Audience Research

Many journalism stakeholders believe they need to better understand and communicate with the news audience to accomplish their goals, a significant departure from the profession’s previous approach to its readers. News organizations routinely draw on analytic data to quantify their audiences—and pursue a variety of techniques designed to engage with them—in hopes of shifting to more audience-supported revenue models, improving the quality of their journalism, and increasing the level of public trust in news media.

Journalism’s privileging of the news audience has identified what some see as a need for journalism studies scholars to understand who the news audience comprises, who it excludes, and what its members actually want from the news. This entry uses the changing dynamic between news producers and consumers as an opportunity ...