COOPERATION EDITORIAL AUDIENCE

Addressees of journalistic speeches

The two-way nature of mass communication

Forms of engaging the audience in the journalistic process

Professional culture of work with the mail

Organizational mass work with the audience

Systematic communication of the media with readers, listeners, television viewers encourages citizens to express their interest and be active in public, public and private affairs. The relations of editorial boards with the audience are different in that they cover the widest sections of the population, different in age and social aspirations of people. Some collaborate with the media all the time, they are interested in watching publications, broadcasts, they know the authors, observers, agree or argue with their point of view. Others turn to the press when something in the life around them greatly hurt, did not leave indifferent.

The collaboration between the editorial staff and the audience is sometimes stormy and nervous, sometimes passive and unproductive. Is it possible to influence this process? How to whip up the feedback, make it conscious and purposeful? Journalist groups should know the methods and techniques for managing audience activity. To this end, the editors constantly enter into working contacts with it. To achieve success of any media, it is necessary that a variety of methods and techniques are applied simultaneously, systematically, in a comprehensive manner.

Each journalistic work exists in the system of relations journalist - audience. Newspaper text, radio or television material created by a journalist and intended for the audience. However, they can not reach the destination, leave indifferent, not be perceived. The main intermediary between the journalist and the audience - the text - may contain valuable information, but the consumer, for whatever reason, will not accept it. Therefore, it is important to know exactly how relationships are established in the designated chain. General ideas about what are the expectations and preferences of the audience, approximate estimates are not enough. The key to success of a newspaper, radio or television program is the constant involvement of the editorial board in the concerns and interests of its readers, listeners, and viewers. This requires a special study, which gives the journalist the opportunity to achieve high labor productivity. The editors encourage the audience to act through verbal, sound, graphic texts. Thus, the proposed chain is extended and looks like this: “journalist - text - audience”. Stable contacts with the audience are established through the texts of journalistic works, through editorial organizing actions and through the author’s assets.

There are two ways to influence the flow of information from the audience. First of all, this is a direct organization (targeted ordering of materials, sensing public opinion, journalistic actions, etc.) - let's call this work an organizational method - and, secondly, the use of texts (encouraging responses with the help of a certain content and form of journalistic materials ) - text method.

These areas are closely related. In the best editions they are used in the complex. The textual method is a subject of special consideration to which other chapters of our textbook are devoted. Here we will dwell on the range of issues related to organizational activity as an integral part of professional practice.

Like most people of creative work, the correspondent works individually on his work (except in cases of voluntary co-authorship). But the artist and the writer are completely free up to a certain stage of activity, and the journalist is initially included in the mechanism of the editorial team. In the process of preparing a speech, he is faced with unforeseen circumstances and can change the form of presentation of the material, its volume, and the depth of its development. In this he is independent of the wording. However, his individual work must comply with the tasks facing the given media, take into account the collective, industrial and commercial interests.

On the one hand, the individual literary creativity of a journalist is completely self-sufficient and independent. On the other hand, it develops in a large general information field, is closely linked with the number of a newspaper, magazine, radio and television program, and is dependent on the actions of many people. The combination of individual and collective efforts leads to the creation of journalistic products. In other words, the system of professional duties of a journalist includes a lot of conscious actions in addition to individual creativity. First of all, it is stimulation and feeding of mass information exchange. In domestic journalism, the study of the interests and expectations of an audience has long attracted the attention of science. How is this study, and we have to find out.

Mass-informational activities of journalism include three stages, which are indicated by researcher E.P. Prokhorov: “The first is a reflection of reality, the second is the creation of the text of a work, the third is the mastering of a work by an audience ... The nature of reflection of reality and organization of a work should be closely related to the desire to achieve the best results in a specific audience” [1]. The scientist rightly considers the care of the audience the most important aspect of journalistic creativity.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the domestic media have become free from censorship restrictions, from monopoly control from above. This led to a change in the nature of publications. They are better able to meet the information needs of readers, as well as broadcasting and television broadcasting - the needs of listeners and television viewers. However, they became dependent on commercial competition, on political opposition, and in some places even ideological filters. A radical restructuring of the media in relation to the world market led to the inevitable polarization of mass consciousness. Instead of the former strong administrative dependence, we are faced with economic dependence. Its mechanism is hidden, veiled, surrounded by the notorious trade secret. Naturally, it is poorly recognized by the real and potential audience.

In the course of social reforms, the media changed the founders everywhere. Then there was a political separation of information channels. Significantly increased the number of private publications and radio stations. The newspaper market, which has remained almost unchanged for decades, is now replete with not only names (by the way, often duplicating each other), a variety of formats and volumes, but also the number of printed goods. At the turn of the 1980s and '90s, a little more than 3,000 magazines and about 5,000 newspapers were published in Russia, and in 1998, 27,000 publications were registered. For ten years, the much more modest press market in Belarus has doubled: in 1998 there were over 1,000 periodicals. Government agencies publish more than a third of this number of newspapers and magazines, 135 local publications are subsidized from regional budgets. The rest live on private funds and grants.

Economic factors determine not only the survival of the media, but also the nature of their activities. Political or advertising engagement significantly affects editorial relations with a mass audience, officials and individuals. Under the conditions of the new economic reality, all media have sharply reduced the costs of studying their audience. For this reason, in particular, public confidence in the media has declined. Methods and forms of interaction with citizens, traditional for domestic mass media, have undergone a significant transformation and moved to the category of non-binding, even in a well-organized public sector of the press. First of all, this applies to such a part of the editorial activity as working with letters. In the last decade, control over their fate and reporting on the passage of each appeal to the editor has practically disappeared.

Undoubtedly, the degree of attention to the audience was influenced by the state policy in the field of mass media. In accordance with officially accepted concepts, the freedom of public expression of opinion has significantly expanded. However, in practice, access to information sources is often reduced. Generally speaking, neither the most perfect law nor the administrative will is able to finally regulate the receipt of operational and comprehensive information from organizations and officials. And only a journalist in the fight for his reader, for a place in the information market has no right to give up.