The reluctant audience: online participation in the Swedish journalistic context

• With new media technology everyone online could easily participate in creating news content. This is usually considered positive from a societal, democratic point of view, even if audience interaction is not necessarily seen as a positive feature by editors and journalists. As a re-sponse to the somewhat scarce research in this field, this article analyses a Swedish mail ques-tionnaire survey on audience behaviour and attitudes in these matters, which however shows that there is only relatively little interest, from a general audience point of view, in participat-ing in creating content on news sites. Likewise, the minority who are actually commenting on news articles, or otherwise participating in the journalistic process through blog-writing, seem to consider these activities as part of a creative leisure-time, rather than as part-taking in de-mocratic activities. The article further argues that the use of interactive facilities and content creation in the journalistic context tend to be yet another tool for persons already possessing substantial competence about society and political life and who are already busy in the online world.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

participation

blog

interactivity

commenting

UGC

news sites

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)