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Gadamer, H.-G. (1976) Philosophical Hermeneutics, D.E. Lang, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1988) Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, trans. New York: Continuum. Hay, J., L. Grossberg and E. Wartella (1996) The Audience and its Landscape. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Huizinga, J. (1950) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Peters, J.D. (1999) Public Journalism and Democratic Theory: Four Challenges, in T.L. Glasser (ed.) The Idea of Public Journalism, pp. 99117. New York: Guilford Press. Stephenson, W. (1953) The Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its Methodology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stephenson, W. (1964) The Ludenic Theory of Newsreading, Journalism Quarterly 41 (Summer): 36774. Stephenson, W. (1967) The Play Theory of Mass Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Facing the distracted audience: journalism and cultural context S. Elizabeth Bird
University of South Florida

Not long ago, I participated in an international colloquium on the phenomenon of tabloidization. As the event began, many of us thought we understood the meaning of the term we were gathered to discuss. Most of us from Britain and the United States held some kind of notion that tabloidization was a negative process that was dumbing down journalism and discouraging rational discourse. Indeed, I still think this is happening in those two nations, as well as in some other European countries. However, we also learned that in some contexts, such as Mexico and the former Eastern bloc, apparently similar trends in journalism a loosening of controls, snappier, more accessible writing, concern to engage the reader were acting as positive forces for social change and democratic participation. By the end of three days, the meaning and the implications of tabloidization were no longer so clear. The lesson, of course, is that to understand journalism we have to understand cultural context. Journalism emerges from and responds to cultural specificities. Even in two societies as apparently similar as Britain and the United States, we dont always acknowledge or understand this. For instance, when people (often reporters) ask me to comment about one of my research interests weekly US supermarket tabloids they often take it for granted that these papers are the same as British dailies. In fact, apart from similar layouts, writing styles, and an interest in celebrities, there are many ways in which they

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are different, and these reflect quite distinct cultural milieus. British tabloids are explicit, visually and verbally, about sex, while American weeklies avoid direct references, one of the reasons they were left behind by respectable papers in coverage of the ClintonLewinsky scandal. American weeklies are far more interested in paranormal topics and religious themes, such as biblical prophecies and faith healing. British tabloids reflect a much greater sense of working-class consciousness than those in the United States, where everyone is middle class. My point here is not to elaborate on tabloids as such, but rather to argue that we need to be more aware that journalism isnt some kind of universal phenomenon, a taken-for-granted reality that transcends national and cultural boundaries. Issues that are important to journalism in one context may be irrelevant in another. My hope is that this new journal will provide a forum for work that goes beyond narrow analyses of particular collections of texts, or particular local issues, and moves to contextualize journalistic trends and issues and explore them culturally. Here, I would like to explore an issue I believe faces journalism in the United States, trying to see how it is located in American cultural specifics, which are not necessarily the same as those in other contexts. One of the challenges we are already facing here is how to understand the audience for news, and how to assess the implication for journalists of what we are seeing as an increasingly distracted audience. We know that journalists have always had to work to catch and hold the attention of their audiences. The inverted pyramid structure evolved as a way to present the main points of the story as quickly as possible, allowing readers to choose whether they stayed with the story or moved onto something more engaging. Yet for much of this century, newspaper journalists, and then network news reporters, were able to assume that there was a sizeable audience out there, who could be counted on at least to pick up the paper or flip on the TV every evening. The journalists role as broker and shaper of information was understood, and the choices for the reader or viewer were fairly few. At the beginning of a new century, there are no such certainties. We know, for example, that American newspaper readership is dropping, and audiences for network and cable TV news are declining steadily. Whats more, while adults over 50 are still relatively regular news consumers, those under 30 are the least likely to be interested in news, especially from traditional sources. What we really dont know is what this means, and what its implications for journalism may be. Is this trend merely part of the normal life cycle? In 20 years, will todays 25-year-olds have become faithful newspaper readers? Or does it reflect a more profound cultural change?

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In a recent, very limited television news audience study, I noticed some differences among a small research sample of white, middle-class Americans (described in more detail in Bird, 2000). Among other trends, it was apparent that younger (under 30) people lacked what might be called a sense of obligation to be informed. Older people did not necessarily always stay as up to date as they would like on current events, but they generally expressed the view that being informed was a kind of civic duty, linking it to their need to make informed voting choices. Their definitions of real news incorporated a view that news functioned to keep one knowledgeable and connected. Younger people almost never discussed news in terms of an obligation to be informed; they characterized traditional news, such as TV network broadcasts, as boring and irrelevant. News was interesting when it gripped their attention with a striking story or arresting visuals. They believed it was the medias job to try to catch their attention, rather than their duty to find out about anything in particular, and they expressed skepticism about whether to believe anything they read or heard. We need a much broader base of information to document these trends, but if they do hold up, we need to see such information about news consumption not as a problem unique to journalism, but as one among many indicators of the developing culture. Unfortunately, we do not yet have enough real knowledge; much of what we are thinking (and perhaps fearing) is anecdotal and unclear. Many of us who are educators learn with alarm how little our students read I am no longer surprised when a student tells me he or she never reads books except when required to do so for class. This awareness underlies the agonized debate on so many US campuses about such issues as the literary canon those books that all students should have to read in core courses. The choice of these books takes on a particular significance if we fear that they might be the only serious literature that many of our students will ever read. I hear from several people in academic publishing that an important factor in the apparent crisis facing the industry is the fact that graduate students no longer buy books in their field, since they do not have time to read anything other than the specific items assigned by their professors. I have been cheerily told by more than one journalism major that knowledge of current events, history, or social science is unnecessary because I want to go into TV news. There does seem to be evidence that the American public is more poorly informed and less engaged than before, and that this is leading to a decline in genuine public discourse (Whillock, 1999). It is not my intention here to contribute to the growing tide of hand wringing about the younger generation and its shortcomings. Of course there are many young people, including future journalists, who are informed and well-read in the traditional sense. However, I do believe that if we are to

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understand the future of journalism, we must try to understand the cultural context in which news is received. We need to know more about how people use and evaluate the internet, with its endless stream of unfiltered information. The internets informational style does mesh perfectly with the distracted style of an audience that places entertainment above all else. Does its flow also feed into an apparent growth in relativistic attitudes among young people, encouraging a sense that all news is equally credible or incredible? Indeed, news no longer has the kind of privileged status it once did among other sources of information. In Britain, Independent Television recently did what seemed unthinkable, bumping its nightly News at Ten broadcast out of its sacred time slot because its ratings no longer justified that key position. American anchor Walter Cronkites famous signature, and thats the way it is, would be laughed off the screen today, or would be assumed to be said in knowing irony. Our audiences, whether they are our students or our readers, are distracted in a way that surely is new, and we need more than anecdotes to understand this. If this is the news audience of the future, where exactly does it leave journalism? One of the hallmarks of the second half of the 20th century was the journalistic moment as cultural unifier news footage of Iwo Jima, the Kennedy funeral, the Apollo moon landing, Martin Luther Kings I have a dream speech, are used in multiple contexts to evoke a shared cultural memory. As the culture fragments into special interest groups who gather their information from multiple sources and in private ways, sometimes there seems to be a note of desperation in the journalism professions attempts to recapture the notion of a shared news in which we can assume everyone is interested. If we were reading American newspapers and watching TV news in October 1998, we might be forgiven for assuming that the whole nation was enthralled by the saga of former Apollo astronaut John Glenns return to space, as a nowroutine space shuttle flight was transformed into the stuff of legend. Yet its likely that many, if not most Americans were not watching or reading, and were not participating in any great national celebration. Reporters created an even greater mythical event around the 1999 death of John F. Kennedy Jr, covering it relentlessly, and declaring it a national tragedy, even as many of the younger people-in-the-street they were interviewing described themselves as essentially indifferent to the Kennedys. Of course, a less alarming way to look at this changing culture would be to follow Rushcoffs (1996) argument that what we are seeing is the end of a stifling monopoly on news and information. Once everyone had to believe Cronkite, but now they can make their own decisions, using their own multiple sources, and the days of the journalist as gate-keeper and agendasetter are numbered. Maybe the new electronic information tide is liberating,

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and analogous to the freeing of the press after the fall of the Eastern bloc, or the revolution in American journalism brought about by the penny press. From this perspective, journalists must abandon any delusions of special status, and learn how to compete among the array of informational sources; they may not be able to reach everyone, but will connect with those who care. And in 20 years, maybe todays teenagers wont be reading newspapers, but will access their electronic versions as they participate in a new democracy. All this is to say that there are myriad questions, and very few answers, facing journalism and its relationship with its audiences. The questions I have raised here are some of those that seem important in the United States, although many are completely irrelevant in other contexts. Here, we tend to forget that while we worry about the effects of addiction to computers, millions of people world-wide cannot even communicate by telephone. In a country where we agonize about political apathy, low voter turn-out, and the role of journalists in changing this, we forget about nations where people put themselves at risk for the right to vote or to read uncensored news. There is a world of difference between a news audience which is thirsty for information, and one which is saturated with it. Journalism has multiple meanings in many contexts, and I hope this new journal will help us consider some of those meanings in action.

References
Bird, S. Elizabeth (2000) Audience Demands in a Murderous Market: Tabloidization in U.S. Television News, in Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (eds) Tabloid Tales. New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Rushcoff, Douglas (1996) Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York: Ballantine Books. Whillock, Rita K. (1999) Giant Sucking Sounds: Politics as Illusion, in David Slayden and Rita K. Whillock (eds) Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World, pp. 528. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Journalism studies in an era of transition in public communications Jean K. Chalaby

City University, London

There is mounting evidence that public communications is entering a phase of transition.1 Factors of change include the information technology revolution; the emergence of new media; the rise of cyberspace; the convergence between