Actualmente é um dado adquirido que os media devem preocupar-se (e fazem-no) em compreender e comunicar com a sua audiência.

By now, it’s a given that news organizations must care (and do care) about understanding and connecting with their audience — much more so than they used to back in the day when journalists could mostly disregard their readers and viewers.

This change in perspective about the audience is everywhere in the industry and in the academy. News executives are focused on growing reader revenue. Journalists are tracking a vast array of digital metrics that provide a real-time window into reader preferences. And many journalism scholars have made an “audience turn” of their own, shifting some research attention away from news production and toward the complexities yet to be understood about news consumption and related questions about, say, how trust in news actually works.

Across the board, there’s a heightened awareness of what has long been obvious but wasn’t such a pressing concern decades ago: the truism that because journalism can’t 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.

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?

To say it’s 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 by Irene Costera Meijer, 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. That wealth of experience is apparent in her new article in Journalism Studies, “Understanding the Audience Turn in Journalism: From Quality Discourse to Innovation Discourse as Anchoring Practices 1995–2020.” Partly a personal reflection and renewed synthesis of Costera Meijer’s own two decades of research, this article shows how the journalistic conversation about what counts as “quality” in news is a revealing lens through which to see how journalists have shifted their approach to news users — to the point that, these days, “becoming more audience responsive is no longer automatically condemned as the highway to popularization and sensationalism.”

How is it possible, she asks, “that for a long time, and almost by definition, honoring quality meant excluding audiences from having a say about quality?”

Costera Meijer traces several “tipping points” 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 “news is news” and doing quality journalism meant not having to reckon with the audience, to a growing professional emphasis in the early 2000s on “informed citizenship” through quality news, followed by digitalization trends that made the audience trackable and thereby essential to journalism’s 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 “quality” and toward “innovation.”

This analysis sets up a way of thinking about where matters of quality fit in a future of journalism increasingly oriented around the audience. “If as scholars we want to keep excellent journalism alive,” Costera Meijer notes in conclusion, “we should … improve our understanding of the experience of quality by news users — when do they actually feel informed — and how such experience changes in relation to time, place, need, habit, mood, device, medium and platform.”

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