Reader construction in interactive online journalism - the imaginary public and its notions of connectivity in 3 Danish online

Jannie Møller Hartley, Journalist and Ph.d scholar at Roskilde University, Denmark, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies.

This talk will ask: How are online journalists constructing the readers when dealing with different kind of interactive features in daily online news production?

Interactivity and User Generated Content (UGC) has long been buzzwords in the literature of online journalism and in the mainstream news-media sites in general. This talk seeks to look at interactive online journalism from the perspective of news sociology. Rather than looking at how social and technological factors constraint the realisation of the interactive potentials, the constructivist approach is used to explore theoretically and emprically why some forms of interactivity are often rejected in the newsroom, while others seem more acceptable. Researchers such as Herbert Gans have documented a ‘fear of audience’ and its potential power. Gans also showed how journalists, when “deciding whats news” base their decisions not on abstracts concept of, what the public need to know, but rather on specific others which interests they can meaningful imagine.

In this talk I look at how online journalists are constructing their readers, seeking to explain how these views affect practices of journalism. Gans idea of the “constructed public” is re-visited, by analyzing newsroom negotiations between one hand enabling the user participation and on the other hand their very skepticism towards it, dismissing it as largely unrepresentative of the general population (Gans, 1980; 230-5).