore, it reflects that journalists many times see their audience as defining issues of “hate” differently than they do.