From Masses to Audience: changing media ideologies and practices in reform China

This article examines the historical trajectory and significance of the conceptual change from ''masses'' to ''audience'' in China's media reform. This change eroded Mao's ''Party-masses model'' of propaganda and its prescribed political and ideological relationship between the press and readers in both the discursive and practice domains of Chinese journalism. In journalistic discourse, the de-politicized conception of the audience as a new media ideology as well as a rhetorical device, coupled with the political and economic dynamics of marketization, circumvents the established interpretation of the roles and functions of the media to ''educate, agitate and organize the masses''. In journalistic practice, the ideational change makes it possible to incorporate audience surveys into media organizational routines. As an institutionalized practice, audience surveys promote and stabilize the notion of the audience and bestow it with currency in the routine operations of the media. The process of ideational institutionalization as formalization, routinization and normalization are characterized here. Through such a process, the concept of the audience becomes part of the institutional arrangement of Chinese media and opens up an institutional space for further reform activities. It also extends the basis of legitimacy for journalistic work, making way for the possibility of pluralistic news reporting and diversified media management.