engleski

Media Audience Engagement through Institutional Mechanisms of Inclusion: What 'Activates' Audiences'

Audiences have been conceptualized differently by media scholars as 'the public', 'masses', 'audiences', 'consumers', 'users', some ascribes agency to them, others constrain them by structure. Regardless of the position taken, the audiences are important in the analysis of media systems. Audiences are what (at least on a declarative level) guide the strategies developed in other segments that form the media system: media policies are normatively developed in order to ensure that the media operates in the 'public interest' ; media markets are partially defined according to audience reach ; advertisers and marketing agencies make their decisions based on audience ratings that include data on reach and socio- demographics of the targeted niche, and finally, media content is created by producers based on their idea about the audience's preferences. However, even though the audiences are pivotal in media systems, their active inclusion in the above mentioned processes of decision making are rare. There are forms of engagement offered to audiences, that serves as mechanisms of 'inclusion' for some institutions: in Croatia, examples of these are the citizens' complaints filed to the regulatory Agency for Electronic Media, the complaints filed to the Croatian Journalist Association's Council of Honor and the complaints and suggestions filed to the Commissioner for Users of the public service broadcaster Croatian Radiotelevision. The paper will analyze the complaints and suggestions filed to these three institutions in order to identify what type of concerns motivate audiences to actively participate in the 'making' of quality media, via marginal but still available mechanism to get engaged.

audiences ; inclusion ; forms of engagement ; complaints

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