Participatory journalism in the Chinese context: Understanding journalism as process in China’s participatory culture

Abstract

Compared to its Western counterpart, China’s media culture has its uniqueness. The relationship between Chinese media and media users presents ‘Chinese style’ characteristics, especially with the rise of participatory journalism online. Based on critical reflections on the agenda-setting theory and existing research work on participatory journalism, this essay proposes three models of participatory journalism in the Chinese context. Depending on the interaction between media agenda and audience agenda, the three models are as follows: (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model. This essay aims to use these three models to demonstrate the notion of ‘journalism as process’ proposed by Robinson and the significance of the socialization and politicization of audience understanding.

Keywords

Agenda setting audience metrics China journalism as process participatory journalism

Introduction

From Gans’ (2004) observation that journalists do not care about audience much to today’s click culture (Anderson, 2009) that news teams depend heavily on audience metrics, what transforms journalism? Since Jenkins (2006) introduced the notion of convergence culture, scholars (e.g. Andrejevic, 2008; Deuze et al., 2007; Jenkins, 2014; Jenkins and Deuze, 2008) have shared the insight that the new media ecology has witnessed the coexistence of top-down and bottom-up forces. Deuze et al. (2007) envision this new media environment as a ‘third place’, an intermediary platform between professional journalism and citizen participation, a renegotiation about what’s ‘hard’ and what’s ‘soft’, and what’s ‘mainstream’ and what’s ‘periphery’. Although there is disagreement in terms of whether changes that technologies have brought to the media industry are evolutionary or revolutionary, it has been widely observed that the audience has played a new role in the digital age, which has impacted the news media in a noteworthy way (e.g. Anderson, 2009; Boczkowski, 2004; Lee et al., 2014; Napoli, 2011).

This changing media environment directs a great deal of scholarly attention to media’s agenda-setting function proposed by McCombs and Shaw in the 1970s. Using agenda-setting theory as the key theoretical framework, the first half of this essay will make critical reflections on agenda-setting theory and existing work regarding the transformation of journalism. Based on this, the second half of the essay will examine China’s participatory journalism from a theoretical perspective. Three cases that happened on China’s Internet in recent years will be discussed. The interaction between the media and the audience as well as their changing roles in the agenda-setting process will be investigated. Based on the analysis of these three cases, this essay will propose three models of participatory journalism in the Chinese context. The three models are (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model.

Agenda-setting theory and limitation

According to the original domain of the agenda-setting theory, the mass media have the power to decide what object/issue is significant and transfer the issue salience from the news media to the public. The mass media therefore play a key role in the formation of public opinion (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). McCombs (2005) states that the agenda-setting theory has experienced five-stage evolution since its birth to make it a richer theory. The five stages are (1) the transmission of issue salience (what to think about) from media to audience, (2) the transmission of attribute salience (how to think about it) from media to audience, (3) people’s need for orientation, (4) sources of media agenda, and (5) consequences of agenda-setting effects on people’s attitudes and opinions. McCombs holds that media’s agenda-setting function still applies in the digital age. He argues against the prediction of the end of agenda setting by pointing out the homogeneity of news agendas online. I agree with McCombs that it might be premature to predict the end of the media’s agenda-setting role. But the media evolution and audience evolution (Napoli, 2011) do require us to reconsider the agenda-setting process and the relationship between media agenda and public agenda.

A closer look at the five-stage evolution of agenda-setting theory reveals that the traditional agenda-setting theory assumes a fixed and linear power relation between the media and the audience, with the media agenda as primary and the public agenda as secondary. For example, the theory assumes that the media transfer issue salience and attribute salience to the public; that the public has the need for orientation to attend to the media although individual differences exist; and that the media’s agenda-setting effects have consequences on forming, priming, and shaping the public opinion. These assumptions consider the media as the powerful while the audience powerless and put the media at the upstream side of the information flow while the audience at the downstream side. But in the Internet era, we may need to reason the process backward to understand the changing media environment. For example, do audiences also transfer issue and attribute salience to the media? Do the media need to learn from the public? Does public opinion affect media’s decision-making process? Therefore, when answering the question, ‘who sets the media agenda?’ besides the ‘intermedia agenda setting, [and] the influence of the news media on each other’ (McCombs, 2005: 549), we may also have to ask whether the audience also plays a role?

Scholars have mixed findings. On one hand, some scholars recognized ambivalence (Jenkins, 2014), a remix of participation and manipulation (e.g. Domingo et al., 2008; Lewis et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2011). For example, Singer (2011) found that online audience preferences have limited impact on local editors. In the work of Williams et al. (2011), even the ‘truly participatory’ examples were still under BBC’s mastery of the collaboration. Citizen participation in this case was limited in a ‘give-and-take relationship’ (Williams et al., 2011), in which the media take audience content and decide what to use, whereas the audience gives its materials but has no control on the decision-making process. From fans who identified themselves as ‘non-duped’ (Andrejevic, 2008) to the non-journalist contributors involved in journalistic hybridity worldwide (Deuze et al., 2007), these savvy audiences’ experiences seem not to escape from the established power relation between the media and the audience. Audiences today are able to offer their own materials or interpretations, but the user-generated content is based on existing media content and media agenda. In this case, the power imbalance between the two sides was not completely changed. Citizen journalism, in this case, is involved in the ‘journalism as process’ as a means to serve the end of the ‘journalism as product’, which seems to deviate from the real spirit of ‘journalism as process’ that some scholars (e.g. Lewis, 2012; Robinson, 2011) pursue.

Journalism as process reflects a shift of the conceptualization of journalism in the digital age. In ‘“Journalism as process”: the organizational implications of participatory online news’, Robinson (2011) calls for the end of thinking about journalistic content as finished product and the end link of the communication process. Rather, journalism should be considered as a continuous, shared, and participatory process. In the digital media ecosystem, especially with the rise of citizen participation, media content produced by journalists often does not serve as the end product but as a starting point, from where citizens can dig deeper, do further research, seek for more information, or offer their own interpretations and contributions. A growing body of empirical research suggests that the public does play a role in today’s agenda-setting process by challenging media agenda or sharing the agenda-setting process. For example, Boczkowski and Peer (2011) found that journalists pay more attention to hard news while online consumers prefer softer news. Lee et al. (2014) provided evidence that audience choices affect news placement on websites of three major US newspapers, but not the vice versa. Bright and Nicholls (2014) found that audience preferences influence the lifespan of news stories on the front page of news websites. Luo (2014) identified divergence between public agenda, media agenda, and policy agenda in contemporary China. Lee et al. (2014) claimed, ‘at the crossroad of this taste disparity, news audiences have the upper hand’ (p. 520).

Existing work and reflections

The evolution of media and audience involves renegotiation of power relation and reconsideration of ‘who sets whose agenda under what circumstances’ (McCombs, 2005: 549). It might be too early to conclude who has ‘the upper hand’ in the encounters of today’s media and media users. In addition to the current research endeavor, what seems more important is to refine our research tool for a wider diversity of perspectives and complexity in order to understand the new media ecosystem. Existing work on online journalism tends to pay more attention to the following aspects:

First, a good amount of discussions regarding how online journalism changes traditional understanding of agenda setting focus on issue salience, the first-level agenda setting, while attribute salience, the second-level agenda setting, has not been given enough attention. Issue agenda setting involves the decision about what issue/object deserves significance. Attribute agenda setting refers to the decision that among the many characteristics and traits of a given issue/object, what attributes ‘are emphasized, others are mentioned only in passing’ (McCombs, 2005: 546). For example, the aforementioned research on audience choices and audience interests mainly examined what issues audience and media are interested, respectively, and the divergence between the two. The work studying how audience choices affect news placement and the lifespan of news stories on the news websites also focuses on issues and topics. These studies only answer the question ‘what is news’ but not the question ‘why is it news’. Why are audiences interested in a specific issue, or what attributes of the issue particularly interest the audience and the media, and are there any disparities between media’s attribute salience and audience’s attribute salience? These are questions that were not fully investigated.

Second, much existing empirical work on online journalism focuses on ‘algorithm journalism’ (Anderson, 2011) by examining measurable and quantifiable variables, especially the popularity of news stories (e.g. most read, most viewed, and click rate). The ‘culture of the click’ (Anderson, 2009) not only influences the media industry but also draws much attention in the academic world. But what are the social implications of the clicks or the ‘sociology and politics of algorithms’ (Anderson, 2011: 529)? If as Anderson (2011) pointed out that the algorithm is just ‘a stand-in for journalistic judgment’ and a strategy to seek for ‘business model success’ (p. 540), would looking solely at algorithm reveal the real significance of the transformation of journalism? In addition, most existing ethnographic work (e.g. Domingo and Paterson, 2011; Gans, 2004; Mabweazara et al., 2013; Paterson and Domingo, 2008; Usher, 2014) studies how online journalism and ‘audience information system’ (Napoli, 2011) affect newsroom practices from a pure professional perspective. However, both journalists and audiences are a product of the social environment. When rationalization of audience understanding (Napoli, 2011) becomes a trend in both industry and academia, is it time to pay equal attention to the socialization of audience understanding and the contextualization of audience information system?

Third, most current work studying the changing media environment focuses on ‘functionally equivalent media cultures’ (Deuze et al., 2007) that share the ‘Western parliamentary democracies’ (Domingo et al., 2008) or ‘broadly share a political ideology’ (Singer et al., 2011) and the capitalist systems. In such a media culture, audiences are considered more as economic capital, rather than social, cultural, and symbolic capital (Tandoc, 2014). Benson (2015) calls for ‘truly international media research’ to go beyond the Anglo-American orbit and to avoid ethnocentrism of the dominant Western culture and universal validity. Given that the media culture is a product of a nation’s particular political, economic, and cultural environment, a cross-cultural, especially non-Western, perspective is needed to better understand the transformation of the media ecology in general and participatory journalism in particular.

Last but not least, many empirical studies on online journalism only look at a specific time on specific websites, and therefore limit the interaction between media and media users in a static setting, which may not be able to reflect the shift from ‘journalism as product’ to ‘journalism as process’, a ‘mutually shared process, requiring forms of “work” from both groups’ (Lewis, 2012: 851), since this process is an ongoing learning process, which involves continuous interaction between the media and media users. Both sides may propose, adjust, and exchange their agendas for discourse legitimacy to meet their respective interests. To understand this process, longitudinal studies are needed to understand the whole course of the given event and how the ongoing interaction develops throughout the course of the event.

As an effort of narrowing the gaps mentioned above, and to respond to Jenkins’ (2014) call for the ‘typology for identifying different claims being made about participation and the ways power gets negotiated at all levels’ (p. 272), the next section of the essay will focus on China, a non-Western nation that featured collectivist culture and Chinese style socialism, where the media industry is under the double influence of market pressure and state regulation. Three cases that happened on China’s Internet in recent years are used as a vantage point to explore alternative forms of audience participation and media–audience relationship. Three models of citizen participation will be discussed from the perspectives of the interaction between the media and media users as well as the relation between media agenda and audience agenda. The three models are (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model. Having been tracing the whole course of all three cases, the author will investigate both first-level and second-level agenda setting and discuss social implications of the interaction between the media and media users.

China’s media culture

Compared to its Western counterpart, China’s media industry has its uniqueness. Unlike the commonly studied Western media industry, which is embedded in the capitalist culture, China’s media industry faces both political and economic pressures. The Chinese government has been adjusting its policies over the media sector according to the external and internal environment. China’s media industry has experienced the trends of nationalization, liberalization, and recentralization in recent decades (Sukosd and Wang, 2013). China’s media industry has been negotiating, through different types of experimental models, with the state about the degree of its liberalization (Zhao, 2008). Entering 2014, Xi administration issued a string of policies to tighten up the regulation of the entertainment, media, and culture industries and urge them to follow the party line and avoid ‘becoming the slave of the market and bearing the stench of money’ (Roberts, 2014). Today, China’s media industry features a mix of selective, limited, sector-specific liberation (Sukosd and Wang, 2013) and constant but self-adjusting political control from the Communist Party of China (CPC). It has become a venue of ‘market demands and the state mandate’ (Zhao, 2013) as well as a nexus of global influence and Chinese local media environment (Poell et al., 2014).

In the Internet sector, economically, the government uses the Internet as a new economic drive ( China.com.cn , 2006); ideologically, the government uses the Internet as a barometer to learn public opinion (Luo, 2014). Under such circumstance, although measurement-oriented ‘audience information systems’ (Napoli, 2011) discovered in many commercialized media organizations in Western countries are also applicable in China’s media industry, the trend of the rationalization of audience understanding comes along with political and social understanding of the audience. From the media’s perspective, on one hand, the media depend on audience data to meet their market need. On the other hand, economic success is not the media’s only goal in China since they have to take into consideration their political role and their relationship with the government. From the audience’s perspective, studies show that in today’s China, the way that media users, especially online media users, react toward media content often reflects their concerns about social problems (e.g. Wang, 2015). The media need to read their users’ reaction socially and politically in order to better understand media users and to predict their reaction toward media content. After all, how the media conceive of their audience will directly affect how they define media responsibilities and decision-making strategies (e.g. Anderson, 2011; Tandoc, 2014).

On China’s Internet, since the regulation on the Internet is relatively freer than the regulation on traditional media, scholars such as Tai (2006) found that Chinese Internet users are very active in various forms of online discussions, communications, and participations. Participating in Bulletin Board Systems, online forums, blogs, and microblogs is among the most popular Internet activities among Chinese Internet users (CNNIC, 2013; Tai, 2006). A cross-national comparison shows that Chinese Internet users are much more likely to participate in online forms, Bulletin Board Systems, and newsgroup sites than their Western counterparts (Tai, 2006). Online discussion has become an alternative means of political participation for Chinese Internet users. Since China’s regulation on the media is sector-specific, that is, a stricter control on ideology-oriented content such as news and a less strict control on non-ideology-oriented content such as entertainment (Guo, 2014), the non-political sector on the Internet becomes an especially important platform for Chinese Internet users to get their voice heard on public affairs and political concerns. The cross-realm effect (i.e. entertainment media content may cause political consequences and vice versa), cross-platform effect (i.e. users may access a specific piece of information on site A but share it on site B or C), as well as incidental exposure to information (Kim et al., 2013) determine that media users’ participation has unmeasureable features in many cases. For example, the work of Wang (2015) illustrates that Chinese netizens extracted political implications from non-political event and their online participation promoted social changes. In cases like these, quantifiable measurement alone is not enough to either understand or predict audiences’ demand and their behavior.

Compared to China’s pre-Internet era, especially the Mao era, when the media were tightly controlled by CPC, participatory culture in the digital age has significantly challenged media authority, and in many cases intensified the tension between the media and media users. Particularly, the divergence between the media agenda and public agenda has been widening. For example, in What is most important for my country is not most important for me, Zhang et al. (2012) found there is no significant correlation between Chinese citizens’ public agenda and media agenda. Especially when authors further divided the public agenda into two sub-categories, that is, personal agenda and social agenda, the study found that although the public’s social agenda – the overall public agenda on the issues’ national importance – mirrors the media agenda to some extent, there was no significant correlation between the media agenda and the personal agenda – the overall public agenda on the issues’ personal importance. These findings reflect the asymmetry between the media’s encoding and the public’s decoding (Hall, 2009) and complicate McCombs’ question, ‘who sets whose agenda under what circumstances’. In the following section, three models of citizen participation will be discussed based on different forms of interaction between the media and media users as well as the relation between media agenda and audience agenda. The three models are (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model (Table 1).

Table 1.

Three models of citizen participation on China’s Internet.

Model	Relationship of media and audience	Relation of media agenda (MA) and audience agenda (AA)	Issue salience	Attribute salience
Incompatible model	Conflicting relationship	MA precedes AA. AA rejected MA. MA and AA are incompatible.	Initially decided by media	Initially decided by media but rejected and reinterpreted by the audience with alternative attribute salience.
Negotiatory model	Negotiatory relationship	MA and AA develop concurrently. MA and AA are negotiating and competing.	Initially decided by media	Initially decided by media but media and audience negotiate for updated attribute salience.
Unconventional model	Audiences as agenda setters, whereas media as followers	AA precedes MA. AA dominates while MA follows.	Initially decided by audience	Initially decided by audience. Media follow.

Three models of citizen participation on China’s Internet

Model A: Incompatible model

The incompatible model refers to a conflicting relationship between the media and the audience. In this model, media agenda precedes but conflicts audience agenda. The media originally decide the issue significance (first-level agenda setting) and offer media’s interpretation on attribute salience (second-level agenda setting) as the preferred way to interpret the given issue. The media try to transfer the issue salience and attribute salience to the audience. The audience, however, rejects both the issue salience and the attribute salience by providing alternative agendas, which lead to different issue and attribute significance. There’s a significant discrepancy between the media agenda and the audience agenda.

Case A: Mr Watch

In August 2012, Xinhua News Agency, China’s state press agency, published on its website a news story, a serious traffic accident that happened in Shanxi province. A total of 36 people were reported killed in this accident. Among the many news photos, one photo revealed an almost unnoticeable detail: a governmental official grinning at the scene. Some online readers were infuriated by this official’s insensitivity. The public anger went viral on China’s Internet. Soon after the accident, Chinese netizens, through collective detective work, found out this official was Yang Dacai, the then head of the Bureau of Work Safety, Shanxi, China. Chinese netizens collected previous news photos of Yang. In one of the photos, some web users noticed that Yang was wearing a very expensive wristwatch. Netizens then found more photos of Yang, in which Yang was shown wearing a collection of luxury wristwatches at different occasions. These watches included an Omega Constellation valued at up to £6500; a Constantin, worth over £20,000; and more (Phillips, 2012). Chinese netizens questioned how Yang, a local governmental official, could be able to afford these expensive watches on his legal salary? To respond to the public’s questioning, authorities developed investigation and Yang ended up stepping down from office because of corruption. In 2013, Yang was sentenced 14 years in prison for corruption. Yang, who is also called Mr. Watch by Chinese netizens since then, at one time became a byword of corrupt official. Chinese mainstream media widely reported the development and the aftermath of the case.

In this case, there is an incompatible relationship between the media and the audience. In the news story introduced by Xinhua News Agency, the traffic accident was decided as the issue with significance due to two reasons: the serious casualties of the accident and the fast response of the local government. The first half of the news article introduced some basic factors of the accident, for example, when and where the accident happened, the casualty, and the drivers’ information. The second half of the article wrote that the local government gave full attention to the incident. They worked hard to deal with the aftermath of the accident. At the end of the article, it concluded, ‘Right now, the rescue, investigation and cleaning up work is very well organized and carried out smoothly’ ( Xinhuanet.com , 2012). The media agenda in this case was decided by political authorities. For example, according to China’s State Administration of Work Safety, accident that causes death of 30 or more people must be reported at national-level news media ( Chinasafety.gov.cn , 2005). The ‘correct’ way to report such major accident is to ‘promote the policies and measures of the party and the government from a positive perspective’ (Shen, 2003). Based on these reporting guidelines, Yang, as one of the local government officials who ‘arrived the scene of the accident without any delay’ ( Xinhuanet.com , 2012), showed up in the news photo. However, there were readers who read this news story differently. They did not take the media agenda, that is, officials’ fast response in this case, as the cue to interpret this specific event. Instead, they proposed their own agenda – ‘what are you laughing at with your big belly protruded like that?’ ( Sina.com.cn , 2012). It was Yang’s insensitive grin that caught the audience’s attention. In China, a protruded belly is often interpreted as a stereotyped image of a corrupt official. From this inappropriate grin, web users further detected Yang’s corruption and called for formal investigation.

In the original news photo mentioned above, a completely burned delivery truck was the center image, whereas Yang and the inappropriate grin on his face and his ‘protruded belly’ were peripheral (Figure 1). However, readers chose to put aside the center information included in the media message but focus on the peripheral information excluded by the media instead. Major Chinese websites reposted this news story and the news photo of Xinhua News Agency. But the audience metrics did not show significant readership or click rate on this specific news story, which nevertheless did not mean public’s disinterest in this story, because a wider public discussion was fermented somewhere else, such as blogs, microblogs, and social network sites. Therefore, the audience metrics may not be able to indicate the public’s real interest, in this case, corruption, especially in the early stage of the event. The wide public discussion and citizen participation in this case reflected the public’s concern about corruption in recent years in China. This concern can only be grasped by the socialization of audience understanding, rather than the rationalization of audience standing. The media need to be sensitive to social problems that concern the general public to predict and catch up the audience agenda.

Figure 1.

Yang Dacai on the scene – media agenda.

In the mainstream media’s later report, many mainstream media used a different version of the same news photo (Figure 2), which reflected the audience agenda. In this new version of the photo, the truck, the previous center image, became periphery, whereas Yang as well as his grin and his belly, the previous periphery images, became the center. This time, it was the audience who transferred its agenda to the media. This example suggests that in the participatory culture, it’s getting harder and harder, even with the help of audience metrics, for the media to predict what’s the center and what’s peripheral, and what kind of and what part of the message will touch the audiences’ nerve. In this example, the media agenda preceded the public agenda in the first place, but in the end the public agenda turned around by redefining the issue and attribute significance, that is, the insensitive grin may indicate Yang was not a qualified official as proved later. What the audience paid attention to was not the accident itself, but the issue of corruption. In this case, the media set the agenda, but the audience rejected. Media agenda and audience agenda are not compatible. Media’s gatekeeping role conflicts with audience’s ‘gatebreaking’ role.

Figure 2.

Yang Dacai on the scene – audience agenda.

Model B: Negotiatory model

The negotiatory model refers to a form of reciprocating relationship between the media and the audience where media agenda and audience agenda develop in a concurrent way. This model often happens in an ongoing event where neither the media nor the audience could decide the issue and attribute significance directly. Instead, the issue salience and attribute significance are realized through the negotiation and the competition between media agenda and audience agenda.

Case B: 2nd GR

In Spring 2014, a Chinese talent show Sing My Song quickly became a popular topic on the Internet. Jiang Yaojia, one of the 32 talented finalists, triggered intense public discussions in online fans communities. Media coverage at first focused on Jiang’s talent as a musician, which was the object and attribute significance at this point, and attracted a great amount of online discussions in fans communities. But soon, fans of online communities found out the special social label of Jiang, that is, Jiang is a second-generation rich (2nd GR). 2nd GR refers to people who have rich parents. 2nd G‘X’ are terms that Chinese Internet users use to label privileged classes in today’s China. For example, 2nd GC, second-generation celebrity, refers to people who have celebrity parents; and 2nd GO, second-generation official, refers to people who have parents who are powerful government officials. As shown in Wang (2015), in today’s China, social inequality is a big concern among Chinese citizens. Jiang as a 2nd GR therefore produced controversies, which became hot topics among fans on the Internet. For example, did she have any privilege to enter the final contest? Did she have more social resources than other musicians who do not have rich parents? Did she get successful more easily because of these social resources? At this stage, audiences kept the issue salience defined by the media but redefined the attribute significance, that is, the media and the audience agreed on the issue salience, that is, Jiang. But the media defined Jiang as a newsworthy figure because she was one of the finalists and because of her talent as a musician, whereas the audience paid attention to Jiang not because of her talent but because of her social identity. At this time, the audience information system helped. With the help of the audience information systems, the media could easily find out which contestant was popular among audiences. Naturally, to cater to the audience interest, the media later provided a great deal of coverage highlighting Jiang as a 2nd GR as an attempt to trigger more public attention and therefore more viewing. At this point, the media’s attempt was successful. However, this was not the end of the story. When Jiang was finally eliminated, fans once again modified their interpretation about Jiang’s social identity by realizing that Xiang Piaopiao, the business of Jiang’s family, is a competitor of Wa Haha, one of the sponsors of the show. For some fans, Jiang’s ‘elimination’ was interpreted as the result of the competition between a non-sponsor and a sponsor of the show, a victim of the capitalist marketing system. Others interpreted Jiang as a role model who did not live under her rich parents’ wings, but chose to become a musician, which for these fans was a hard career than living an easy life prepared by Jiang’s parents. The media could not follow this time around.

This case suggests that in an ongoing event, it is hard for the media to predict what issue and what attributes of an issue could attract and sustain audiences’ interests since audiences constantly update their agenda. Therefore, the media–audience interaction may have to involve several bouts of negotiation. The negotiation process in this example was, at first, the media offered both issue and attribute salience, that is, Jiang was a newsworthy figure (issue salience) because she was a talented musician (attribute salience). Then, the audience gave a counter-offer by setting a new attribute agenda although media and audience still agreed on the issue salience in this stage, that is, yes, Jiang was important (issue salience), but it was not because of Jiang’s talent but because of her social identity (attribute salience). This new attribute agenda reflected the public’s concern about social inequality in China. The media agreed to take the counter-offer by taking audience agenda and incorporating audience agenda into media agenda because the media realized by doing so it could promote the market value of the show and maintain the media authority. At the end, however, the audience once again reset the attribute agenda by pointing out its reflections on a deeper layer of inequality. Jiang’s failure as a finalist was interpreted as the result of the power imbalance between a sponsor and a non-sponsor in the capitalist system. In this negotiation process, both the media and the audience compromised and competed in order to win discourse legitimacy. In this example, audience metrics may be able to help the media identify audience agenda and catch up with it in a short run. But as audience agenda kept updating, depending solely on audience metrics would have only made the media a recorder of audience’s voice. The media may have to be more sensitive to the social surrounding and audience’s social needs in order to refine media agenda and maintain the media’s authority.

Model C: Unconventional model

The unconventional model refers to a form of irregular interaction between the media and the audience where audience agenda precedes media agenda. It’s unconventional because this model differs from the media-lead-public-follow model, which once dominated the sender–receiver type of media–audience relationship. In the unconventional model, it is the audience, rather than the media, who originally decides the issue and attribute significance. The audience offers its own agenda as the preferred way to interpret the given issue. The media, rather than the primary producer, become the ‘follower’ by following up the audience agenda. But the media may also offer alternative media agenda to meet their own interests.

Case C: The Red Cross scandal

In June 2011, Guo Meimei, a 20-year-old Chinese girl posted a series of photos to flaunt her extravagant lifestyle on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service. Some Chinese Internet user randomly browsed the web and noticed Guo, who was once an unknown name in China. This web user then posted a comment on a fashion-gossip online forum located on Tianya.cn, one of the most popular social networking websites in China:

Come watch this, quickly! Twenty years old, general manager of Red Cross Commerce, big house, closetful of Hermès handbags, and Maserati … The Red Cross is rich! From now on, only motherfuckers would donate to the Red Cross!!!! … (Wang, 2015)

This specific post received over 1.5 million clicks and more than 9400 comments on Tianya.cn. Chinese netizens paid special attention to Guo because she registered on Sina Weibo as a general manager of the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC). Chinese netizens questioned how could an RCSC employee be able to afford those luxuries shown in Guo’s photos, such as Hermès handbags, Maserati sport cars, first-class flights, and luxury apartment. Netizens further suspected RCSC’s misuse of donations. Within a couple of days, RCSC’s image was significantly devastated. According to the latest data from China Charity and Donation Information Center (CCDIC) report, charitable giving in China has plummeted for 2 years consecutively ( Xinhuanet.com , 2013). The mainstream Chinese media did not pick up Guo Meimei–related topic until they realized that it went viral among Chinese netizens. The mainstream media then followed the audience’s interests in Guo Meimei case but tried to guide the audience’s attention to other aspects of the issue, for example, the loophole of Sina Weibo’s registration system, the innocence of RCSC, and the hype of Guo. However, the public’s attention insisted on the possible embezzlement of RCSC. User-generated content, evidence, and revelations were shared online to support the public’s suspicion. The event culminated when CCTV, the China Central Television, aired its news investigation show on the Red Cross scandal. CCTV journalists used information provided by web users online as important materials to develop their investigation and interviews.

This case showed an unconventional model in terms of the media–audience relationship because audience agenda preceded and led the media agenda throughout the event. At the beginning of the event, it was the netizens who decided the newsworthiness of Guo in the first place. They started heated online discussion about Guo on online forums and social network websites. Netizens’ decision of issue and attribute salience was made based on their lived experience, for example, many web users claimed that they had first-hand experience of donating money to RCSC. The donated money included college scholarship, monthly salary, and family budget, sources closely related to people’s everyday life. Netizens questioned where their money actually went and whether their money was embezzled by RCSC employees like Guo to buy luxuries. The audience set not only the issue agenda but also the attribute agenda while the media were completely absent. At this stage, audience data may be able to help the mainstream media realize the audience’s attention to Guo Meimei, but they may not be helpful for the media to understand the audience’s attribute agenda. Therefore, after the mainstream media finally picked up the topic a couple of days later, the then media coverage did not focus on the public’s real concern, that is, the corruption issue in today’s China, but instead they focused on RCSC’s innocence, the loophole of Sina’s verification system, and so on. The media seemed off-track. The audiences did not follow the media agenda. Through crowd-sourced detective work and collective intelligence, they found and shared evidence online to legitimize their own agenda. Until then, the mainstream media had to abandon their previous agenda by once again following the audience agenda. Thus, many mainstream media started joining the audience to question the RCSC at this stage. Throughout the whole event, audience agenda dominated and led the development of the event while the media was not able to propose a legislative agenda. The media were slow in response and not sensitive enough to audiences’ real concern. They were only able to follow the audience agenda throughout the event.

In this case, the audience set the agenda, and the media followed. At first, the media accepted the issue significance decided by the audience but tried to offer alternative media agenda on attribute salience. But at last, the media gave full acknowledgment to the audience agenda. Thus, the early media coverage focused on defending the RCSC, but the later media coverage focused on answering the public’s questioning. Model C differs with models A and B because in model C, it was the audience who originally set the agenda, while in models A and B, media set the agenda in the first place, but the media agenda was either rejected or negotiated by the audience. Therefore, the audience was more independent in model C.

Discussions

These examples discussed in this essay suggest that in the digital age, citizen participation has made journalism an ongoing process, as described by Robinson (2011) and Lewis (2012). In the pre-Internet age, once the media set the agenda, it’s unchangeable, either because audiences were ‘passive’ or because audience agenda was not accessible. But in the digital age, the media and the audience share the process of agenda setting through different modes of interactions. The three models discussed here by no means cover all possibilities in terms of the media–audience relationship in the changing media environment, but they shed light on the understanding of journalism as process. This process is a learning process for both sides to adapt themselves to the digital transition. It also involves tension and power dynamics for the media and the audience to renegotiate power distribution to meet their respective interests.

The audience information system shortens the distance between the media and the audience, but the examples discussed above demonstrated some limitations of the audience information system: first, it only presents a linear media–audience relationship. The purpose of the audience information system is for the media to understand the audience, the quantifiable audience, not for the audience to understand the media. With the rise of participatory journalism, the audience information alone could not support the notion of journalism as process. This process is a learning process, which involves continuous media–audience interaction and dialectical relationship between media agenda and audience agenda. In this process, the media and the audience share the role as the agenda setter. Both sides constantly adjust their agendas to meet their best interests. The audience information system usually provides audience data collected at a specific time, which may not be able to reflect a developmental picture of audience interest. In this essay, the author traces the whole course of the events discussed, which helps us understand the development of the event and the trajectory of the changing media–audience interaction. More longitudinal studies are needed to understand journalism as process.

Second, audience engagement is not a monolithic, static process. The examples examined in this essay show that audience participation often has cross-platform effects and cross-realm effects. The audience may not learn a specific news story from the news website where it was originally posted. He or she could learn it from other platforms, for example, blogs, social network websites, and online forums. In addition, an audience member who is interested in a specific news story may not necessarily comment on the news website, but may discuss it somewhere else, especially on the online platforms they often visit or they feel more comfortable with, where wider public discussion is triggered. These cross-platform effects make it hard for the media to depend on audience metrics collected from their own news website to judge audience’s choice. Furthermore, as showed here and in Wang (2015), audience participation often travels between political and entertainment realms. Audience members may elicit political value from an entertainment event and vice versa. Audience metrics are not likely to indicate such cross-realm effects.

Third, examples discussed above also reveal that in some cases audience metrics may help identify news popularity, but could not explain why audience members are interested in a specific topic. Journalism as process requires us to understand not only what’s news but also why it is news. In a media culture where the media industry is not completely commercialized, media organizations also have social and political functions. Therefore, socialization and politicization of audience understanding are needed in order to understand the context of news topics and audience’s reaction toward media content. China has its unique media environment, which is a product of China’s political, economical, and cultural development. The three models discussed in this essay are characterized with unpredictable, unmeasureable, and spontaneous participation. These new experiences bring challenges to Chinese media authorities. They also raise new questions in terms of how to reimagine the media–audience relationship in China’s political framework and how to understand the complexity of the participatory culture by not considering it as a universal term but as a concept with various presentations based on different media cultures.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Philip Napoli for his comments on the early version of the paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Qun Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She holds a Master’s degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Qun is a former Chinese TV anchor and news director. Wang’s research focuses on journalism, media’s digital transition, and Internet culture, and has been published in The Journal of International Communication.

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