CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Litty, J. M. (2002). Audience, relevance, sound: Meaning structures and structuring meaning in public radio journalism. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University. Advisor, Brenda Dervin.
© Jamie M. Litty (2002).
You may be able to order a full copy of this dissertation through the author, or through ProQuest Dissertation Express.

ADVISOR:
Brenda Dervin

ABSTRACT:
This study explores how public radio feature producers experience the production process, and in so doing, exposes certain meaning structures that are in effect in “encoding”—as the production process has been called in Cultural Studies and other mass communication literature. Specifically, the research asks how the concept of “audience” serves as a meaning structure in encoding and answers that question by analyzing respondents’ ways of “knowing” the audience and by demonstrating what consequences those have for encoding the journalistic text. The research also analyzes the journalistic and technical values and situational conditions that constitute a powerful system of relevance with direct consequences for assignment, sourcing, and telling of public radio features.

This study presents a methodological shift in the study of media workers, resurrecting the media-worker-as-author at a time when textual analysis and audience perspectives have gained ascendancy in the field. Furthermore, this document advocates specifically for the application of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology to the study of electronic media production. Its epistemological and ontological assumptions (and theory of the research interview) constitute an interpretive analytic well-suited to the empirical study of persons-in-contexts and the experiences of those persons. It taps into the lived reality of the research subjects while respecting them as lay theorists, yet also accommodates the field’s calls for pattern-seeking and structural analysis. In its exploration of particular strategies in effect in particular communicatings, the methodology reveals what is contingent, idiosyncratic, and personal about a person’s craft as well as what is rigid, constraining, or habitual.

The literature review is organized around three classes of meaning structures (frameworks of knowledge, technical infrastructure, and relations of production) to set the scene in which public radio feature production should be understood. The data analysis, conducted by open coding and inductive frame analysis, focuses on two in the class of frameworks of knowledge: ways of knowing the audience and the system of relevance. However, there is a synergy in which assumptions regarding the audience and the journalists’ relevances are dependent in part on how those people sense the nature of the medium (especially as it is constituted by sound), so that certain discussions pertaining to aspects of the technical infrastructure could have been only artificially held back from discussions of audience and relevance.

Major findings include: an “audiencing” repertoire of ways to bridge the gap that the trade’s audience mandate presents; journalists’ assumption of the intersubjectivity with their audiences; “audience” not always distinctly defined as public auditors in the traditional sense but sometimes as a complex of self, other personnel, or objects of reportage; relevances such as journalistic values regarding newsworthiness sometimes mirror beliefs about audiences’ intrinsic interests; beliefs about audience attention and comprehension sometimes are reflections of beliefs about the essential nature of the medium—and thus are bound up in “medium-reflexive relevances.” Additionally, the technical infrastructure constituting radio as a mass medium is a tacit consideration in some assumptions about audience and also determined professional practices. Thus, how the public radio feature producers in this study understand the nature of the medium is a flip-side of both their self-proclaimed production values and the ways they theorize the audience experience.

At a meta-level, we find a tripartite synergy involving the respondents’ sense of the medium, their audience assumptions, and, by definition, their medium-reflexive relevances. The technical infrastructure shows up in this study in the ways that the medium’s supposed requirements and beliefs about the function of sound permeated audiencing and the system of relevance.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEBSITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistlitty.html