Making ‘quality’, class and gender: audiences and producers of The Archers negotiate meaning online

This chapter explores the new ‘producer – consumer’ dynamics discussed by Henry Jenkins (2006a and b) and others (Buckingham and Willett 2009; Klein 2009; Hills 2009; Thomas 2009) through a case-study of a particularly active area of user generated content around a BBC broadcast, the radio soap opera The Archers (BBC Radio, 1951-). It analyses listeners’ interventions and engagements with BBC output in the online spaces around the programme and considers how the production culture evolves in relation to them. It also provides some discussion of the programme itself, thus adopting a (still relatively rarely practised) model of media research where production cultures, audiences and text are studied in combination (Buckingham 1987), and indeed are conceived as interconnected and interdependent sites of cultural production, rather than separate and bounded entities.