The Power of Interactivity

Hello again everyone and welcome back to my blog on media convergence. This week we are wrapping up both Briggs’ Journalism Next and Grant and Meadows’ Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals. Today’s topic, you ask? We’ll be talking about the interactive audience in both journalism and advertising.



With so much news content going online today, audience participation was inevitable. Now, instead of hindering this participation, news writers have begun to encourage this interactive behavior. Using interactive media in journalism allows a news writer to receive feedback on his work, spread his message to a broader audience through online word-of-mouth, obtain additional information from audience members that supplement the story, and gain valuable insights into what his audience wants to hear about in future stories. Online advertising and promotional materials have been affected in this same, positive manner. However, I believe that advertising was much more open to this new form of audience interaction because advertising depends so much on the opinion of the audience. Interactive media is just one more way in which the internet has benefited the advertising industry.

As many of you know, journalism and advertising have both fundamental similarities and also differences. One issue that applies to both industries when it comes to interactive media is the problem of getting the audience to participate when you want them to. What is amazing to me is the fact that so much of the web’s content is generated by so little of the online population. For example, a 2007 study found that over 50% of the edits on Wikipedia are done by less than 1% of the users. The key to getting the audience to participate in journalism is for the journalist to get involved. They need to interact with their audience in the same way they want the audience to interact with them. The same goes for advertisers. In order for the audience of an interactive online promotional campaign to participate, they must get something in return, even if that something is as small as an acknowledgement of participation.

One thing that applies more to journalism than to advertising is the issue of staying objective. When journalists publish content online, they can be tempted to editorialize and opinionate their stories. They have to remember that their online content is still news, and therefore, must remain objective. As Briggs points out, a journalist should never publish anything online that they would not publish in the New York Times. This is much less of an issue with advertising because, well, advertising is about the least objective form of mass communication out there. The whole point of advertising is to persuade an audience that the product or service is the best, even if it is not.

That is all I have for this week. Be sure to stop back tomorrow for the second episode of the Chris Wagner Blog Show, where you can learn even more about the fascinating material covered in this blog post. See you next time!