European French-Speaking Local Media’s Relationship with Audiences. A Strategic Challenge between Diluted and Integrated Organizational Modalities

This article studies local news media’s relationship with audiences from an organizational perspective. It is based on 45 semi-structured interviews conducted in eleven local news organizations in European French-speaking countries (France, Switzerland and Belgium), that explored the implementation of actions aiming at revitalizing the link with audiences, the role of the hierarchy and the allocation of human and material resources to this end. Findings reveal two organizational modalities that characterize how the issue of audiences is taken into account in local news media. A proactive and integrated modality describes news media that tend to include the issue of audiences in the internal organization in a tangible, visible and structured way. A reactive and diluted modality describes news media that tend to favor a more variable and opportunistic approach to audience relations. This typology, built empirically from our data, does not claim to situate a news outlet in a definitive manner, but rather suggests a reading grid for questioning the degree of formalization of the issue of audiences within the organizational process of local news media.