Understanding the audience expectations of journalism in troubled times

Pervasive low levels of trust in journalism suggest that the news media and journalism are failing to meet audience expectations. Yet, we know very little about what audiences expect from journalism, what audiences think about how journalism performs, and even less about the connection between expectations, evaluations of performance and trust. Finding ways to understand the audience-journalist relationship is increasingly important in the context of today’s changing media ecology, characterised by fragmented audiences, a rise in mis and disinformation, metrics driven understandings of audiences, and a proliferation of new actors and outlets, all of which challenge the credibility and professional status of journalism. If we want to consider ways in which journalists and news organisations can act to repair the fundamental relationship between them and their audiences, there is a need to engage the public.
This paper takes a constructivist approach, deriving an understanding of trust by asking audiences how they expect news publications and journalists to perform and exploring the perceived discrepancies between expectation and performance (Coleman et al., 2012). We propose that as individuals and as groups, public understanding and expectations of standards in journalism will vary because “attitudes, opinions, and values are powerfully shaped by our past histories, our group memberships, and by our context-dependent experience of the given moment” (Bergman, 1998: 82). We analyse responses collected in a nationally representative survey of 3000 members of the UK public to develop a nuanced understanding of variations in expectations and evaluations of performance that explores socio demographics, levels of use, and levels of political engagement. The study contributes to the ‘audience turn’ in journalism studies by focusing on understanding news from the perspective of audiences (Loosen and Schmidt, 2016, Costera Meijer, 2020).