Journalists and their audience: a changing relationship?

It has been argued by some that the changes occurring in journalism has led to the audience becoming more important in a journalist’s creative process, particularly with newer work practices such as social media and online writing and tools such as Search Engine Optimisation. However, what this paper is contending is that the audience has always been one of the structures that journalists interact with in their creative process. Using data from a doctoral research project that examined the creative practices of print journalists in Australia, this paper will demonstrate how journalists interact with their audience throughout the work process from story generation to research, writing, publishing and feedback. The discussion about print journalists and their audience demonstrates how the audience is important in a journalist’s creative process regardless of the platform they write for.What this paper will also show is that the audience is a structure that both enables and constrains journalists in their creative process. Furthermore, writing for an audience becomes part of a journalist’s tacit knowledge (Schön, 1983), thus making the creative process easier.