Civic Engagement Projects
How to Make Thin Journalism Strong?
By Heikki Heikkilä
Jul 3, 2002, 4:33pm

The concepts of audience and public create an interesting division within media studies. On the one hand, the empirical research on readers and viewers talk primarily about ‘the audience’; if any mention is made of ‘the public’, it will usually be used interchangeably with ‘the audience’. Thus, if the distinction between the audience and the public should be analytically meaningful, as some scholars insist (see Dahlgren 1995, 19), then audience studies seem to have refused to take it seriously. On the other hand, for scholars who take an interest in the media and democracy, this distinction is of great importance. Even if they seem to have an analytical advantage over audience researchers, it is not quite clear what this distinction means empirically. Is the public anything else but a slogan?

This article explores the empirical meanings of the public through a case study. It is inspired, firstly, by the theory and practices of public journalism (see Rosen 1999; Glasser ed. 1999). Secondly, it echoes a more general interest that has been re-emerging in Finland (among other places) in the concept of the public. Some scholars have gone so far as coining a brand new word (julkiso) into Finnish language to denote the public in contrast to the audience (yleisö), because hitherto the word yleisö has covered in addition to the meaning of the audience also that of the public (Pietilä & Ridell 1997, 95). Later this initiative has been elaborated both theoretically and empirically.

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