An Intersectional Approach to Exploring Audience Expectations of Journalism

Abstract

Audience expectations of journalism reveal how well journalism is performing its role in society in the minds of its consumers. In an increasingly fragmented media and audience landscape, it has become more important to consider how social identity shapes audience expectations. However, scholarship has tended to examine expectations based on single identity categories (e.g., class or gender), revealing a crucial but disassembled understanding of how audiences perceive the journalism they consume. This study relies on an intersectional framework and eight focus groups to examine how class, race, and gender, as intersecting and mutually constitutive modes of power/oppression, shape audiences' expectations of journalism in South Africa. It identifies intersectional differences in audiences' expectations of solutions journalism, perceptions of journalism's unaffordability and inaccessibility, and normative evaluations of quality and popular journalism that reveal classist and racist discourses of distinction and stereotyping. The study demonstrates the importance of intersectionality as a critical framework for studying audience expectations and the extent to which they are in/excluded and rendered (in)visible to journalism's dominant ideology.

The Final Word on sports podcasts: Audience perceptions of media engagement and news consumption

“…In examining fan responses to changes in sports media production and the shifting digital media environment (see Sherwood et al, 2017), the findings provide a greater understanding of broader themes in sports journalism and media through audience expectations and listener perceptions of trust in, and engagement with, a specific podcast Practically, this includes greater trust of the information by those who engage heavily in the product. These findings also highlight how podcasts are extending the boundaries of journalism and sports journalism (see Carlson and Lewis, 2020;Maares and Hanusch, 2020) by providing other avenues for audiences to find information away from legacy media, and in an increasingly fragmented market (see Banjac, 2022). In response to RQ1, the audience of The Final Word was highly engaged in media content, including through their watching and listening of cricket, and their cricket news consumption through various forms of traditional and social media.…”

“…Loosen et al (2020) note audiences still expect journalists to report objectively, analyse current affairs, and criticise the powerful when necessary. However, Banjac (2022) concludes that if journalism is to meet audience expectations it needs to disseminate to a diverse public, especially in a fragmented online media space. Within this evolving digital environment, Sherwood et al (2017) have called for research examining fan responses to changes in sports media production.…”

“…Podcasting is part of broader changes in the digital media environment that have altered the relationship of audiences with journalism, with consumers having greater opportunities for engagement (Banjac, 2022; Loosen et al, 2020). Loosen et al (2020) note audiences still expect journalists to report objectively, analyse current affairs, and criticise the powerful when necessary.…”

Advancing a qualitative turn in news media trust research

“…Moreover, the aforementioned technological, social, and cultural changes may have affected the audience's expectations in regard to the news media; current expectations may be completely different from those held in the past (Van Dalen, 2020). One criticism of the reliance in audience research on quantitative methods is that they inadvertently limit the opportunity for alternative expectations to emerge freely while overly relying on old—sometimes outdated—categories (Banjac, 2022).…”

“…Even if quantitative research shows that trust in news media is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to particular social groups (see Fawzi et al., 2021), journalism scholars have tended to privilege audiences that are of interest to the news industry, thus overlooking people with a lower socio‐economic status, especially at the intersection of other social categories like race and gender (Swart et al., 2022). Since individual expectations also depend on what affects a person personally and his/her lived experiences, Banjac (2022) advocates employing an intersectional perspective to understand audiences' diverse expectations. From journalists' point of view, taking different expectations into account could help, for example, close the gender gap in news avoidance and encourage young people to consume news‐related contents (Loosen et al., 2020).…”