Conceptualising the Audience

This week’s lecture focused on the idea of ‘Audience’. What is an audience? An audience is what the media strives to serve. Without an audience, there would be no media? Each media text such as Newspapers, Television, and Radio all have a purpose. Their purpose is to create a product or service which is then consumed by an audience. In order for this to be a success and to make profit, they need to target their specific audience rather than everyone as a mass audience. By specifying the audience, you are then most likely to be more successful because you are overly suiting the audience’s needs.

 “’Know the audience’ is the first basic principle every handbook for commercial broadcasting teaches the would be television programmer’’ [Ang, L, 1991;p19]

Every photographer depending on the genre or the text in which they work in, have a desired audience to whom they produce their work for. For example, a photographer who works for Vogue would create a photo-shoot under the genre and conventions of Fashion. This then relates to the audience which they would be targeting which would be the audience of Vogue. You can then define the audience even more by specifying the type of person. For example, a woman from the age of 18-30 who has a high interest in Fashion. Then you have your audience. The audience whom you produce your work for.

The audience are the people who consume the product. Some consumers may seek out to the media which is when you may argue that the audience need the media. Others may argue that the audience does not need the media and that without the audience, there would be no media. Or you may wish to argue that it is a two way street and that they both need each other. These are different concepts on the idea of an audience. However, the media’s purpose is to target the audience and this can be something of a difficulty at time especially when trying to target a larger wider audience. In order to do so, they need to specify who their audience is.

“other audiences may be harder to locate. For example, ‘YouTube’ viewers, across the globe, logging on at different times and dates offer a different spatial and temporal dimension of the shared experience of being an audience’’ [Long P and Wall T, 2012;p279]

So therefore media produces would find it harder to evaluate and define their specific audience if they are always gaining different feedback in a large amount. For example, the obvious convention of a YouTube viewer is that they must have the knowledge to use the internet. To define the gender and age and even ethnicity of your audience would be hard to evaluate unless you produce a product with the desired conventions which would relate to your specific audience. I would produce a focus group to analyse my audience and find out the interest of them by doing a discussion to see an overall opinion rather than an interview which would only give me one result unless it was one repeatedly.

 

Ang, L (1991). Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge. 19.

Paul Long and Tim Wall (2009). Media Studies Text, Production and Context. Essex, England : Pearson Education Limited. 279.