In a breakout session on the topic of “Who is the audience?” participants discussed the question of who uses (reads) online content.

The discussion covered two general areas of content: what users want and what news providers are generating.

With the Internet, we have the ability to gather large amounts of data about user habits. We can, to a degree, understand who the audience is. What we know, however, is limited to some demographic information from user surveys and counts on their click-through rates and time spent on specific pages. Participants reported their finding of a low interest in news items by online readers.

Coupled with the issue of what readers are seeking is the second issue outlined above: the dearth of local, investigative reporting. Among the reasons cited for this situation were the investments inherent in investigation reporting, both financially and in terms of time.

Questions generated in this session included:

-Has the goal of journalism changed? Is it about exposing the reader to different ideas/discourses or about advocacy?

-What civic & social needs are being met by news 2.0?

-What are patterns of online reading: do users do the equivalent of channel surfing during ads? If that’s the case, do news providers need to create “covert” ways of delivering news to users?

-Are users loyal to writers (posters) or to content (topics)?

-Who are the users now? Who should be the audience? Just because these are the users going to the site, it doesn’t mean they should drive the content

-how do you build a reading community, a group of people that habitually read and plan to read specific content?

Other session topics included: Politics/Political Activism on the Internet; The Role of Advertising on the Internet; Legal Issues & Journalistic Standards and Ethics; Web Video.