Audience Perceptions of News
Conventional models concentrate on what the journalist perceives as news. But the news process is a two-way transaction, involving both news producer (the journalist) and the news receiver (the audience), although boundary between the two is rapidly blurring with the growth of citizen journalism and interactive media.
Little has been done to define equivalent factors that determine audience perception of news. This is largely because it would appear impossible to define a common factor, or factors, that generate interest in a mass audience.
Basing his judgement on many years as a newspaper journalist Hetherington (1985) states that: “…anything which threatens people’s peace, prosperity and well being is news and likely to make headlines”.
Whyte-Venables (2012) suggests audiences may interpret news as a risk signal. Psychologists and primatologists have shown that apes and humans constantly monitor the environment for information that may signal the possibility of physical danger or threat to the individual’s social position. This receptiveness to risk signals is a powerful and virtually universal survival mechanism.
A 'risk signal' is characterized by two factors, an element of change (or uncertainty) and the relevance of that change to the security of the individual.
The same two conditions are observed to be characteristic of news. The news value of a story, if defined in terms of the interest it carries for an audience, is determined by the degree of change it contains and the relevance that change has for the individual or group. Analysis shows that journalists and publicists manipulate both the element of change and relevance (‘security concern’) to maximize, or some cases play down, the strength of a story.
Security concern is proportional to the relevance of the story for the individual, his or her family, social group and societal group, in declining order. At some point there is a Boundary of Relevance, beyond which the change is no longer perceived to be relevant, or newsworthy. This boundary may be manipulated by journalists, power elites and communicators seeking to encourage audiences to exclude, or embrace, certain groups: for instance, to distance a home audience from the enemy in time of war, or conversely, to highlight the plight of a distant culture so as to encourage support for aid programs.
Read more about this topic: News Values
Famous quotes containing the words audience, perceptions and/or news:
“My chance, when it came, was due, literally, to the fact that I was slender.... You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will endanger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady’s sake.”
—Maria Jeritza (1887–1982)
“A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)