Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen is a media expert and guest on Deutschlandfunk’s media podcast “Nach Redaktionsschluss” (After Editorial Deadline). What makes this format unique is that listeners determine the topics. This episode focuses on the relationship between journalists and their audience. Click here to listen to the podcast episode.
Listener Benedikt Herudek feels that journalistic offerings often fail to meet the needs of their audience. Topics that are relevant to readers, listeners, and viewers are not given enough attention. Instead, he often finds that reporting reproduces the opinions and worldviews of journalists. Where does this impression come from, and how can it be changed? And is there really such a thing as journalists and the general public? Holger Stark (ZEIT) discusses these questions in the podcast with Benedikt Herudek and media researcher Wiebke Loosen.
Loosen works at the HBI, where she focuses on the transformation of journalism in a changing media landscape and researches how audience expectations and journalistic practices relate to each other. In the podcast, she emphasizes that journalists in Germany fundamentally represent the same values as their audience — such as objectivity, neutrality, and diversity of perspectives. Conflicts often arise not from different basic attitudes, but from differences in how these values are implemented in practice.
Must or Should Journalists Align Themselves with Audience Expectations?
“I believe […] that good journalism also involves occasionally failing to meet audience expectations,” says Wiebke Loosen. In political journalism in particular, she argues, it is important to address issues that are central to democratic opinion-forming. According to Loosen, this can be understood as a “duty to keep informed” – a responsibility that can also be observed on the part of the audience.
Who Is the Audience?
Loosen points out that the view of the audience has changed significantly in recent years: editorial offices are increasingly thinking in terms of target groups and developing user-centric products. She thus emphasizes the clear shift in focus toward the audience. “There is no such thing as ‘the reader,’” she says, adding: “And when you talk to journalists, hardly anyone talks about ‘the audience’ anymore […]; instead, there are all kinds of different terms.” At the same time, according to Loosen, we have expectations of journalism and journalists to create a public sphere themselves.
Loosen emphasizes that it is important to address the contradictions and tensions associated with target orientation and user centricity in journalism.