BBC and African audience: Insights from ethnography

Forms of message delivery may have continuously changed, but audiences have constituted a central component of the communication process at all times. Notwithstanding this centrality, interrogation of audiences in the communication process has largely been informed by commercial imperatives such as advertiser need for information on ratings, organizational need for information on audience demographics and programme preferences by both commercial and public media, and so on. In its psychological phase, early audience research in Africa borrowed from the pioneering works of Merton (1968) and Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) in inquiring into engagement with media texts. Consequently researchers’ engagement with media audiences focused on effect studies, which became the vogue in the early days of independence when the diffusion of modernizing innovations was emphasized.