Abstract

Awareness of the audience has been seen as a kind of black hole in pre-internet journalism – Philip Schlesinger’s ‘Missing Link’. A shift may be occurring in the mindset of the online journalist with the visibility of the audience through feedback. This research proposes that online journalists show some remarkable new traits and understandings about users, despite some conservatism already noted by scholars. Rather than remaining aloof from their public, magazine, broadcast and multimedia online journalists are finding and enhancing audience relations that might be termed emotional – using words such as ‘closeness’, ‘empathy’ and ‘identifying with ’, to describe their audience links. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 22 editors and leading online journalists of UK-based media, both with an offline ‘parent’ and net-native. The research discusses tensions thrown up by living audience presence, such as journalists’ new awareness of users’ ideologies. Some such beliefs are recognised as fitting awkwardly with the identity of parent brands. Yet recognition of the need for the new closeness journalists must maintain in order to develop user bases, is forcing them – especially in the magazine sector – to confront these contradictions directly. The negative potential to distort brand identity has to be reconciled with positive potentials of extra circulation and consequent market strength.