Journalism Audiences and Emotion

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff University

ICA 2015, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Overview• Context: Growing interest in the role of

emotion in journalistic story-telling and audience engagement

• Audience engagement: Predicated on emotional involvement

• Role of empathy and solidarity• Complicating accounts of journalistic

objectivity

Journalism and its audiences

• Our panel: Premised on redressing relative neglect of the audience in journalism (cf. Madianou, 2009)

• “Audience turn”: Turn to taking seriously reconfiguration of relationship between journalism and its audiences

• Opportunity to revisit journalistic story-telling practices

The audience turn and the affective turn• The audience turn accompanied and informed by an “affective

turn” (Clough and Halley, 2007) in journalism studies: Turn to questions of emotional expression in, and engagement with, journalistic texts

• Emotion as “bad object” of journalism studies (e.g. Pantti, 2010; Wahl-Jorgensen, forthcoming)– Journalistic ideal of objectivity; liberal democratic underpinnings

of journalism as profession• Recent years: Growing recognition of emotion as

epistemological “blind spot” in journalism studies emotion (e.g. Pantti, 2010; Peters, 2011; Richards and Rees, 2011; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013a, 2013b)

The affective turn in journalism studies

• Long-standing interest in relationship between public discourse and popular culture forms (including journalistic ones)– E.g. Bird, 1992; Lunt & Stenner, 2005; van Zoonen, 2005)

• Social sciences and humanities: Taking emotion seriously as motivations for action

• Digital era: Shift in relationship between journalists and audiences– Emergence of citizen journalism/UGC– Rise of social media logics

Emotion in public story-telling: Changing paradigms?

• Social media logics: Emotion as central to architecture (Papacharissi, 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen, forthcoming)– Role of marketing and PR (e.g. Bernays, 1928)– Emotional expression and elicitation structurally

encouraged to monetize engagement• E.g. Facebook “Like” button and sentiment analysis.

• Affordances of new media enabling new forms of public discourse (user-generated content, social media sharing)

Emotion in public story-telling: Changing paradigms?

• Citizen journalism and social media: More personalized and emotional forms of expression

• “New authenticity” (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013): New system of truth claims

• Audience contributions: Raw, immediate and subjective (Allan, 2013)

• Professional content: Seen as less engaging because it is “cold,” detached,” “objective” and “distanced” approach (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2010)

Emotion in public story-telling: Changing paradigms?

• New opportunities for solidarity and empathy?

• “Injunction to care” about the suffering of distant others (Cottle, 2013)

• “Affective news streams” (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2014; Papacharissi, 2014)

• Today’s ambient news environment: Forms of public expression no longer tightly regulated by professional norms

Conclusion

• Relationship between the audience turn and the affective turn in journalism studies

• New epistemologies of news premised on questioning opposition of rationality and emotion

• Emotion as central to audience engagement• New forms of storytelling may generate empathy and

solidarity• Professional ways of knowing no longer automatically

privileged