James G. Webster
James G. Webster is a professor and audience researcher at Northwestern University. Webster's publications have documented patterns of audience behavior, sometimes challenging widely held misconceptions. He has also made foundational contributions to audience theory and the methods of audience analysis.
Career
He earned a B.A. from Trinity College (Connecticut). After two years as an audience analyst at Children’s Television Workshop, he went to Indiana University Bloomington where he earned his Ph.D. There, he studied with Keith Mielke, who would later become Senior Vice President of Research at CTW, Jack Wakshlag, who would later become Chief Research Officer at Turner Broadcasting, and Dolf Zillmann, a pioneer in media psychology. He joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 1986. Webster served as the Senior Associate Dean of the Northwestern [University School of Communication] for 15 years. During that time, he was instrumental in creating the University’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in Media, Technology and Society. He directed over a dozen doctoral dissertations, and in 2014 received the School’s Clarence Simon Award for outstanding teaching and mentoring. In 2015 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Scholarship Award from the Broadcast Education Association. In 2020, he was designated Professor Emeritus at Northwestern. The following year, he was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association.Research & publication
Webster’s publications have been widely cited. His books appear in Chinese, Korean and Indian editions. He has lectured at universities around the world including the London School of Economics, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Zurich, and the Communication University of China. His work includes empirical studies of audience behavior, interventions in audience theory, and novel approaches to analyzing data.Audience behavior
Webster’s empirical work typically uses secondary analyses of large datasets to document law-like regularities in audience behavior. Early studies identified the determinants of television audience flow. His 1997 book, The Mass Audience, describes patterns of audience behavior based on analyses of television ratings data. Webster has also produced widely cited research on audience fragmentation which has demonstrated that “beneath the veneer” of fragmentation, audiences move readily among popular and unpopular offerings.Webster’s findings have often challenged commonly held beliefs. For example, The Long Tail, a popular book written by Chris Anderson, argued that hit-driven culture would devolve into niches and become “massively parallel." Webster has found that cultural consumption remains concentrated on a relatively small number of mainstream outlets, with much audience duplication among all outlets. He argued that the persistence of popular offerings and high levels of duplication were producing a “massively overlapping culture.” Two of Webster’s students published an analysis of global internet use suggesting that the Great Firewall was not responsible for isolating Chinese web users. In 2015, the International Communication Association, named it the best article of the year. In collaboration with those same colleagues, Webster adapted the concept of flow to digital media, to argue that unseen architectures of choice “nudge” the flow of attention on the internet.