Regathering the Imagined Audience

Abstract

Based on fifteen months of fieldwork with television and new media producers at the transnational “European” public television channel, ARTE, this article describes the ways in which staff are in the midst of reimagining the channel’s “audience.” On the one hand, staff continue to understand television audiences as primarily national, and only nationally coherent; on the other hand, ARTE’s audiences are understood to be fast-dispersing as a result of new broadcast technologies and streaming web content. To reach dispersing audiences, and to better articulate its programming across borders, ARTE has partly shifted its efforts toward regathering its public through international events, festivals, and other off-screen engagements where its viewers become differently coherent and knowable. The article argues that such a strategy re-emplaces “fans and followers” of ARTE in ways that might foster collective identifications in ways that may be literally replacing those engendered by traditional public broadcasting.