AND THE IRISH
SPEAKING AUDIENCE
Introduction
In this report I aim to examine the Irish speaking audience of TG4. This involves looking at three items in relation to this topic. Firstly in section 1 we will look at information which is currently available about the Irish speaking audience and the issues raised by this information. In section 2 I have included a proposal for a research project to be carried out on this audience and what I would expect to find in the results of this research. Lastly in section 3 we will look at how the uses and gratifications approach originally outlined by Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1974) would approach this topic and the feasibility of carrying out this research from that perspective.
Section 1
What information is available about the Irish speaking TG4 audience and what issues are raised by this data?
There are two primary sources of information available about the Irish speaking audience of TG4, one quantitative and one qualitative.
Irish Weather
Irish Flag
English: Irish language stop sign with text "STAD"...The quantitative research comes in the form of AC Nielson ratings and are available for the month October 2001. The qualitative research is an MRBI survey conducted over four weeks in February and March 2002. The results for this survey where released in May 2002. We will look at these sources of information and examine exactly what they tell us about the Irish speaking audience of TG4 and what issues are raised by this information.
Quantitative - AC Nielson Ratings
A press release by TG4 in November 2002 shows us two important pieces of information. We see the market share which TG4 holds against other television channels (both Irish and British) and it compares this information in October 2001 and 2002. It shows that TG4's market share has remained the same in both years however this...