Abstract
ABSTRACT This article—co-authored by a transdisciplinary team of social scientists and journalists in the United States—traces changes to the news landscape in recent decades, and asks: How are legacy media producers grappling with these new realities? As part of a four-year collaboration on young adult news consumption, we take a participatory action research approach to this question, tacking back and forth between newsroom concepts and anthropological ones in pursuit of a synthesis that strengthens both. Starting from anthropological frameworks of participation, the authors argue that broadcast videos typically position their audiences as overhearers rather than interlocutors, while the reverse is true for social media, and that these tendencies shape audience expectations. We find that many audiences have what we call poetic motivations: they are drawn to stories that exemplify their genre. For example, the participatory nature of social media genres translates well to a more candid style that can incorporate live questions and other direct participation. The study reported here focuses on STEM news, but many of the findings apply to news production in general. Our reflective methods can also be applied more widely in the field of journalism to synthesize perspectives from theory and practice.
Published Version
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