The rise of the internet, then social media, then the ubiquity of smartphones each successively raised questions about how journalists think about and interact with the people on the receiving end of their work. We’re talking about that nebulous concept known as the “audience” — or, as Jay Rosen famously said nearly 20 years ago, “the people formerly known as the audience,” people newly enabled by digital media to participate and engage with journalists and their work as never before.

So, it’s not surprising that the journalist–audience relationship has been one of the most central lines of research about journalism for the past 15-plus years. There’s much discussion, too, about the “audience turn” in the news industry — in the way that media organizations are far more focused on understanding who their audiences are and what they want than they were in 20th century mass media — and also in journalism studies research — in the way that scholars are shifting significant attention to making sense of how people, going about their everyday lives, feel about and make sense of news: whether they love it, hate it, or avoid it altogether.

But sometimes lost amid that focus on journalists and their audiences is the reality that there is no unidimensional relationship between the two, just as audiences themselves, as James Webster reminds us, always remain an abstraction, it being impossible for media producers to know, with total accuracy, who has consumed their content (and why). What we have needed in research is a more careful elaboration of the many, diverse forms that journalist–audience relationships might take.

In that spirit, Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, Louise Oberhülsmann, and Tim van Olphen have delivered a useful new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly: “From cultivating fans to coping with troublemakers: A typology of journalists’ audience relationships.” Over several years, Loosen and her team interviewed 52 journalists in Germany representing a range of characteristics — not just differences in demographics, but also in the relative stability associated with their jobs: some working in traditional reporting roles for established media outlets, others producing content for innovation units within those companies or in startups. All were identifiable journalists working under bylines, as opposed to doing mostly behind-the-scenes tasks.

The researchers found that there isn’t one journalist–audience relationship to speak of, but rather “eleven distinct ideal-typical relationship forms,” each a kind of “sub-relationship” that journalists establish with their audience or different segments within it, depending on the circumstances involved. The authors describe these 11 relationship forms as “building blocks” of the broader approach that journalists develop toward audiences overall. They also make clear that most journalists draw on multiple forms in the way they think about and interact with the audience, depending on the context at a given moment or in a given role.

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by Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis, International Journalists’ Network