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Playing To Your Audience: The Rise of Infotainment

This article explores the need for media outlets to cater to their audience's preferences and how it shapes news coverage. It delves into the criteria people use for story selection and the distortions that occur as a result. The article also highlights the impact of individualization, simplicity, familiarity, excitement, eventfulness, and inoffensiveness on news stories. Additionally, it discusses the role of soft news and celebrity culture in the media landscape. The article concludes by questioning what drives audience preferences and the journalist's role in this dynamic.

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Playing To Your Audience: The Rise of Infotainment

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  1. Playing To Your Audience:The Rise of Infotainment Jon Herbert

  2. Introduction • Last Week (-ish)… on Newsmaking. • This Week… the bit we missed out… • Playing To Your Audience • The Need To Keep An Audience Shapes Coverage

  3. The Market & Entertainment • Find and Keep Your Audience • Infotainment • “The criteria people use in story selection relate primarily to audience appeal rather than to the political significance of stories, their educational value, their broad social purposes, or the newspeople’s own political views.” [Graber, p.106]

  4. Story Criteria

  5. 1. The Impactful News • Impact • Proximity • Distortions

  6. 2. The Individualised News • What is individualisation? • Why does individualisation work? • Distortions

  7. 3. The Simple News • The Complex World • Resisting Complexity • Distortions

  8. 4. The Familiar News • The People • The Issues • Distortions

  9. 5. The Exciting, Dramatic News • Violence, Action, Conflict, Disaster or Scandal • Creating A Drama • Availability of Suitable Materials for the Medium • Distortions

  10. “Every news story should, without any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action – a beginning, a middle and an end.” [Reuven Frank, 1963. ‘Memo to Staff’]

  11. 6. The Eventful News • “News Pegs” • Novelty and Deviance • Distortions

  12. 7. The Inoffensive, Unchallenging News • The Risk of Alienating Your Audience • Distortions • Summary

  13. Soft News and Celibritology • The National Enquirer • The A-Listers • Star Narratives

  14. Hard News vs Soft News • Darfur in 2004 • 18, 5 & 3 minutes • Martha Stewart • 130 minutes

  15. Hard News Vs. Soft News • “Too Much Celebrity News, Too Little Good News” • October 12, 2007 • Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press • http://people-press.org/reports/print.php3?PageID=1198

  16. Norms and Values • Norms and Values: Herbert Gans • The Master Narrative: William Woo • Ethnocentrism • Commitment to Democracy and Capitalism • Small Town Pastoralism • Individualism (in Moderation) • Support for the Establishment and Social Order

  17. Conclusions • What will we watch? • What will drive us away? • What is the journalist’s role?

  18. Constructo Inc. Scenario • Large residential construction Company • U.S. success story: high profits, big employer • Medical research comes out suggesting connection of building materials to oesophealosis • Choose media outlet, market.

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