Crafting a Community: Staff Members’ Conceptions of Audience at a City Magazine (Top Student Paper)

• In Event: News Ethnographies in the 21st Century

Abstract

In a changing media ecology that legitimizes content based on its ability to increase revenues, news organizations have found ways to develop content that serves the interests of advertisers as well as audiences. Although scholarship has addressed the implications of this shift among traditional news media, the magazine industry has undergone similar changes. City and regional magazines, which cater to affluent readers while also aiming to reflect their communities, provide an important site of analysis. To understand how these magazines use the relationship of editorial content and advertising to increase profits and serve readers and advertisers, the researchers conducted an ethnography and interviews (N = 4) at a Midwest city magazine. The findings address how members of the organization discursively constructed their audience, commodified that audience as a product to sell to advertisers, and created an understanding of the community they serve and their function within it.

Authors

• David Wolfgang, U of Missouri

• Joy Michelle Jenkins, U of Missouri