This article explores the connections between reality television and older print and electronic media formats. It surveys the history of audience participation in the media through a series of case studies drawn from Britain, Australia and the United States: periodicals featuring significant contributions from their readers in the 1880s; confessional magazines in the 1920s; mass-market women’s magazines during the inter-war years; talkback radio since the 1960s; and the emergence of ‘real life’ media genres in the 1980s and 1990s. The article argues that media producers have, for more than a century, been blurring the notion of the passive media consumer.
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