News Production - Audience Imagined and Its Consequences Essay

News Production - Audience Imagined and Its Consequences - Essay Example News today not only reaches the local audience but also global audience. Globalisation has made the world a small place and the effects of an incident in one part of the world are felt in other parts of the world. News production is today a global phenomenon and the process of how the news is gathered and showcased to the audience has undergone a complete transformation. The important aspect of news production is the way the audience are imagined by the journalists or the news companies. Even though, technology has made it possible to have a more interactive news production process, that hasn’t been the case. There are various reasons why the technology hasn’t been used to best effect to improve the overall news production processs. This paper discusses how the audience are imagined in news production and what its consequences are. In order to do so, first how the perception of the audience has changed over the years or stages of the journalism-audience relationship is addressed. News Productions – Imagined Audience There has been a fundamental transformation in the understanding of the audience by journalists. The professional or traditional view of audience is in complete contrast to the modern view of the audience. The advent of the web has increased the responsiveness of the audience to the news and this has now been incorporated into the DNA of news production. The traditional approach was that the desires and wants of the audience were not of much important and the journalists decided what news the audience needed to know. It was the journalists and the management at the news companies that decided what stories that need to be told to the audience. There was very less interaction and also very less the journalists and companies could do to understand their audience. But with this new level of audience responsiveness, which is made possible by the web, the journalists have better tools to understand their audience and their preferences . But the main question remains whether they have used to best effect. This has impacted the way the audience is imagined during the news production. It is claimed that the web has now lead to audience responsiveness in news production which was earlier audience ignorance. That is, the real audience perception was completely ignored in traditional approach. Now the audience responsiveness has bought in a certain reality into how the audience are imagined in news production. But this is most often limited news channels on the internet. The press and the television news channels haven’t completely utilised this. The audience have been imagined differently during different stages in the last century and this century. The professional view in the last century was that the journalists had very little understanding of their audience. As Ettema & Whitney (1994) state that there was an industrial construction of audience. Industrial construction is the way people who create material (for news companies, agencies, etc) think of the people on the receiving end of their material (Turow, 2005). This had serious consequences or implications on the news that the audience would get. Audience would get material that was not contained of the actual facts but was a perception of journalist about the facts. That is, the audience were fed with news that the journalists thought was right. This was the case most of the times. Gans (2004) in his study makes a very