The next media regime: The pursuit of ‘audience engagement’ in journalism

Abstract

As news organizations struggle to overcome losses in revenue and relevance, academics and professionals have pinned their hopes for salvation on increasing ‘audience engagement’. Yet few agree on what audience engagement means, why it will make journalism more successful, or what ‘success’ in journalism should even look like. This article uses Williams and Delli Carpini’s ‘media regimes’ as a theoretical framework to argue that studying the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding it – is vital to understanding journalism’s transition from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is yet to fully emerge. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It concludes with a call for more research into audience engagement efforts to better understand what journalism is and what it might become.

Keywords

Audience engagement audience measurement journalism media regimes news production

The news industry is now two decades into a period defined by instability and confusion. In an ever-expanding and increasingly partisan media environment, news publishers have grown uncomfortably aware of the fact that they can no longer assume that their output will reach enough people to generate revenue or impact public policy (Hamilton, 2006; Prior, 2007; Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). Throughout this time, news stakeholders and scholars have suggested many solutions to save the profession from financial ruin and irrelevance. One of the most popular suggestions addresses both of these concerns: that journalists more actively pursue ‘audience engagement’.

Audience engagement advocates argue that journalism must explicitly consider and communicate with its audience in order to better understand and meet their news media needs. They believe doing so will produce more collaborative news from a wider variety of viewpoints, which will lead audiences to find the news more credible and thus more worthy of their loyalty. The growing promise of ‘audience engagement’ has resulted in the proliferation of both ‘engagement’ focused jobs within newsrooms, as well as a growing industry that offers audience engagement tools and services to newsrooms (Nelson, 2018b). Though the term remains inconsistently defined, a growing number of researchers and practitioners have embraced it as one of the key measures by which journalism’s success should be evaluated (Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019; Lawrence et al., 2018).

These attempts to make audience engagement a chief pursuit within journalism raise many questions about how the profession is changing and what it will look like going forward: Why do journalists believe audience engagement will lead to more successful journalism? What do audience engagement advocates believe ‘successful’ journalism should look like? Is this more explicit pursuit of the audience something new, or have we seen it before? This article begins to answer these questions by situating journalism’s current fascination with its audience within a broader examination of how this relationship has changed over time.

What follows is an overview of how journalists have (or, perhaps more accurately, have not) engaged with audiences in the past and the factors currently persuading them to change that approach. These shifting priorities can be understood as part of a larger movement from one ‘media regime’ to another. Williams and Delli Carpini (2011) have used ‘media regimes’ to isolate US media history into periods that comprise distinct conceptualizations of media, citizenship, and democracy. This article similarly draws on ‘media regimes’ to argue that the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding what this approach should look like and accomplish – is part of journalism’s transition away from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is still emerging. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It then describes the way audience engagement has become widely embraced within local news, and how that embrace has presented itself as a revival of a civically minded form of news production called public journalism. It concludes with suggestions for future research.

A narrow view of the audience

Journalists historically thought little about what their audiences wanted from news. Instead, they tended to report on topics that appealed to them and their editors, as well as those that had been covered by their competitors. Newsroom ethnographers have observed this more dismissive approach to the news audience in studies across media platforms (e.g. broadcast in Epstein, 1974; newspapers in Fishman, 1980; both in Tuchman, 1978) as well as in both national (Gans, 2004) and local news (Kaniss, 1991). Journalists also saw the audience’s role as a passive one. As a result, audience feedback was rarely sought and hardly valued (Gans, 2004; Karlsson et al., 2015; Kormelink and Meijer, 2018; Tenenboim and Cohen, 2015).

This limited view of audience worked in tandem with a narrow conceptualization of objectivity. For instance, mainstream broadcast and print journalists tended to report stories by interviewing government officials and seeking bureaucratic records (Fishman, 1980) and then presenting these as indisputable facts. They less frequently interviewed nonofficial sources and rarely developed sources in poverty-stricken neighborhoods (Tuchman, 1978). When these journalists interviewed community activists or other nonofficial sources, they often considered their statements biased (Kaniss, 1991). There were a few notable exceptions to this, including community newspaper and investigative reporters (Ettema and Glasser, 1998; Janowitz, 1952). For the most part, however, the daily journalism produced by the most prominent news organizations throughout the 20th century was a one-way conversation that privileged information gleaned from political elites and was mostly unconcerned with what many now refer to as ‘audience engagement’ (Batsell, 2015; Mersey et al., 2012 Rosenberry and St John, 2010).

Media regimes

Despite these consistencies, the meaning of journalism and the way it has been practiced has been far from constant. The industry’s professional norms have stressed different attributes at different times, depending on political, economic, and technological circumstances. During the ‘Golden Age of Broadcast News’ in the mid-20th century, for example, US media audiences faced limited options for what to watch on television at night. As a result, many of them watched the evening news (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). The people behind these news programs knew they reached a mass audience that likely comprised a diversity of political viewpoints, which led them to pursue an ideologically neutral tone in their reporting. Doing so diminished the chances that they would unnecessarily alienate or offend any of their viewers.

With the advent of cable, however, more channels became available – news and otherwise. As audiences abandoned the nightly newscast for more entertaining programs, television news that tried to appeal to everyone ceased to be as economically advantageous. The result is the current model, where partisan news channels like Fox and MSNBC are significant players (Prior, 2007; Webster, 2014). This transition reveals that understandings of what journalism looks like and how it is produced change periodically, shifting from one ‘media regime’ to the next (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011: 26).

These regimes are the results of political, economic, and social struggles that have definite winners and losers. For instance, the transition from the age of broadcast news to the age of cable meant good news for Rupert Murdoch but bad news for the journalists who valued objectivity over partisanship (and for the companies that employed them). Media regimes, in other words, are the collision of stakeholders with different, often competing interests surrounding media production and reception. It is only during these moments of impact that these regimes cease to appear natural; however, soon after a resolution is reached, the new regime eventually becomes ‘naturalized until the next disjuncture occurs’ (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011: 283). We are currently in the midst of one such transition.

An industry in crisis

The last media regime began to crumble in the early 21st century with what scholars refer to as the newspaper crisis (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012). A combination of economic, technological, and social factors caused the journalism industry to plunge into its current, dire state (McChesney and Pickard, 2011; Siles and Boczkowski, 2012; Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). Newspapers have long depended on advertising revenue to maintain profitability, which declined sharply with the advent of the Internet and the financial recession that began in 2008 (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012). As Siles and Boczkowski (2012) note, the newspaper crisis manifested itself in readership declines, newsroom staff cuts, and reductions in the amount of coverage a publication could provide. Advertising revenue evaporated with the arrival of websites like Craigslist and print subscriptions plummeted.

The reluctance of traditional newsrooms to embrace the digital age compounded these issues by delaying industry innovation in the face of changing news consumption habits (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012). However, as the popularity of online news consumption grew (and continues to grow), news production practices began to more intensely emphasize digital content creation (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2010). Many news producers went bust and the ones that survived slowly started investing online.

The rise of online audience metrics

In transitioning to digital, these publishers learned to embrace online audience metrics (Cherubini and Nielsen, 2016; Petre, 2015; Tandoc, 2015; Webster et al., 2014). Audience metrics have always been an important part of the relationship between media producers and consumers (Webster, 2014), but the advent of sophisticated measures available via digital technology combined with the increasingly dismal economic circumstances facing newsrooms has resulted in these measures playing a larger role in newsrooms than ever before (Anderson, 2011). Now, many major publications subscribe to multiple sources of online audience measurement (Graves and Kelly, 2010), despite their uncertainty about how to best incorporate these data into editorial decisions (Anderson, 2011; Usher, 2014). These measures can track the amount of time people spend on a site, the number of times a site is mentioned on social media, and, most importantly for the purpose of attracting advertisers, the number of people who visit a site (Kosterich and Napoli, 2016).

Because advertisers look to reach as wide an audience as possible, audience size has become the currency by which advertisers evaluate the quality of a news site (Napoli, 2012; Sanghvi, 2015). Currencies have been defined as ‘a class of metrics that quantify the audience attributes of value to advertisers … a common coin-of-exchange that all buyers and sellers of media can use to conduct business’ (Nelson and Webster, 2016: 2). The establishment of a currency is the result of negotiations among the affected parties – namely media companies, advertisers, and currency providers (Kosterich and Napoli, 2015; Napoli, 2011). The prevailing audience currency in media generally and journalism specifically privileges size, meaning for-profit news sites face pressure to publish content that will appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and less incentive to publish anything else (Nelson and Webster, 2016).

The outsize role that measures of audience size now play has forced news publishers to acknowledge that public affairs news is wildly unpopular (Boczkowski, 2013; Prior, 2007). This realization has meant that, within a news media environment that relies on clicks and pageviews to generate necessary ad revenue, the news that most journalists consider ‘important’ (i.e. necessary for a well-functioning democracy) is conspicuously unprofitable. Compounding this issue is the fact that news consumption increasingly happens ‘incidentally’ via third party platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter (Boczkowski et al., 2018; Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018), each of which privileges popular content over other kinds (O’Connor, 2013). As a result, news publishers now find themselves pressured to publish stories that appeal to these platforms’ algorithms so that they are more likely to cut through a cluttered media environment and get noticed by audiences. Although scholars have recently argued that popularity metrics like ‘clicks’ should not be taken as a stand-in for actual audience preferences (Kormelink and Meijer, 2018), for now these metrics hold a privileged place within both social media platforms and news websites. In other words, success or failure within the news media environment often gets determined by the stories people click on and those they do not.

Online audience metrics have also revealed to journalists that news audiences are not monolithic – what appeals to a segment with certain characteristics (geography, income, political ideology) will not necessarily appeal to another. This realization has provided journalists the information necessary for them to become much more deliberate about who they attempt to reach with their news (Nelson, 2018a). Yet, this opportunity poses its own risks. While the advent of audience analytic data may lead some news publishers to more explicitly attempt to bring neglected community members into their audience, these data could also exacerbate this gap by leading others to give up on trying to reach those citizens altogether.

Further complicating the implications of audience analytic data is the fact that its adoption throughout the news industry appears to be coinciding with the public’s growing concern for how these data get collected in the first place. As the public becomes more aware of incidents in which the social media platforms they frequently rely on for news consumption either accidentally or intentionally misuse their personal data, the likelihood of a backlash against the very collection of these data becomes much more real. If legislators were to respond to this backlash by enacting stricter online privacy laws, the digital tools newsrooms increasingly rely on to better understand – and profit from – their audiences could cease to be available.

This is the current situation, and it has many scholars and industry stakeholders wondering what’s next for this shaken profession (McChesney and Pickard, 2011), its role in American democracy (Schudson, 2012), and its relationship with its audience (Singer, 2013). One thing is certain: there is no going back. Few believe that the defining characteristics of the last media regime – white, male journalists with a detached tone and a reliance on elite sources – will play as primary a role in the media regime to come (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). Though no one knows what the next media regime will look like, many are convinced that it must be more inclusive, diverse, and willing to cooperate with the audience (Davis Mersey et al., 2010; Kiesow, 2015; Lewis et al., 2014; McCollough et al., 2015; Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). To accomplish this, the argument goes, the next media regime must depend upon audience engagement.

Defining audience engagement

Yet, the excitement surrounding audience engagement on the side of journalists has been tempered by uncertainty on the side of advertisers, who traditionally have decided whether a media metric becomes a currency (Napoli, 2012; Sanghvi, 2015). Similar to media regimes, the struggle for an audience currency is a political one that has definite winners and losers. Within this struggle, advertisers hold considerable leverage. Audience engagement advocates believe journalists would prefer to be evaluated based on how people attend to the news instead of how many, because they assume this would both yield larger profits for publishers and encourage more of the ‘important’ content that typically draws smaller audiences. But no matter how impassioned journalism professionals and partners are, they will not succeed in making audience engagement the metric by which they are evaluated unless they either win the ad industry over to their cause or find some way to circumvent it altogether (Nelson and Webster, 2016).

To be sure, the prospect of the ad industry being circumvented in this way grows less far-fetched with each passing year. News publishers have recently realized that digital advertising revenue is unlikely to ever lead to financial stability (Jerde, 2019), and have grown heartened by signs that people are in fact willing to pay for online news (Molla, 2018). As a result, many have begun experimenting with audience-supported and foundation-funded revenue models that depend on memberships, subscriptions, or donations (Benson, 2018; Hansen and Goligoski, 2018; Kiesow, 2018; Moritz, 2018). This development is important, as revenue models built on audience support will likely lead news publishers to focus much more on audience engagement than models built on superficial measures like audience reach, for no other reason than they will suddenly have an obvious incentive to better understand what does – and does not – encourage audience loyalty.

Such a shift would also likely lead news organizations to focus on smaller, niche audiences in hopes of gaining their direct, financial support, as opposed to attempting to capture the attention of as many people as possible. Should such a transition occur, journalism researchers would be faced with an entirely different set of questions about the news media and its relationship with the public. For instance, amid claims that society has grown politically polarized to a troubling degree, would a media environment that actively embraces audience segmentation lead to more ideological segmentation as well (Nelson, 2018a)? While it is too soon to say how viable the push for audience-supported revenue models within journalism will be, the fact that they are being pursued at all suggests a growing reluctance within the profession to have their economic prospects dictated solely by the advertising industry.

Of course, even a news media marketplace that trades advertising for audience revenue will still need a currency to make sense of how each organization is faring in relation to its competitors and to understand how their efforts do – or do not – lead to profit. For now, the chances of audience engagement becoming the currency by which news media is evaluated are slim (Nelson and Webster, 2016). For starters, measures of audience size are more straightforward to gather and interpret. And although many measures of audience engagement exist, none stands out as the most obvious choice for a currency because no one agrees on how engagement itself should be defined (Napoli, 2011; Plummer, 2006; Webster et al., 2014). Potential measures of engagement include everything from audience attentiveness (e.g. via pageviews, shares, and comments) to online discussion (e.g. commenting, user-generated content, to civic participation (e.g. voting, demonstrating). In other words, audience engagement has been used to describe the marketing practices of newsrooms, the media consumption patterns of audiences, and ‘the civic values of journalism’ (Neilson, 2018: 3). As a result, it has become a term that means very different things depending on the context and is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Consequently, any definition of audience engagement is likely to please some and frustrate others. Because this article focuses on journalism specifically, it adopts Jacob Ørmen’s (2015) conceptualization of audience engagement in relation to news: ‘‘Engagement’ captures both how people devote attention to and interact with something’, (p. 25). Engagement thus comprises two aspects of media audiences typically of interest to researchers – consumption and participation. Audience engagement with news entails understanding ‘how people attend to information about issues of public concern, become aware of the intricacies of these issues, and address each other about such issues’ (Ørmen, 2015: 18). To engage with news is to undertake the news attentively.

This definition, however, focuses more on the audience than on the producers trying to reach them. To understand the way that different news publishers approach their relationship with their audience, ‘audience engagement’ needs an additional distinction: reception-oriented and production-oriented (as depicted in Figure 1). Reception-oriented definitions of audience engagement focus primarily on the audience’s reception of news: How much time did they spend with a story? How many times did they tweet about it or comment on it? These definitions are especially useful for for-profit news publishers who take a ‘market-driven’ (Ferrucci, 2018; McManus, 1994) approach to journalism, meaning they view the news as a commodity and the audience as customers. Reception-oriented audience engagement definitions appeal to for-profit publishers because these definitions can translate into quantifiable measures that may eventually be deemed worthwhile by advertisers.

Figure 1.

Reception- and production-oriented approaches to audience engagement.

Production-oriented definitions, on the other hand, focus on news production: How many citizens participated in the creation of this story? How many diverse voices were included as sources? How much of the audience requested this story in the first place? These definitions matter more for nonprofit outlets, as these publishers are less concerned with ad revenue and instead want to measure their success by how much their audience feels included and empowered by their reporting. In other words, production-oriented audience engagement refers to the ways that journalists attend to their audiences, while reception-oriented audience engagement refers to the ways that audiences attend to the news.

This distinction is not absolute. As for-profit newsrooms increasingly look more toward revenue models based on subscriptions than on ads, they are likely to incorporate production-oriented engagement tactics in hopes of building audience loyalty (Ksiazek et al., 2016). Furthermore, most news publishers, including for-profits and nonprofits, want to produce journalism that creates an ‘impact’, an idealistic goal with an elusive meaning (Lacy and Rosenstiel, 2015). Because impact is so difficult to define, let alone measure, publishers increasingly draw on both production- and reception-oriented engagement definitions to see what insight each can offer (McCollough et al., 2017). Nonprofits may focus more intently on production-oriented engagement definitions than on reception-oriented (and vice versa for market-driven publishers), but the ease with which huge amounts of online audience data can now be collected and the uncertain state of the media regime means that, for the time being, publishers will take whatever they can get in hopes it will help them better understand and connect with their readers.

All eyes on local journalism

The cause of audience engagement has been taken up most fervently in the journalism subgenre of local news. Journalism at the local level inherently has a limited audience, and thus has suffered the most at the hands of the prevailing currency that privileges audience size. Ironically, many also see local journalism as the most democratically valuable form of news (Anderson, 2013; De Tocqueville, 2012; Kaniss, 1991; McCollough et al., 2017; Napoli, 2015). Local journalism, according to Nielsen (2015), is both terrible but also terribly important (p. 1) – it is far too vital to democratic engagement to continue limping along in its current state. Consequently, a segment of journalism research has begun focusing on local journalism’s role in society, the way its practitioners conceptualize and attempt to connect with their audiences, and how this subfield’s reporting and production practices may or may not help national news organizations adapt to a more competitive media ecosystem (Anderson, 2013; Hindman, 2015; Knight, 2012; Lee, 2016; McCollough et al., 2017; Nielsen, 2015). Many believe that a renewed focus on local journalism that stresses audience engagement to connect with community members is an important step toward making the news industry both relevant and sustainable again (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2019; Ferrucci, 2015; McCollough et al., 2017; Nielsen, 2015; Singer, 2011).

Specifically, many have pinned their hopes about the future of journalism on a novel form of news production that combines aspects of traditional reporting with collaborations between foundations, community activists, and data scientists. This model often takes the form of the ‘digitally native news nonprofit’, a news organization with a skeleton staff that produces content for the Internet (Ferrucci, 2015; Nee, 2013). These organizations seek funding from grants and donations rather than ad revenue, actively court audience participation, and frequently partner with a variety of civic organizations in addition to more conventional newsrooms (Felle, 2016; Ferrucci, 2015; Konieczna and Robinson, 2014; Pickard and Stearns, 2011; Rosentiel et al., 2016). This model is spreading quickly across the country: All but nine states in the United States have at least one news nonprofit (Mitchell et al., 2013), and most are less than 10 years old (Rosentiel et al., 2016).

The return of public journalism

These news nonprofits bear a strong resemblance to the failed public journalism efforts of the 1990s, in that both focus on altering traditional journalistic norms in order to more effectively connect with local communities (Ferrucci, 2015). The goals of public journalism were to engage the community, give citizens the power to shape the news agenda, present the news in an easily understood format, and galvanize readers (Ferrucci, 2015; Nip, 2006, 2008). Public journalism advocates hosted town hall meetings and other participatory events in an attempt to turn news production from a one-way lecture into a two-way dialogue (Marchionni, 2013; Nip, 2006). ‘Professionalized journalism lost touch with its community – a problem that the public journalism movement sought to resolve’ (Lewis et al., 2014: 230).

The news nonprofit approach, which the journalism scholar Patrick Ferrucci (2015) dubbed public service journalism, is ostensibly the same, except when it comes to the news agenda. Public journalism advocates wanted to yield editorial control to the audience. Public service journalists, on the other hand, want the audience to contribute to reporting from beginning to end, but maintain that their news judgment ‘remains sacrosanct’ (Ferrucci, 2015: 917). Another difference between the two is that public journalism was often found in for-profit newsrooms, while public service journalism so far has mostly been taken up in local news nonprofits.

Public journalism (sometimes called civic journalism) failed because it was difficult to implement in a pre-Internet era, especially with newsroom staffs already stretched thin. And because it primarily occurred in market-driven newsrooms, it often struck journalists as little more than a cheap marketing ploy rather than a sincere attempt to connect with communities. Even efforts in newsrooms that took public journalism seriously fizzled when employees invested in their success left the organization (Nip, 2008). As a result, some see public journalism as the right idea that had the misfortune of coming along at the wrong time (Schaffer, 2015).

However, public journalism pushed newsrooms to connect with their audiences, inadvertently providing a roadmap for current efforts to bring audience engagement to the forefront of news production. Now that the Internet allows newsrooms to more easily interact with and measure their audiences – and has left them financially desperate enough to prioritize doing so – many see public journalism’s embrace of the audience as critical to the future of the industry (Batsell, 2015; Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019; Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy, 2019; Lewis et al., 2014; Stearns, 2015). Perhaps public journalism was not a blip in journalism’s history but a necessary step in a punctuated evolution.

Though both public journalism and public service journalism advocates believe the audience should actively shape the news agenda and play a part in telling their own stories (Charity, 1995; Ferrucci, 2015; Glasser, 1999; Merritt, 1995; Rosen, 1996), some believe the latter model has a stronger chance of survival because it does not depend as much on generating ad revenue for economic success (Ferrucci, 2017; Knight, 2012). Audience engagement within this model is production-oriented rather than reception-oriented, since it focuses primarily on tactics ‘meant to strengthen and galvanize the community’ (Ferrucci, 2015: 916). Furthermore, this model’s nonprofit structure allows it the flexibility to put market-driven interests aside and pursue these goals without worrying about anything outside the quality of their work and their ability to reach and advocate for their specific community.

Few public service journalism organizations have been around long enough to demonstrate their sustainability beyond foundation-driven funding. However, the fact that they have formed and have begun publishing original reporting is enough to have piqued the interest of journalism researchers and practitioners (Coates Nee, 2013; Ferrucci, 2015; Knight, 2012; Nee, 2013; Rosentiel et al., 2016). The pressure on these organizations is intense. Many believe they will not only provide a new model for journalism, but, by maintaining a focus on working alongside their audience, they will also spur a growth in civic engagement within the communities they cover. As Clay Shirky wrote (Shirky, 2009),

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases… Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues… Many of these models will fail… but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need. (pp. 43–44).

How realistic is this hope? And what can ‘the journalism we need’ truly accomplish?

Changing methods, changing goals?

Though journalists increasingly believe these more intensive efforts to connect with audiences will lead to better, more sustainable journalism, they have yet to reach a consensus surrounding what ‘better’ journalism actually means. Consequently, the impulse to publish stories that include more local voices and more community advocacy stems from a deceptively simple question confronting journalism professionals and researchers: who should their work reach? Now that there is no returning to the monolithic audience (which was never more than a myth in the first place), news publishers face the difficult challenge of deciding what groups they will prioritize trying to engage and why they will decide to do so.

A satisfying answer to this question is impossible without news industry stakeholders first answering an even bigger one: What do they believe journalism should accomplish? Should journalism provide useful information to as many people as possible? Should it advocate for social or political policy change, specifically for the sake of marginalized communities? Should it pursue some combination of the two? Should it make a profit? Several reports have recently explored these questions (Friedland et al., 2012; Knight, 2012; Lacy and Rosenstiel, 2015) and their inability to offer neat, satisfying answers further illustrates just how confusing a moment this is for journalism.

Perhaps the inability of journalists to specifically define and defend what they do simply speaks to the legacy of the passing the previous media regime. In that regime, the authority of professional journalism resulted not from any public articulation and defense of journalism’s methods but rather from the structure of a media environment that positioned professional journalists as gatekeepers at the limited conduits through which political information flowed. In an emerging media regime that contains much more expansive and varied means of mass communication, journalists’ scrutiny by the public has grown more intense and impactful. As journalists begin the process of explaining their roles and responsibilities to the public, they find themselves realizing they must first determine how each should be defined in the first place. As Anderson (2013) argues in his analysis of Philadelphia’s local news ecosystem, ‘Journalists must begin the hard process of rethinking who they are, what they do, and who their work is actually for’ (p. 5). Scholars who watch this process unfold have the unique opportunity to uncover how journalism is changing and what it might look like going forward.

To accomplish this, scholars must not only examine what journalists are doing to adapt to a new media regime but must also use these examinations to uncover the assumptions underlying these efforts. In other words, this is an opportunity to not only learn what news professionals and partners expect audience engagement to accomplish but also to use these expectations to make explicit their implicit assumptions about journalism, community, and democracy. Figure 2 offers a useful mechanism by which researchers can do this, by sorting data into three tiers: goals, broad approaches, and specific methods.

Figure 2.

A tiered approach to identifying journalism’s goals.

The appeal of this classification system is that it provides a template by which newsroom observations can be situated so that larger goals are revealed. For example, a traditional newsroom’s focus on measures of time spent with content is a specific method used within a reception-oriented approach to audience engagement. A local news nonprofit, on the other hand, may focus instead on measuring the number of contributions made to their reporting by their target audience. This is a specific method chosen in pursuit of a production-oriented approach to audience engagement. By situating these distinctions in this tiered classification system, researchers can more precisely make explicit a news organization’s underlying goals. They might reveal that the latter measures the success of journalism by how accurately it reflects its audience, while the former may instead measure success by how willing their audience is to devote large amounts of time to their content.

Uncovering these larger goals is necessary for journalism researchers to understand where the industry is trying to go, how likely it is to get there, and what the implications are for publishers, audiences, and civic life. For example, if production-oriented audience engagement becomes the norm, might that exacerbate the already alarming trend of audiences checking out of political news for more entertaining fare (Boczkowski, 2013; Prior, 2007)? Or will bringing the audience into news production motivate citizens to grow more involved in public life, as some engagement advocates believe? If journalists have embraced new methods to accomplish the same old goals, it is worth understanding why they think these new methods will work so that we can more accurately predict whether or not they will actually be successful. On the other hand, if these new methods have been embraced in pursuit of entirely new goals, it is important to understand what this means for our conceptualization of journalism and the role we expect it to play in society.

Finally, at this moment of professional uncertainty, it is more important than ever for scholars to find constructive ways to share their findings with journalism practitioners. Many scholars in our field already do this by publishing summaries of their research in public-facing presses like Columbia Journalism Review and NiemanLab. Some go even further, by pursuing opportunities to cultivate sustained, productive conversations between journalism’s many stakeholders. For example, the journalism scholar Andrea Wenzel (2018b) recently published a summary of her research about mistrust in Philadelphia’s local news environment in Columbia Journalism Review. Soon after, she built on those findings by launching the Germantown Info Hub, an initiative that intended to help solve the very problems that her initial research initially identified (Wenzel, 2018a).

This kind of work is important, but it is also labor intensive and typically not valued within academia as much as the publication of research in peer-reviewed journals. There are signs, however, that this situation is beginning to change. The Journalism Studies division of the International Communication Association recently launched a Public Engagement Award, which seeks to recognize researchers who ‘successfully engaged with people outside of academia to contribute to a better understanding of journalism… by connecting practice and research, communicating research findings, and addressing real world problems’. And organizations like the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (founded in 2006), the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas Austin (founded in 2013), and the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon (founded in 2014) all aspire to produce research for the benefit of news media professionals and scholars alike. These developments indicate a growing enthusiasm among journalism researchers to define the quality of their work not only by its reception within the academic community but by its impact on the profession as well.

Next steps

Nearly 20 years ago, Ettema and Glasser (1998) interviewed award-winning investigative journalists at the height of their editorial influence. These reporters were at the top of their field at a time when journalism’s reach was just beginning to wane. The journalists they spoke with had demonstrated an incredible power to appeal to society’s sense of moral outrage, making them ‘custodians of public conscience’ (Ettema and Glasser, 1998: 3). By investigating the intellectual assumptions behind this unique form of news production, Ettema and Glasser revealed the ways that these journalists considered their roles, their work, and their attempts to summon empathy from their audiences.

We find ourselves at a very different moment now, where journalism’s ability to call upon society is far from guaranteed and its relationship with its audience is on the cusp of reinvention. The specific meanings of words like ‘active citizens’ and ‘free press’ have been contested throughout history, and are once again in the process of being redefined (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). Victor Pickard wrote that this moment ‘requires nothing less than a systemic overhaul of the press, one that returns news organizations to the communities they serve’ (Pickard and Stearns, 2011: 59). In the past few years, many within the industry have answered this call by explicitly pursuing a stronger connection with the audience. This article has argued that the recent open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding what it should look like and accomplish – is part of journalism’s transition from one media regime to the next.

Going forward, it is important that researchers continue the difficult work of investigating why journalism professionals and partners are taking such dramatic steps to connect with their audiences in order to uncover the underlying assumptions about what journalism is, what it should become, and what it can be expected to accomplish. These investigations should examine the hopes journalists have for connecting with and understanding their audiences, the tools they are using to do so, and the degree to which these hopes are being fulfilled. In doing so, such studies will uncover the assumptions that structure these recent efforts to reinvent journalism, allowing them to accurately predict what form the next media regime will take. Just as Ettema and Glasser documented how journalists conceptualized their roles as arbiters of morality, we now must work to understand how journalists believe that role has changed. The new industry’s recent embrace of the news audience provides a helpful lens with which to do so.

Journalism is slowly making its way from one model to the next. More research focused on the news industry’s changing relationship with the audience will shed light on what the field will look like when the dust settles.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Mark Coddington and Edson C. Tandoc Jr. for their feedback on earlier drafts of this study. He also wishes to thank James G. Webster, Wendy Griswold, and Philip Napoli, who oversaw the dissertation from which this study originates.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

ORCID iD

Jacob L Nelson

Author biography

Jacob L Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He researches issues in news production and consumption.

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