Maintaining Power by Guarding the Gates： Journalists＇ Perceptions of Audience Participation in Online Newspapers

Focus on audience participation in online news media has increased rapidly in recent years. Online newspapers offer their audience several opportunities to participate, for example, by submitting comments on articles or uploading pictures/videos. Audience participation has also emerged as a fast growing research field： The motives for focusing on audience participation have been analyzed and the kind of participatory opportunities that news media offer the audience have been mapped. Also, questions on whether audience participation should be regarded as an advantage or disadvantage to professional journalism have been discussed. This study relates to the latter perspective as it examines media practitioners＇ perceptions of audience participation. By focusing on the case of Swedish newspaper journalists, this study analyzes how audience participation is perceived to affect journalistic work and to what extent such participation is believed to benefit journalism. Based on a representative survey of Swedish journalists, conducted in 2011-2012, and a survey of journalists working at three local morning papers in Sweden, conducted in 2009, the analyses reveal a rather ambivalence attitude to audience participation among the journalistic corps.

Interactivity Features of Online Newspapers:Use and Effect on Gratification Among Zambian Readers

Interactivity in online newspapers is the focus of this chapter in eliciting readers’evaluation of Zambian online newspapers.This aspect of the study investigates and characterises the motivations(gratification sought)for use of interactivity features(“process motivation”)and how widely they are used.It also attempts to ascertain the gratification obtained from their use among readers.The probable relationships between use of the interactivity features(“audience interactivity”)and gratification obtained from them(“process gratification”)and the impact of the perceived credibility of the online newspapers on gratification are also examined.Past studies present mixed results on use of interactivity and gratification obtained from it.This study finds that use of interactivity in Zambian online newspapers is at a low level,although among the three broad categorisations of features of online newspapers,interactivity attracts greater use than hyper-textuality and multi-mediality.Human interactivity features-“knowing what others think about an issue”,“chat on the Facebook page of the newspaper”,“ability to navigate on the Facebook page of the newspaper”,and“posting own comments on stories”-are the main motivations for use of online newspapers,the most frequently used,and the most gratifying to the readers.While readers express an interest in interacting with other readers via online newspapers,they seem less interested in posting their own stories as“citizen journalists”and linking up with the publishers and editors.This finding challenges the notion that all new media are catalysts of participatory and cyclic communication.