Popular news in the 21st century: Time for a new critical approach?

This paper is a brief review and critique of the main scholarly approaches to thinking about popular forms of news in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly in regards to broadcast television. Rather than advocating the merits of either popular or ‘hard’ news, it will discuss the possibility of finding (or revisiting) a critical approach to popular news and current affairs journalism that charts a suitable middle-ground: one that can accommodate the emergence of popular informational programs (e.g. The Awful Truth, The Daily Show) and one that moves away from the sometimes too simplistic binary discourses that have tended to become characteristic of recent debates over ‘tabloidisation’

Audience research at the crossroads: the 'implied audience' in media and cultural theory

While audience research, particularly reception studies, has successfully furthered the diverse traditions from which it developed, there now seems to be some uncertainty about the way forward: audience research is at a crossroads. This article argues that the future agenda should not restrict itself to repeating the cultural studies 'canon' of reception research, but should strengthen external relations between audience research and other domains of media and cultural studies, challenging the 'implied audience' - the ways in which audiences are theorized outside audience theory — within the realms of political, policy, technological, economic and social theory. It is further proposed that by developing a multi-level conception of audiences that analytically links the macro and the micro, several existing problems facing reception studies - particularly concerning the nature of audience activity and resistance - may be addressed