“Apart but together”. Proximity to Audiences in Times of Pandemic: The Case of the Italian daily L’Eco di Bergamo

(Re)connecting with audiences. An overview of audience-inclusion initiatives in European French-speaking local news media

“…Our inventory of these initiatives indicates a focus on relatively active approaches to engaging audiences, stemming at times from the need or injunction to respond to an “audience demand” identified with varying degrees of formality, as well as from the wider “audience turn” in journalism (Costera Meijer, 2020). This awareness on the part of local media is consistent with the discourse of practitioners who highlight the issue of connecting with audiences as an important practice or even a strategic priority nowadays, even if the means associated with it vary considerably from one news organization to another (Amigo, 2023; Standaert et al, 2023).…”

“…It should also be noted that the initiatives are to be considered as one aspect of the relationship between a news organization and its audiences. This relationship takes shape through long-term processes such as work routines and business models, and thus is related to practices that cannot necessarily be identified from the initiatives (Amigo, 2023; Standaert et al, 2023).…”