Production Perspectives on Audience Engagement: Community Building for Current Affairs Television

Abstract

This article studies the practices and motivations of media producers to engage their audience in an audience community. Many media producers experience difficulties in engaging audiences, and community building seems to be a fruitful way to deal with this. Most empirical studies focus on the commercial value of communities, but this contribution studies the Flemish public service media program Vranckx as a case in point, using in-depth interviews, observations, and content analysis to assess the value of audience communities for Public Service Media (PSM). Results show that producers encourage different types of audience engagement, including immersive, interactive, and para-active engagement, to build and maintain an audience community. To do this, they integrate journalistic roles as observer, developer, facilitator, and curator within the community. Even though production practices show many similarities with commercial brand communities, PSM goals constitute central motivations, namely to decrease polarization and include different perspectives through dialogue in the audience community.

Audience Participation in PSM from a Media-centric to a Society-centric Approach

“…25 For example, VRT's current affairs program Vranckx initially aimed to increase audience appeal by creating an online community, but media producers became concerned of more democratic PSM objectives such as decreasing polarization and including different perspectives throughout the project. 26 This also shows that more minimal forms of participation, such as interaction in an online community, can foster societal goals equally well as some more elaborate forms of audience participation in media production. 27 Accordingly, the question becomes how to move from mere technological interaction or media-centric participation (participation that attracts audiences to other media platforms) to society-centric participation (participation that also encourages media users to go out and promote actual change in society), and the achievement of societal goals.…”