Historicising the Journalist–Audience Relationships in the Internet Era: A Case Study of the Slovenian Newspaper Delo
Historicising the Journalist–Audience Relationships in the Internet Era: A Case Study of the Slovenian Newspaper Delo

Summary/Abstract: The study’s aim is to reveal how tensions between continuity and change in journalist–audience relationship evolved with the rise of the internet in the news industry and how journalists working in specific institutional settings have conceived audience members and negotiated their online connections with them in the last two decades. Previous scholarly works indicate historical diversity in articulations of the concepts of access, interaction and participation in mediatized political life, which are reflected in the complex dynamics of journalists’ conceiving of audiences based on quantifiable and generative sources. The research objective is addressed in the context of Slovenian journalism in the internet era, more specifically the leading Slovenian newspaper Delo, and aims to offer insights into diachronic diversity within journalist-audience relationship from the setting up of Delo.si website in late-1990s, opening up weblogs to audience members online in mid-2000s, to journalists’ move to Facebook and Twitter in recent years. Despite this case study’s limited scope historical analysis of the journalist audience relationship at Delo reflects a silhouette of journalism’s Janus face – on the one side, the newspaper is adopting technological changes to envision a better future through various online interactive forms, but on the other side Delo is looking back and leaning on journalists’ traditional communication privileges downsizing participation in news and established corporate logics of the news industry in order to retain the top-down character of the journalist-audience relationship.

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