A question of perspective: Exploring audiences’ views of journalistic boundaries

Abstract

While scholarship has studied the boundary discourses of (quasi-)journalistic actors on social network sites, how audiences perceive these boundaries and engage with these interlopers’ work has been examined far less frequently. Drawing on 11 focus groups, this article explores how audiences construct boundaries by examining and comparing their expectations of content creators on Instagram, YouTube and blogs, with traditional journalism and journalists. Findings show audiences expect journalists to embody established, normative journalistic values, largely excluding content creators from this field. Audiences’ expectations of content creators reveal a more nuanced picture, which includes expectations of authenticity and transparency, engagement, and quality, slow content. Interpreted against broader debates in journalism, we argue that they reveal implicitly journalistic values and expectations, thus blurring normative boundary distinctions. Furthermore, audiences feel an increase in market orientation among both journalists and content creators leads to lower connection and perceptions of credibility, thus further disrupting boundaries.

What News Users Perceive as ‘Alternative Media’ Varies between Countries: How Media Fragmentation and Polarization Matter

“…This study aims to fill this gap in research on alternative media by connecting audience evaluations to outlets' self-characterization as "alternative". We orient ourselves to recent theoretical discussions highlighting the importance of an audience perspective in identifying the boundaries of journalism (Banjac and Hanusch 2020;Tandoc and Duffy 2016). These studies all showed that audiences are increasingly becoming conscious of what journalism is (Tandoc and Duffy 2016) while simultaneously recognizing that different players can fulfil expectations from both traditional and non-traditional journalism (Banjac and Hanusch 2020) as so-called interlopers (Eldridge 2019).…”

“…We orient ourselves to recent theoretical discussions highlighting the importance of an audience perspective in identifying the boundaries of journalism (Banjac and Hanusch 2020;Tandoc and Duffy 2016). These studies all showed that audiences are increasingly becoming conscious of what journalism is (Tandoc and Duffy 2016) while simultaneously recognizing that different players can fulfil expectations from both traditional and non-traditional journalism (Banjac and Hanusch 2020) as so-called interlopers (Eldridge 2019). Furthermore, audiences are a valuable resource for researchers studying news media performance crossnationally, as audience evaluations come to similar conclusions as traditional content analyses (Steppat, Castro Herrero, and Esser 2020).…”

“…Adopting an audience-driven approach is relevant since audiences have traditionally been actively engaged in the content production and distribution of alternative media (Rauch 2007). Media audiences have been shown to share similar understandings of the functions of different media types, journalistic norms (Banjac and Hanusch 2020), and media roles and performance, which are commonly used to study actual media content (Steppat, Castro Herrero, and Esser 2020). News media use and perceptions have also been shown to vary across different information environments (Newman et al 2019).…”

Selective exposure in different political information environments – How media fragmentation and polarization shape congruent news use

“…This is further corroborated by recent studies finding that newspapers are perceived as less hostile and closer to one’s own political convictions than TV ( Bachl, 2016 ). Nevertheless, newspaper journalism still aims to differentiate itself from other non-professional content generators by employing specific journalistic roles and standards, for example, objectivity and disseminator ( Banjac and Hanusch, 2020 ).…”

Audience Views on Professional Norms of Journalism. A Media Repertoire Approach

“…Although, they comprise journalism's role in society and its contribution to a functioning democracy. Journalistic norms have been an anchor point to investigate the publics' expectations (example: Tsfati et al 2006) and recent findings already indicated that media users expect journalists to fulfil these journalistic roles (Banjac and Hanusch 2020). Therefore, we assume them to be convenient and suitable concepts to compare views on journalism of different types of news users.…”