New COST publication: Overview of European audience research. Research report of the COST Action 'Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies'

The state of audience research in European countries is not yet properly charted due to the fragmented and varied nature of the field. Obtaining an overview was both an objective of the Action in its own right, and a precondition of other achievements. For the first meeting of the Working Groups (WG) in Lisbon (November 11-13, 2010), the Steering Group (SG) of the Action invited the members to submit short national essays that review existing and emerging audience research in their respective countries. The reviews could be theoretical, topical, methodological, empirical or institutional. Most of them were presented in the WG sessions of the Lisbon meeting. The SG requested some revisions or additional essays in order to better cover the countries for which the essays where too focused, or to cover the countries that were not represented at all. In total, 58 essays covering the 30 participating countries were delivered and are available on the Action website at: http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu. This research report brings together these 58 essays as well as a tentative synthesis in the concluding section.