INTERACTIVITY BETWEEN ACTORS

The relationship between those who produce journalism and those who consume news has traditionally been a fairly one-way street (Gunter 2003). The journalist delivers the news and the viewer or reader takes what they can get whether they agree with it or not. Beyond the odd letter to the editor or message on an

answering machine call line there has not been much for the reader/viewer to contribute (Pavlik 2004).

Two of the key ethnographic studies on television newsrooms spent entire chapters of their books lamenting this relationship. Herbert Gans in Deciding What’s News described the journalists‘ thoughts about the audience this way: ‗they had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it: instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves,

assuming that what interested them would interest the audience‘ (1980:230).

In Philip Schlesinger‘s study of the BBC (1978) he devotes an entire chapter to the ‗Missing Link: Professionalism and the Audience.‘ It is not so much that journalists do not know who their audience are (they have media marketing tools to figure that out) it is more that they do not understand how the audience reacts to news or indeed even what specifically they want. According to Schlesinger (seconding Gans‘ audience findings):

When it comes to thinking about the kind of news most relevant to ‗the audience‘ newsmen exercise their news judgment rather than going out and seeking specific

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information about the composition, wants or tastes of those with whom they are communicating. In this context making a news judgment is thinking about the audience because the presumption is that the professional‘s selections are those which meet the desires of those who are being addressed (1978:116).

These studies are echoed further by other studies done about newsrooms and journalists (Rock 1973, Fishman 1980, Epstein 1974).

The image of the audience, in this case, is mostly created by the journalist but often does not mesh with reality. Tuchman (1978) noted that assumptions about readers were made by journalists about which specific stories they would like. She says that it was assumed readers were ‗interested in occurrences at specific localities: concerned with activities of specific organisations: and interested in specific topics‘ (1978:25). However, none of the journalists were able to say with much certainty who the audience was and what it was they wanted.

Stuart Allan (2006) began this debate about what was happening for online journalists this way: ‗[T]he realization that the ‗information super highway is a two-way street‘, where journalists could expect to encounter the viewpoints of their readers on a regular basis, brought with it a growing awareness that

traditional rules and conventions were being rapidly rewritten‘ (2006:15). Indeed this sentiment has been echoed by countless numbers of scholars (Bardoel 1996, Pavlik 1999, 2000, 2001, Arora 2006, Glocer 2006, Boczkowski 2004). No doubt that this change in the way journalism is done is a fundamental one that shapes news as it exists online (Quandt et. al 2006, Deuze and Dimoudi 2002, MacGregor 2007).

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Users of online journalism can determine in many ways how journalists decide to cover the news. There is now a direct line of feedback to the source of the news. Users can email, comment, post on bulletin boards, send stories to friends which increases its viewership and even add to the content themselves. Almost all news websites in this day have a feature allowing the user to send in their view, their comment etc… It is now an active rather than passive media for consumers of news (Deuze 2003).

One of the most interesting studies done of online journalists looked at their relationship to tracking software and how it shaped the creation of online news (MacGregor 2007). The software, which can be purchased from any number of providers, can track anything from the simple number of hits on the website to time spent by each user to demographic background of the user. The research by MacGregor found that journalists widely adopted the use of tracking software but that it was an exception that this information would alter daily practices of news construction. There were three positives of the software: can see most popularly accessed stories: assess trends over time and across site: regard

tracking data as supplying ‗objectivity‘ compared to interactive human feedback (2007:288). However, there were some defined negatives as well: stronger need to adhere to brand and news values: shortcomings in data-cold statistics: indirect message on how to attract traffic: too laborious to retrieve data constantly (2007:290-91). The last negative has now changed as technology is much quicker. However, what we get a sense of with this information is that tracking

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software does not necessarily provide all the answers on how to cover stories but it is a good tool in gaining a better understanding of the user.

USAToday.com (a parentage site of the US national newspaper USA Today) took extreme care when redesigning their website in order to make sure the user was involved. According to an article about the redesign: ‗One theme that emerged was that redesigning their site was an ongoing process that relies more and more on taking readers‘ opinions into effect and making the process more of a

conversation than ever before‘ (Hirschman 2007). The editor of latimes.com echoed this sentiment saying: ‗Readers are coming to us for the journalism we are producing, and we wanted to make maybe a subliminal statement that

interactivity with our readers is going to be a huge priority going forward‘ (ibid).

Many are doing this by having their reporters post blogs on the site4. These blogs often give additional insight into a story but also create an environment where the reporter can have more meaningful interactivity with their users.

Occasionally news websites will pay their reporters more if their blogs are able to generate a buzz within the ‗blogosphere‘ and bring a lot of hits to the website (Palser 2007). However, there is debate as to whether or not this is actually a successful route to new users. There is not debate however, as to whether or not blogs are an essential part of a news website, as almost all contain a blog or several blogs in one form or another (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2007, Nielsen/NetRatings 2006, Singer 2005).

4 _{See http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/index.html for one of the best examples of this being done} today

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These forms of communication of course do not even begin to take into account the numerous amounts of self-created websites or blogs. These sites, often used by frequent consumers of news, voice their opinions and bring up issues they feel are not being dealt with in the media (Drudge 1998). They can often become successful themselves and thus creating another news organisation or source of news for users5.

Additionally, these potential users of online journalism are not limited by spatial boundaries of print or broadcast but rather can be from anywhere in the world. The audience for these online journalism sites are simultaneously hyper local and global (Boczkowsi 2004).And this is not simply unexplored potential, as a majority of UK parentage news websites get their users/audience from abroad (Thurman 2007, Christensen 2004) and are seeking more of them (Pfanner 2007). The study by Thurman (2007) concluded that a huge proportion of British-based news website users are from America. There was no consensus by the editors of these sites that it was either good or bad but the potential global audience online is something those working in the medium have to deal with.

This globalization of news content gives journalists who work online an

unprecedented opportunity to move across state imposed boundaries to disperse their output around the globe to a potential audience of millions. McNair (2006) noted this when talking about the Internet as the first truly global medium: ‗From the perspective of news consumption, the reader of an online newspaper in Sydney is in precisely the same position as one in Toronto or Dublin—part of

5 _{Prime examples of this are The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com and Daily Kos} http://www.dailykos.com

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a global community of readers, existing physically in different time zones but, in this aspect of their lives at least, unconstrained by the separations of time and