Book Review: Imagined audiences: How journalists perceive and pursue the public by Nelson, J. L.

Abstract

We now have more information from more sources than ever before, but the free flow of information has also opened the doors to misinformation, fake news, propaganda, and manipulation of information (Berduygina et al., 2019). Some researchers argue that media is profit-driven and promotes advertisers and elites, ignores the audience need for accurate and objective information (Akhavan-Majid & Wolf, 1991). Jacob L. Nelson writes in his latest book, “Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public,” that it is time to shift the focus from profit to audience. He claims that this shift would help news media regain financial stability and that journalists should work alongside the audience if they want to recover public trust. Nelson’s book was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. It has seven chapters and in each of the chapters, the author explores different questions, such as: how do journalists conceptualize their audiences? Who gets included in these conceptualizations and who is left out? And most importantly, how aligned are journalist’s ‘imagined’ audiences with the real ones? Nelson explores these issues through an ethnographic study of the Chicago Tribune and City Bureau newspapers, along with the media consulting firm Hearken. Throughout the book, he focuses on the relationship between journalists and the audiences during a time when the newspaper industry in America is losing revenue, cutting jobs, and dealing with the proliferation of fake news. In the first chapter, Nelson investigates how journalists today are trying to understand their readers and working to strengthen their relationship. The author writes that journalism practitioners usually conceptualize audience as faceless or nameless subjects who independently watch, read, or listen to the news. Journalists know of the audience’s existence but intentionally choose not to think about them, thus ignoring Book Review