James G. Webster

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. 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.[2] He directed over a dozen doctoral dissertations, and in 2014 received the School’s Clarence Simon Award for outstanding teaching and mentoring. In 2020, he was designated Professor Emeritus.

Media researchers commonly believe that audience behavior is best explained by micro-level factors such as individual preferences. In a 1983 article, “A theory of television program choice,”[3] Webster claimed that preferences were expressed within the structure of available program options and that these structures were important determinants of audience behavior. Similarly, in “The duality of media,” Webster adapted structuration theory to argue that macro-level structural factors affected patterns of public attention to digital media.[4] In 2012, the "duality" article won the Denis McQuail Award for best article advancing communication theory.[5] The fullest expression of his theory of audience behavior is in The Marketplace of Attention,[6] which won the 2015 Robert G. Picard Book Award.[7]

Webster has also written extensively about measurement and the analysis of audience data. Ratings Analysis, first published in 1991, is in its fourth edition and is a standard text on audience measurement and analytics.[8] His 1997 book, The Mass Audience, describes patterns of audience behavior based on analyses of television ratings data.[9] Since 2010, Webster and his students have used social network analysis to study audience behavior.[10] Their approach, which uses data on audience duplication to build “audience networks", has been adopted by many communication researchers.[11][12][13]

Webster’s findings have challenged commonly held beliefs. For example, contrary to The Long Tail (book), which argued that hit-driven culture would become “massively parallel," Webster has found that cultural consumption remains concentrated on a relatively small number of outlets, with much audience duplication among them.[14] He argued that the persistence of popular offerings and high levels of duplication were producing a “massively overlapping culture.”.[15] Two of Webster’s students published an analysis of global internet use suggesting that the Great Firewall did not isolate Chinese web users.[16] In 2015, the International Communication Association, named it the best article of the year.

Webster’s publications have been widely cited.[17] 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. In 2015 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Scholarship Award[18] from the Broadcast Education Association.