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This article explores the mechanisms by which corporate prestige produces distorted legal outcomes. Drawing on social psychological theories of status, we suggest that prestige influences audience evaluations by shaping expectations, and that its effect will differ depending on whether a firm's blameworthiness has been firmly established. We empirically analyze a unique database of more than 500 employment discrimination suits brought between 1998 and 2008. We find that prestige is associated with a decreased likelihood of being found liable (suggesting a halo effect in assessments of blameworthiness), but with more severe punishments among organizations that are found liable (suggesting a halo tax in administrations of punishment). Our analysis allows us to reconcile two ostensibly contradictory bodies of work on how organizational prestige affects audience evaluations by showing that prestige can be both a benefit and a liability, depending on whether an organization's blameworthiness has been firmly established.

This article examines the effects of market specialization on economic and social outcomes. Integrating two perspectives, we explore why products that span multiple categories suffer social and economic disadvantages. According to the audience-side perspective, audience members refer to established categories to make sense of products. Products that incorporate features from multiple categories are perceived to be poor fits with category expectations and less appealing than category specialists. The producer-side view holds that spanning categories reduces one's ability to effectively target each category's audience, which decreases appeal to audience members. Rather than treating these as rival explanations, we propose that both processes matter and offer a systematic, integrated account of how penalties arise as a consequence of audience-side and producer-side processes. We analyze data from two dissimilar contexts, eBay auctions and U.S. feature-film projects, to test the central implications of our theory. Together, these tests provide support for our integrated approach and suggest that both processes contribute to the penalties associated with category spanning.

'Tailoring' refers to any of a number of methods for creating communications individualized for their receivers, with the expectation that this individualization will lead to larger intended effects of these communications. Results so far have been generally positive but not consistently so, and this paper seeks to explicate tailoring to help focus future research. Tailoring involves either or both of two classes of goals (enhancing cognitive preconditions for message processing and enhancing message impact through modifying behavioral determinants of goal outcomes) and employs strategies of personalization, feedback and content matching. These goals and strategies intersect in a 2 × 3 matrix in which some strategies and their component tactics match better to some goals than to others. The paper illustrates how this framework can be systematically applied in generating research questions and identifying appropriate study designs for tailoring research.

Purpose: This project contributes a rhetorical approach to search engine optimization (SEO) as algorithmic audience analysis. It positions SEO as an activity that requires strategists to compose website content that is optimized to both human search engine users and the algorithmic audience (Gallagher, 2017) of a search engine???s indexed content. Method: Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005), with its focus on the agency of non-human entities combined with human agency in social activity, provides the theoretical framework for this approach. The project combines usability testing with web development methods to trace rhetorical agency during online search activities (Hocutt, 2019). Doing so demonstrates the role search algorithms play as receptive audiences of SEO strategies. Results: Approaches to teaching SEO within the framework of technical and professional communication (TPC) rhetorical foundations require understanding the algorithmic audiences of SEO practices. By matching timestamp data from videorecorded usability tests and HTTP archive (HAR) files produced during usability testing sessions, content strategists can overlay the chronological recordings with their SEO strategies to better understand how successfully SEO met human and algorithmic audience expectations. When SEO practice identifies human audience expectations effectively and develops content signals attractive to its technological audiences, both audiences succeed in an assembled meaning-making exercise. By applying existing methods of audience analysis to search algorithms, content strategists can improve SEO and help surface relevant content for their human users. Conclusion: The results of this project provide a framework for practicing SEO as rhetorical activity built upon audience analysis of both human and non-human users.

This paper introduces a deep learning methodology for analyzing audience engagement in online video events. The proposed deep learning framework consists of six layers and starts with keyframe extraction from the video stream and the participants’ face detection. Subsequently, the head pose and emotion per participant are estimated using the HopeNet and JAA-Net deep architectures. Complementary to video analysis, the audio signal is also processed using a neural network that follows the DenseNet-121 architecture. Its purpose is to detect events related to audience engagement, including speech, pauses, and applause. With the combined analysis of video and audio streams, the interest and attention of each participant are inferred more accurately. An experimental evaluation is performed on a newly generated dataset consisting of recordings from online video events, where the proposed framework achieves promising results. Concretely, the F 1 scores were 79.21% for interest estimation according to pose, 65.38% for emotion estimation, and 80% for sound event detection. The proposed framework has applications in online educational events, where it can help tutors assess audience engagement and comprehension while hinting at points in their lectures that may require further clarification. It is effective for video streaming platforms that want to provide video recommendations to online users according to audience engagement.

What do citizens in the Netherlands expect from journalism? A large-scale survey shows that many audience expectations align fairly well with what experts and journalists consider important democratic functions of the press. We refer to these expectations as Civic Demands. In addition, more at odds with the profession’s view, the audience wants journalism to take Citizen Demands into account: the complaints and wishes of citizens. We explore how these demands relate to audience characteristics and news media use. Findings suggest that journalists and citizens could very well cooperate in securing a future for high-quality journalism.

This study examines the agenda setting of candidates’ attributes and its relationship with polarized candidate evaluation among TV news viewers. Content analyses of candidates’ affective attributes during the 2012 presidential election indicate partisan imbalance from CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox’s Special Report. NBC Nightly News was relatively balanced. Watching a particular program was positively associated with attribute agenda setting by each program. Also, agenda setting by the Fox program was positively related to viewers’ polarized candidate evaluations, whereas agenda setting by the NBC program was negatively associated. Implications of the partisan TV news context for agenda-setting theory are discussed.

Despite scientific consensus and educational efforts, approximately 25% of Americans remain unconvinced of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), and significant misconceptions remain. Many studies have assessed adults’ views, but it is important to also understand the perceptions of younger individuals who will deal with the future impacts of ACC. In this study, we aimed to determine first-semester college students’ attitudes toward and knowledge of ACC, which factors are associated with these measures, and whether knowledge scores differ among audience segments. We issued surveys at 19 American universities and received 2355 responses. The surveys contained sections assessing attitudes, knowledge, and demographics. We analyzed the attitudes and knowledge in ordinal and beta regressions. Most (73.6%) of the students were very concerned about ACC, and their average knowledge scores were high (0.89, standard error = 0.003). Attitude and knowledge were associated with a combination of personal and environmental factors. The concerned students had higher scores, suggesting education may be an important mitigation tool.

This study analyzes the performance of the main news programs of the five largest television channels in Romania: TVR1, PRO TV, Antena 1, Kanal D, and Prima TV. By examining monthly average ratings over a five-year period (2018-2022), the study identifies key trends and performance disparities between these channels. The results highlight significant differences in the performance of TVR1's Telejurnal compared to its commercial competitors. While Telejurnal demonstrates stability with a loyal but relatively small audience, commercial channels like PRO TV, Antena 1, and Kanal D exhibit higher variability and significantly higher mean ratings, reflecting their ability to attract diverse and dynamic audiences. Seasonal patterns in Telejurnal's ratings reveal higher viewership in winter months, with declines in summer, but the overall trend remains stationary. These findings suggest that TVR1 operates in a distinct niche but faces significant challenges in competing with commercial channels.

This report assesses peer‐reviewed and grey literature on risk communication concepts and practices, as requested by the European Commission to support the implementation of a ‘General Plan for Risk Communication’, i.e. an integrated framework for EU food safety risk assessors and risk managers at Union and national level, as required by the revised EU General Food Law Regulation. We conducted a scoping review of social research studies and official reports in relation to risk communication in the following areas: understanding and awareness of risk analysis roles and tasks, reducing misunderstanding of the different meaning of the terms ‘hazard’ and ‘risk’, tackling misinformation and disinformation, enhancing confidence in EU food safety, taking account of risk perceptions, key factors in trade‐offs about risks, audience segmentation and tools, channels and mechanisms for coordinated risk communications. We structured our findings as follows: i) definitions of key concepts, ii) audience analysis and information requirements, iii) risk profiling, models and mechanisms, iv) contributions to communication strategies. We make several recommendations for consideration by the Commission, both in terms of actions to support the design and implementation of the general plan, and research needs that we consider crucial to further inform appropriate risk communication in the EU. EFSA carried out a targeted consultation of experts and a public consultation open to all interested parties including the general public, in preparing and finalising this report. This publication is linked to the following EFSA Journal articles: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2021.e190401/full and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2021.e190402/full