Listening to News Audiences: The Impact of Community Structure and Economic Factors

Abstract

This study examines influences on the degree to which news organizations attend to everyday readers through online feedback, or conversely via advertising and marketing data. Factors at the community level, the market level, and the organizational level are examined as predictors of editors’ exposure and attention to audiences. Results of a national survey indicate that most editors tend to pay attention to both online reader feedback and marketing data. Factors at the organizational level, such as organizational size and public ownership, were more influential than community-level factors in explaining level of attention. Community structural pluralism was not a strong predictor of attention to feedback via marketing data or online. These findings suggest a business motive in editors’ communication and reinforce previous research pointing to the importance of organizational and peer-level factors in shaping journalists’ response to audiences.

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