Positioning yet another idea under the glocalisation umbrella: Reader participation and audience communities as market strategies in globalised online journalism

Abstract

The creation of a globalised network of information has led researchers to direct their attention to several trends detected in the area of media and journalism. Glocalisation is one such umbrella notion. The current article positions readers' participation and audience communities as market strategies in terms of globalised online journalism. Systematic glocalisation involves making extensive changes to the production process (in terms of production routines), in such a way as to incorporate human resources and expertise in enlarging, contextualising and enriching the news with a local focus. In the absence of such a move, there is likely to be an increasing measure of homogeneity in the news coverage conducted in the mainstream media in Brazil, as information is almost exclusively produced by the national and international news agencies concerned. In this article I suggest that, instead of using systematic local treatment and contextualisation as forms of audience targeting, two other less costly forms of capturing and maintaining audiences are comprehensively employed as marketing strategies in mainstream online newspapers: readers' participation mechanisms (which generate a sense of co-production and complicity) and incentives to form audience communities (which generate a sense of belonging and identity). In order to illustrate how such strategies work, I present the case of four mainstream Brazilian online newspapers.