The Trust Gap: Understanding and Evaluating Journalism and News Media Today

Over the past decade, the literature on journalistic roles and journalistic cultures has documented inevitable discrepancies between the professional ideals of journalists and the practice of the profession. At the same time, high levels of audience dissatisfaction with how journalism and the media do their work have been observed along with a decrease in audiences’ level of consumption of traditional platforms. Moreover, the data has shown that the business models of traditional media platforms are being challenged due to their inability to understand audiences’ needs and behaviours, which threatens their survival and profitability. Despite all of this, attempts to actively incorporate audiences into journalism studies have been limited and even non-existent in some parts of the world.

Based on a survey conducted with 350 journalists and 1,600 news audience members in Chile, in this talk I will address the audiences as a relevant subject of study in the understanding of journalism as a social institution, analyzing the relationship and gaps that exist between the two groups in terms of how they conceive of each other, their expectations of journalism, and the degree to which their expectations align with their evaluations of journalistic work, looking at the individual and organizational factors that better explain the various gaps in the journalism-audience relationship.

Comparing audience perceptions of journalism to those of journalists is a crucial element for understanding the norms, rules and values that give life to and maintain the profession as a legitimate and viable social institution. Studying both journalism and audiences will thus reveal the paths journalists and the media can choose to recover their credibility and increase public interest in various formats and types of news media, representing an opportunity to rethink the ethos of the profession.

Biography

Claudia Mellado is Professor of Journalism at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University. She is the Principal Investigator of the Journalistic Role Performance cross-national project www.journalisticperformance.org. Her research focuses on journalistic cultures, professional roles, social media performance, and comparative research. Her last two edited books are Journalistic Role Performance: Concept, Contexts, and Methods (Routledge, 2017), and Beyond Journalistic Norms. Role Performance and News in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2020).