Production perspectives on audience engagement

Subtitle:community building for current affairs television

This article studies the practices and motivations of media producers to engage their audience in an audience community. Many media producers experience difficulties in engaging audiences, and community building seems to be a fruitful way to deal with this. Most empirical studies focus on the commercial value of communities, but this contribution studies the Flemish public service media program Vranckx as a case in point, using in-depth interviews, observations, and content analysis to assess the value of audience communities for Public Service Media (PSM). Results show that producers encourage different types of audience engagement, including immersive, interactive, and para-active engagement, to build and maintain an audience community. To do this, they integrate journalistic roles as observer, developer, facilitator, and curator within the community. Even though production practices show many similarities with commercial brand communities, PSM goals constitute central motivations, namely to decrease polarization and include different perspectives through dialogue in the audience community.

Publication year:2019

Keywords:A1 Journal article

BOF-keylabel:yes

Accessibility:Open