Audience Research

The most distinguishing feature of performing arts courses is the culminating presence of an audience. Although direct research about how audiences play a teaching role in performing arts courses and in performing arts in general is scant, there is evidence describing and showing relational aspects between performer and audience in various environments. In an educational context, I propose calling this relationship the Audience-Performer Feedback Loop (APFL). Using this as a pedagogical basis and being faced with Health Authority restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project provides technologies and strategic solutions to mitigate and maintain the role in which audiences teach performing arts students synchronously. This paper includes technology tutorials for inexperienced teachers and producers to bring live, at-home, synchronous audiences into their theatres under the watchful eyes of performers who thrive on learning from their audiences in real time. More research is needed to prove how the audience plays a teaching role as a distinguishing feature of performing arts education. Future policies should make direct reference to APFLs in performing arts curricula and be accompanied by strategies and techniques for understanding, identifying, learning, and assessing how APFLs shape a performance and have direct influence on the development and skill of performing arts students.

In this project, we conducted focus groups with college students at a mid-sized university in order to examine their interpretations of different political advertisements. Our interest emerged from heightened political tensions in the United States that have led to increases in political advertisements targeting people in general, but young people and students in particular. After viewing nine different ads, students were asked a series of questions to generate discussion. Overall, these discussions provided insight concerning the interpretive strategies that were used to make sense of the ads. We found that most of the students would only interpret the campaign ads as "political," while the others-including ads produced by activists-were interpreted as "issue ads" or "topic ads." What is more, most of the students (but particularly those who identified as conservative) found the candidate ads to be untrustworthy, or viewed them as negative. Many of these students explained their interpretations of the candidate ads as a response to the growing negativity and partisanship that they saw in contemporary elections. Such findings hold important implications for strategic approaches to audiences-for both traditional politicians, as well as activist organizations.

Radio audiences are today a mix of traditional radio broadcasting audiences and networked publics (boyd, d. [2007]. Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingha (Ed.), MacArthur foundation series on digital learning–youth, identity, and digital media volume (pp. 119–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Ito, M. [2008]. Introduction. In K. Varnelis (Ed.), Networked publics (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008]. Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008]. Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; boyd, d. [2011]. Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). London: Routledge). This not only means that new media is changing the nature of listeners/viewers, transforming them into interactive users, but also that radio publics, once organized into networks, may have different properties, different behaviours and different values. In this paper, we have employed Digital Methods (DM) (Rogers, R. [2009]. The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) and social network analysis to understand the Twitter activity and the communicative dynamics of the audiences of two Italian national radio stations: Radio3 Rai (public service station) and Radio Deejay (private commercial station). This work also aims to respond to a question asked by Rogers when defining DM: ‘Could the information contained in profiles on social networking sites provide different insights into the composition and characteristics of publics?’ (Rogers, R. [2009]. The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Based on the results that have emerged from this study, we believe that the answer can be affirmative: the analysis of the social connections and the interaction models of the networked listeners highlights new features of these audiences, and allows us to reevaluate and understand them from new points of view. This work shows that the digital audiences related to the two radio stations clearly distinguish themselves for their distinctive online behaviour and a different display of social networks, cultural capital and affect. We therefore hypothesize the presence of three different types of capital within the two different audiences analysed: social, cultural and affective capital.

ABSTRACT Immigration has become an increasingly significant social phenomenon in Spain. The immigrant population has proven to be a potentially powerful target audience for advertisers. However, media research concerning immigrant audiences in Spain is still developing. The objective of this paper is to identify the most common difficulties encountered in immigrant-related media research, and to make recommendations regarding how advertisers and media planners can design and implement an effective media survey to investigate immigrant audiences. In this context, we consider the Spanish General Media Survey (EGM) as an instructive case study and analyze its methodology and data.

The Phoenix is one of only a handful of British cinemas to have remained active for the past 100 years. This is the story of Oxford’s oldest continuously operating cinema, as told by its staff and customers. Featuring first-hand reminiscences dating back to the days of silent movies, and illustrated with a fabulous collection of over 100 images, many of which have never appeared in print until now, 'The Phoenix Picturehouse' presents a wide-ranging account of a popular local institution whose changing fortunes exemplify a century of British cinema and cinemagoing history.

This article will examine how a public service broadcaster, specifically the BBC, delivers news content to its audience across multiple media platforms. Rather than looking at how the audience responds to media texts, this article will take the opposite standpoint by addressing the following question: How does the BBC build its audience on a platform-by-platform basis? To answer this key question we compared news outputs on the three platforms offered by the BBC: web, television and radio. A sample was compiled based on the top stories that appeared at a specific time of day over a month in early 2015. The results suggest that there is no significant difference in establishing news agendas through a digitally converged media landscape. In fact the three platforms analysed do not take media convergence into account when delivering news content.

La presente ponencia presentará una serie de avances del proyecto de investigación “Escuchar las prácticas” radicado en la Facultad de Ciencia Política y RRII de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, que, desde el campo de estudios de la comunicación y la historia social, tiene como principal objetivo analizar las prácticas de escucha de los primeros años de la radio, a partir del propio relato de los oyentes.
Esta investigación posee una particularidad en relación a la construcción de su corpus de análisis: trabajamos con historias de vida a adultos mayores realizadas por sus propios nietos, partiendo del trabajo docente con estudiantes  de la cátedra Producción Radiofónica de la Licenciatura en Comunicación Social de la UNR. Este corpus -construido sobre unas cien entrevistas- supone un recorte espacial que abarca la ciudad de Rosario y su zona de influencia, tanto urbana como rural, y un recorte temporal centrado entre la década del veinte y la aparición de la televisión en la década del cincuenta.
A partir del relato de los oyentes de aquellos primeros años de la radiodifusión en la Argentina, accedemos a unas memorias de la radio en las que se establecen relaciones entre pasado y presente, entre el medio y su contexto de aparición, las prácticas y rituales que supuso su incorporación al espacio familiar, los géneros privilegiados en la evocación, así como las significaciones otorgadas a lo que fue el medio de comunicación masivo y popular por excelencia durante la primera mitad del siglo pasado.