Part IV centers on the flow of information that becomes news stories. Close analyses of source–fixer–reporter interactions that informed reports on the Turkish government’s crackdown on domestic critics and on the country’s July 2016 coup attempt show, concretely, how fixers transform the information that passes through them from source to reporter. From the ways they prepare reporters for interviews to the words they choose when interpreting between Turkish and English, fixers cannot help but shape reporters’ perceptions and so the news. Fixers nonetheless operate within the tight constraints of news organizations’ framings of events and templates for coverage. Fixers’ interventions into information transmission are patterned by socially constructed but idiosyncratic moral considerations: their personal and political aspirations, as well as their desire to harmonize emergent conflicts between the parties they broker.

This chapter discusses a number of broad and influential perspectives to studying audiences, explains differences and similarities in background as well as explores their main possibilities in understanding the flow of management ideas. In particular, we consider: (1) research in the field of conversation analysis which is concerned with understanding the way lectures and speeches may influence and transform audiences and in turn, how audience responses may affect speakers’ oratorical performances; (2) the ‘uses and gratification’ approach to studying media audiences which focuses primarily on the reasons and motivations for selecting specific media options and the way various audience activities relate to the nature of audience orientations; (3) more critical traditions of media research focusing on how audience members’ interpretations of media messages relate to their social backgrounds and (4) literature on fans and fandom which provides an important lens to advance understanding of how and to what extent audience members take the ideas beyond a mass communication setting and may even become producers themselves.