Where’s the audience?

Image by Archangeli via Flickr

Where’s the audience? (insert reader, listener, viewer as appropriate). The past few months have reminded us they’re not reading regional newspapers – certainly not in the numbers they used to be. Drooping viewing figures suggest they’re not watching TV in quite the same quantities either. Radio seems to’ve faired better though books haven’t escaped the digital revolution.

So where are the audience?

A ‘build it and they will come’ mentality pervades the media industry looking to fund production of a plethora of media products. Many of them do so with little thought about who they’re building for. Those that do may have a few market research stats offering broad demographic ABC categories lumping groups together generically along socio economic lines. Ask a journalist who they’re writing for and few will offer a description of a real person the rest of us would recognise.

Developing a clear idea of the audience for a project needs to start well before any of the production process. Getting wrapped up in the elements of the story without thinking who it is for, why they’d be interested and where or how they’ll receive the story.

In the internet age there are plenty of tools that help identify, understand and engage an audience before stepping out to cover the story. Seeding stories on social networking sites, sitting on twitter feeds looking for similar relevant conversations are both reasonable ways of finding niche audiences, engaging them in your story by pulling them top your blog or web site. All these people are connected to others with shared interest in the subject you want to discus and the story you’d like to tell. They’re not just potential contributors for you to interview. They’re part of the story as they share their subject knowledge, introduce others in their virtual and real communities to what you’re doing, and open the debate.

This approach has an impact on the media product itself. No longer is it a static or linear dictate. Instead it’s a conversation focussed on the subject seeded by (in this case) a journalist and with an audience genuinely engaged in the subject matter, prepared to discuss it and add their own slant through comments, video posts and twitter.

What’s emerging as newspapers, television broadcasters and traditional media organisations face up to being digital is the alluring promise of a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism. An evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have seen before.