How Media Consumers May Analyse My Work

Media Theorist, Stuart Hall, suggests there are three ways my audience will be able to analyse and interpret my media text. These are:

Preferred Reading

Negotiated Reading

Oppositional Reading

Preferred Reading is when the audience agrees with my piece and shares its views. It is the most dominant reading and would be expected of my target audience who enjoy my mix of serious and light-hearted stories, while taking something away from the text after listening.

Negotiated Reading is when the audience partly agrees with me but sometimes resists and modifies. These readers may still enjoy listening to my radio piece but could think of ways to improve it.

Oppositional Reading is when the media consumer understands my text but does not agree. They may not think my stories fit the mise en scene or just not enjoy the flow of my work at all. It is this audience I will take the most feedback from as I try to improve my work.

I think it is important to understand how my audience will analyse my work as I then have a good idea on how to present it to them.

I think most of my audience will read my work though 'Negotiated Reading' as it is news based and topical. They are likely to have their own strong views on what should be presented on the news and how. There are many different ways to present the news and this is why there are newspapers aimed at many different target audiences such as 'The Sun' for the working class who want a light-hearted and over dramatised approach and 'The Observer' for factual middle-class reads.

David Morley on the other hand wrote: 'audiences, like producers of messages, must also undertake a specific kind of "work" in order to read meaningfully what is transmitted' in his 1980 text 'The Nationwide Audience'. Morley suggests that the audience will not just initially analyse a media text in one of three ways as Stuart Hall suggests, but "work" through it to make their own decision. They may listen to a media text such as my radio work, go away and talk to friends via the 'Two Step Flow' theory and reach a new point of view.

I believe how a media consumer analyses a text depends on the individual- but I will take all varieties of feedback, as I did with my questionnaires, and try and improve my work accordingly.