Chapter One: Introduction
Like any broadcaster, it is an unavoidable fact that SBS staff make most of their productiondecisions away from the immediate presence of the radio listeners, television viewers and onlineusers who constitute their audiences. How does SBS, from its base in Artarmon, come to know about those audiences? What purposes do audiences serve within SBS? For that matter, why doesSBS bother with its audiences at all? Audiences are troublesome: getting to know them is difficultand expensive; it sometimes seems that they can be quantified in any way one sees fit. What they do say is sometimes unpleasant and counter-intuitive. One might imagine that broadcasters wouldbe better off without the audience.But broadcasters truly need audiences in order to survive. It is one of the key tasks of abroadcaster to attempt to know its audience. A range of feedback mechanisms inform thebroadcaster's knowledge of its audience. With multiple techniques of gathering feedback, thereare thus many images of the audience. It is accurate, in fact, to say that SBS has many audiences.Each audience affects production processes in manifold ways. While knowledge of audiences isalways abstracted - it is an idea, or a re-imagination of feedback - this knowledge is often put topractical use.SBS has a wide range of institutional goals which are accomplished by feedback-informedknowledge and actions. The goals of SBS are complex, made so by its dual position as acommercial and public broadcaster. In particular SBS's responsibility to serve a multicultural Australia necessitates constructions of an audience which include references to both diversity anda united whole. The many audiences of SBS are increasingly recognised to be enmeshed with oneanother, as demonstrated by the recognition that television and online audiences share many of the same citizens.Staff at SBS are well aware of the complexity (and often inadequacy) of audience feedback.Nevertheless there are many practices in place which seek to achieve the goals of SBS by utilisingit. In this thesis I have documented some of these practices and how they contribute to theeffective functioning of the broadcaster as a whole. This thesis demonstrates the audience's key role in broadcasting and its agency in institutional decision-making.
About SBS
The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is a radio and free-to-air television broadcaster, and morerecently an online content provider, primarily based in Sydney, Australia. It has existed in one
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