Conceptualizing the Active Audience: Rhetoric and Practice in “Engaged Journalism”

Abstract

A constellation of journalistic tools, platforms, companies and nonprofit funding has recently emerged, promoting the idea that allowing the audience to contribute to the news agenda is a promising strategy to increase trust in journalism, create new revenue streams and foster community-building. Despite a growing body of research, however, two main issues remain currently unexplored: (1) the extent to which engaged journalism as a practice aligns with engaged journalism as a theoretical construct, and (2) the extent to which the audience assumptions underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism align with actual audience expectations and desires. This paper begins to address both of these issues by comparing how advocates of engaged journalism conceptualize the public’s interest in participating in journalism with observations of actual instances of that participation. We find that there is indeed a gap between engaged journalism theory and practice, which we attribute to a distinction between what engaged journalists believe audiences want from news and how those audiences actually behave. At the same time, we also find that institutional rigidity in newsrooms that leads to some reluctance with regard to making news production more collaborative.

Keywords

Engaged journalism ethnography Hearken participatory journalism public journalism

“Engaged journalism” has been heralded by some journalists, entrepreneurs and nonprofit foundations as a promising strategy to increase trust in journalism, create new revenue streams, and foster community-building (Das, 2017; Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019; Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy, 2019). This growing network of proponents, practitioners and scholars has coalesced around the normative idea that journalists better serve the public when they go beyond the role of detached arbiters who authoritatively decide what is newsworthy. Instead, they believe journalists should work with their audiences by soliciting their ideas, experiences, questions, and opinions throughout the news production process. As a result, these advocates put forth a reform agenda, blending elements of a past journalism movement (public journalism) and current technological capabilities of interactivity. From the perspective of its proponents, then, engaged journalism de-centers journalists’ power in favor of news created collaboratively with citizens.

The engaged journalism philosophy has clearly caught on in some corners of the profession. Journalism foundations such as the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism have poured millions of dollars into initiatives that draw on engaged journalism techniques to improve the relationship between news publishers and their audiences. And hundreds of newsrooms across the globe have used their diminished capital to pay for services provided by audience engagement companies, such as Hearken and GroundSource. The enthusiasm behind engaged journalism has grown even more pronounced as news publishers increasingly look to audience-supported revenue models (e.g. subscriptions, memberships, and donations) to offset losses in advertising revenue – or to replace advertising revenue altogether (Hansen and Goligoski, 2018; Kiesow, 2018).

A growing number of academic studies has illuminated certain aspects of these engaged journalism efforts (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc, 2018; Lawrence et al., 2018; Lawrence et al., 2019; Nelson, 2018b; Schmidt and Lawrence, 2020; Wenzel, 2019); however, the institutional dynamics and professional challenges of this approach to journalism invite closer examination. Two issues specifically currently remain unexplored: (1) the extent to which engaged journalism as a practice aligns with engaged journalism as a theoretical construct, and (2) the extent to which the assumptions about audiences underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism align with actual audience expectations and desires.

This paper begins to address both of these issues by comparing the evolution of the normative ideals of engaged journalism with the implementation of these ideals in daily journalistic routines. We draw on the interplay between Hearken, a company that offers digital tools and consulting services to newsrooms, and 15 news organizations in the U.S. that have implemented its tools and its model of “public-powered journalism.” We specifically explore (1) how willing journalists are to reshape their practices based on the engaged journalism philosophy, which frames audiences as eager and untapped potential participants in news-making, and (2) how successful they feel in executing those changes, especially with respect to audience participation. We find that there is indeed a gap between engaged journalism theory and practice, which we attribute to a distinction between what engaged journalists believe audiences want from news and how those audiences actually behave. We conclude with a discussion about what this gulf between expectation and reality means for a news industry that is increasingly sure that its future depends on how well it understands the people that it hopes to reach.

Literature review

The emergence of engaged journalism

Faced with uncertain economics (Jerde, 2019), political polarization (Newman et al., 2018), and the rise of misinformation (Fawzi, 2019), a growing number of news publishers, funders, and collaborators have embraced “engaged” journalism as the remedy to these ails (Nelson, 2019; Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy, 2019). In this context, engaged journalism has been defined as “an inclusive practice that prioritizes the information needs and wants of the community members it serves, creates collaborative space for the audience in all aspects of the journalistic process, and is dedicated to building and preserving trusting relationships between journalists and the public” (Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019). The emphasis on working collaboratively with the public sets “engaged journalism” apart from broader “engagement” trends both across media industries generally and news media specifically that frequently focus more on how audiences interact with news content after the fact rather than with news reporters as they go about preparing their stories (e.g. Ksiazek et al., 2016).

Advocates of engaged journalism believe that journalism’s economic and credibility issues are entwined: people don’t support the news because they don’t trust it. They therefore argue that, to earn public trust, journalists must be more transparent and collaborative. Rather than deliver news stories that are largely pre-determined in the newsroom, for example, journalists should solicit the public’s input throughout the reporting process in order to tap into people’s curiosities and lived experiences. And rather than assume the public will believe that the news is credible simply because it comes from a professional news organization, news organizations should be more responsive and collaborative.

Engaged journalism as public journalism 2.0

Some of the practices included in today’s engaged journalism share strong similarities with approaches that not too long ago were referred to as “participatory” or “reciprocal” journalism (Hermida et al., 2011; Lewis et al., 2014; Singer, 2011), and, most notably, with the “public journalism” movement that preceded it (Ferrucci et al., 2020; Min, 2020). As Geneva Overholser notes, “Engaged journalism is a much-evolved descendant” of public journalism, “born into a radically changed landscape” (2016). The public journalism movement of the 1990s began with journalism scholar Jay Rosen and newspaper veteran Buzz Merritt, who argued that journalists had alienated their audiences by taking an elitist, uninterested approach to them (Rosen, 2002). While traditional journalism has long assumed that citizens are innately uninterested in public affairs, public journalists embraced John Dewey’s philosophy about citizens. They argued that the public wants to be involved in civic life, and that journalists should help them to do so (Dewey, 1927).

Like today’s engaged journalism advocates, public journalists believed that news production should include listening to the stories and ideas of citizens, reporting on public problems in ways that would most likely help citizens solve them, and systematically communicating with the public throughout all stages of the reporting and publishing process (Voakes, 2004). As the public journalism movement receded and the idea of “participatory journalism” took root, this notion of a public longing for deeper engagement continued. As Hermida et al. (2011: 6) put it, “a Deweyan ethos underlies much of the rhetoric on participatory journalism.”

Throughout the evolution of these ideas, however, there has been some reason to doubt that the public would jump at the chance to play a part in making the news – doubts sharpened in the social media era. Indeed, the so-called 90-9-1 rule – that “lurkers” make of roughly 90 of social media interaction with news and brands, versus 9 percent who participate occasionally and 1 percent who participate heavily – is well known among practitioners. As a result, many express skepticism about the public’s eagerness for meaningful engagement, particularly through comments sections (Nelson, 2018a; Quandt, 2018). Nonetheless, today’s engaged journalism movement contains a strong element of Deweyan optimism and hopefulness about the potential for greater public engagement with news. In essence, engaged, participatory journalism promises to transform the news by tapping into a latent public appetite to participate in making the news. In short, public reluctance might limit the actual practice of engaged journalism on the audience side.

Discursive constructions of journalistic roles

Conversely, engaged journalism might also be hampered by journalists’ own notions about their role vis-à-vis the audience. Engaged journalism proponents challenge the traditional journalistic notion that journalists “have” to be the gatekeepers of news because the public doesn’t have the gumption or intelligence to know what information they need. A body of research confirms journalism’s reluctance to “share the road” (Singer, 2011; see also Domingo et al., 2008; Peters and Witschge, 2015) as new digital affordances have empowered ordinary citizens to make news themselves (as well as to widely and instantaneously share and critique journalists’ work). While digital and social media have eroded the news gates, traditional journalism’s attachment to its gatekeeping role has remained remarkably persistent. Part of the challenge might be that journalists’ perceptions of their audience only change slowly – if at all. As Robinson (2019: n.p.) noted in this context, “attention should be paid to how well a journalist’s imagined readership aligns with reality.”

To explore how the ideals and practices of engaged journalism affect and potentially transform journalistic routines, we turn to the discursive construction of journalism’s institutional identity as conceptualized by Hanitzsch and Vos (2017, 2018). According to this view, journalistic roles “set the parameters of what is desirable in a given institutional context, and they are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 6). This framework (see Figure 1) allows us to identify two analytically distinct levels of engaged journalism: role orientation and role performance. “Role orientations refer to discursive constructions of the institutional values, attitudes, and beliefs with regards to the position of journalism in society and, consequently, to the communicative ideals journalists are embracing in their work” (123). On the other hand, “Role performance refers to the roles of journalists as executed in practice, or as observed and narrated by the journalists. The performative properties of journalists’ roles may thus be analytically extracted from direct observation of their work or from self-reports of journalists” (124).

Figure 1.

The process model of journalistic roles (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017).

According to Hanitzsch and Vos’s theory, role conceptions are articulated through normative ideals and cognitive orientations. Within this study, for example, Hearken’s public-powered journalism model suggests a particular role conception for journalists as “hearkening” to a public brimming with ideas and curiosities to be heard. Role performance, on the other hand, encompasses professional practices and journalists’ “narrated performance” of their work. In short, our study examines how journalists narrate their attempts to actually implement the role conception espoused by Hearken. As we will show, the normative ideal of citizen participation promoted in the Hearken model has been adopted at to some extent in the newsrooms we study, but that ideal also creates practical challenges as well as institutional tensions.

Following the five analytically distinct vectors in the Hanitzsch and Vos model, we trace if and to what extent journalists internalize, enact, reflect, negotiate and normalize the normative ideals of engaged journalism through the process of implementing Hearken’s tools and philosophy. As we analyze the discourse both at Hearken and in 15 newsrooms, we delineate the origins of normative ideals as well as tensions and connections between the positions of different actors. We focus on and attempt to clarify the discrepancy between engaged journalism and audience participation.

To differentiate these analytical dimensions, we explored three research questions:

RQ1: What normative ideals of engaged journalism does Hearken construct and promote, particularly with respect to audience participation?

RQ2: How do journalists reshape their practices based on the engaged journalism philosophy and how successful are they in executing those changes (i.e. to what extent do their practices align with the previously identified normative ideals)?

RQ3: What are the tensions and inconsistencies between engaged journalism’s philosophical notions about the public and the pursuit of participatory journalism in practice?

Methodology

This study looks at both Hearken and at newsrooms using Hearken’s tools and services. It draws from a dataset combining interviews with and observations of Hearken employees (conducted by researcher 1) and interviews with editors and reporters at 15 newsrooms around the country (conducted by researchers 2 and 3). The data sets were initially created for separate purposes with no interaction until both data sets were completed. After both data collection on both projects was completed independently, we realized that the data sets could be combined to assemble a comprehensive study of how audience engagement gets first conceptualized and subsequently implemented.

Hearken was founded in 2015 and currently partners with more than 130 newsrooms across the globe. A for-profit firm, it sells newsrooms digital tools with which newsrooms can solicit questions from their audiences and, through its consulting services, encourages newsrooms to increase opportunities for journalist-audience collaborations. It offers an online platform that allows audiences to submit questions directly to news organizations, and tools to allow audiences to vote on these questions, with the winning question eventually (in theory) becoming the focus of a news story. Hearken’s revenue model is based on providing its services to newsrooms for an annual subscription fee, which averages about $8,500.

Along with the software tools it sells to newsrooms, Hearken promotes a philosophy of journalism centered on a vision of the public as active participants in news. Hearken advocates for including the public in every stage of the news-making process, from pitch to story assignment to reporting, as well as at the feedback stage after publication (where most current engagement efforts focus). Hearken also provides consulting to help news organizations implement its model and by encouraging newsroom staff to transition from perceiving the public as consumers of news active participants in its production.

To gather the first data set, Researcher 1 spent January through March of 2017 observing and interviewing Hearken employees in their office space in downtown Chicago. He spent approximately 250 hours total observing, which included time spent sitting in on internal meetings as well as presentations to potential newsroom clients. Because Hearken is such a unique company, Researcher 1 chose to rely on observations to inform his interview questions rather than on assumptions about how its employees approach their work. Consequently, these observations were a necessary prerequisite for the interviews with Hearken employees, which were continual throughout the data collection period (see Table 1). For example, Researcher 1 observed Hearken employees meeting to discuss strategies for pitching their offerings to newsrooms. Researcher 1 observed that these discussions typically involved finding ways to persuade newsrooms that their audiences wanted to participate in the news production process, which led him to ask about the origin of that news audience perception during subsequent interviews.

Table 1.

Interview details for Hearken staff.

Title	Name	Number of interviews	Hours recorded
CEO/Co-Founder	Jennifer Brandel	5	3.75
CTO/Co-Founder	Corey Haines	2	2.2
Engagement consultant	Ellen Mayer	2	2
Engagement consultant	Julia Haslanger	1	1.4
Engagement consultant	Summer Fields	5	3.3
Director of business development	Anna Thomas	2	1.65
Business operations manager	Remy Schwartz	1	1.25

The second data set is based on a sample of newsrooms researchers 2 and 3 selected from a list provided by Hearken of 33 news organizations that had been using its platform for a least a year as of December 1, 2017. The researchers selected an initial sample of 15 organizations, stratifying the sample to achieve diversity in terms of geography, newsroom size, and medium (radio, print, online); we also considered the level of audience involvement that, according to Hearken, each newsroom had achieved using its tools, though that was not a determinative factor in constructing our sample. Since we were interested in examining journalists’ practices across various organizations, we decided to analyze “narrated role performances,” described by Hanitzsch and Vos (2017: 127) as “subjective perceptions of and reflections that journalists carry out in practice,” and determined that semi-directed interviews would be the most efficient and fitting method for data collection. For each news organization, the researchers aimed to interview one editor who supervised the production of Hearken-driven stories and one journalist who produced those stories (see Table 2). Interviews with 28 journalists were conducted, 26 interviews over the phone and two in person, between January and April 2018, with the shortest interview lasting 18 minutes and the longest 1 hour and 1 minute. Following a semi-structured protocol, the interviews covered areas such as main reasons for using Hearken, challenges when using Hearken and questions about expectations and attitudes with regard to audience engagement. Interviewees were given the opportunity to share experiences off the record to encourage frank conversations without fear of any potential repercussions. However, there were only two minor instances when interviewees requested to make comments off the record.

Table 2.

Interview details for newsrooms.

Organization	Location	Hearken project	Interviewees/job title at time of interview
AL.com	Alabama	Ask Alabama/Reckon	Elizabeth Koekenga-Whitmire, Senior Director of Audience John Hammontree, Managing Producer
BOISE STATE PUBLIC RADIO (BSPR)	Boise, Idaho	Wanna Know Idaho	Tom Michael, General Manager Lacey Daley, Digital Content Coordinator
CALmatters	California	The question tool is attached to individual stories	Marcia Parker, Publisher and COO Matt Levin, Data and Housing Reporter
THE COLUMBIAN	Vancouver, Washington	Clark Asks	John Hill, Editor
KCRW	Los Angeles, California	Curious Coast	Caitlin Shamberg, Digital Editor Jenny Hamel, Reporter
KQED	San Francisco, California	Bay Curious	Olivia Allen-Price, Producer and Host Jessica Placzek, Reporter
KUOW	Seattle, Washington	Local Wonder	Brendan Sweeney, Managing Producer Jim Gates, Senior Editor
LANCASTERONLINE	Lancaster, Pennsylvania	We The People	Dustin Leed, Digital Editor Lindsey Blest, Reporter
TEXAS TRIBUNE	Austin, Texas	Texplainer	Amanda Zamora, Chief Audience Officer Alex Samuels, Community Reporter
VPR	Vermont	Brave Little State	Angela Evancie, Managing Editor and Host
WBEZ	Chicago, Illinois	Curious City	Shawn Allee, Senior Editor of Editorial Operations Katherine Nagasawa, Multimedia Producer
WDET	Detroit, Michigan	CuriousiD	Sandra Svoboda, Special Assignments Manager Shelby Jouppi, Multimedia Producer
WFPL	Louisville, Kentucky	Curious Louisville	Laura Ellis, Senior Producer Ashlie Stevens, Reporter
WUFT	Gainesville, Florida	Untold Florida	Ethan Magoc, News Editor Christina Morales, Reporter
WUWM	Milwaukee, Wisconsin	Bubbler Talk	Michelle Maternowski, Digital Services Coordinator Ann-Elise Henzl, News Director

We recognize that in partnering with Hearken to create our interview sample we traded access for full autonomy in determining the population of newsrooms on which our sample is based. Nevertheless, we remain confident that our sample was big and diverse enough to encompass a variety of viewpoints. Moreover, consulting directly with Hearken was by far the most efficient way to determine what newsrooms around the U.S. are using its services.

Data analysis unfolded as an iterative process among the three researchers, adopting the theoretical framework of “discursive construction” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017). First, the Hearken-focused researcher summarized the interview data specifically outlining elements that denoted role orientations. In a second step, the other two researchers examined the interviews with journalists and identified how descriptions of their work aligned or contrasted with those role orientations. These themes were then discussed among the researchers with regard to referential adequacy (i.e. “checking preliminary findings and interpretations against archived raw data, previous literature and existing research to explore alternative explanations for findings as they emerge” (Erford, 2015: 102). Finally, in a third step, the researchers determined master themes and recurring patterns and tensions, illuminating key elements of enacting Hearken’s model in particular news outlets and their variation across organizations.

We are not the first to analyze journalistic practices with respect to potential gaps between role conceptions and role performances (see Mellado and van Dalen, 2014) but to our knowledge, there have not been attempts to do so in the area of engaged journalism. Moreover, while our analysis focuses on tensions and potential inconsistencies between the “rhetoric” of Hearken and the “role performance” of journalists in our sample of newsrooms it is not our intention to single out Hearken and its philosophy as test case for all kinds of engaged journalism. Consequently, this research strategy foregrounds a situational analysis of discursive practices in the interest of understanding how norms, values and practices of engaged journalism are constructed.

Findings

Conceptualizing engaged journalism

Our interview and observational data reveal that that Hearken conceptualizes and advocates for a set of interlinked normative ideals around citizen participation in the news. Two ideas animate Hearken’s philosophy of “public-powered journalism:” (1) Citizens want to be part of journalism but haven’t been given access and tools. (2) Participation enhances journalism: Giving citizens voice makes news more “relevant, useful, and original” (Hearken, 2019).

(1) Hearken encourages news organizations to see the public as partners in setting the news agenda. The company designs its tools and offerings to provide news organizations the means with which journalists can actively include the audience in their journalistic practices. To that end, its pitch focuses on persuading newsrooms that news audiences want this sort of inclusion in the first place. For instance, when describing why people would welcome the opportunity to participate in the news production process, Hearken co-founder and CEO Jennifer Brandel explained, “I don’t think human beings will ever not be curious. I don’t think people will ever stop asking really important questions.”

This is a stark contrast to the notion that the public is somewhat apathetic toward civic life, a notion that Hearken employees said came up often during meetings where they would attempt to pitch their offerings to newsrooms. Another counter-argument Hearken employees reported hearing when they made this optimistic argument about ordinary citizens was that news organizations already have mechanisms in place for hearing from the public – such as social media channels, email, and online comments – and rarely is that input valuable for the news production process. To these objections, Hearken employees were in the habit of suggesting the tools available to the public for engaging with journalists are to blame for lackluster communication between the two. When journalists would lament the mean-spirited, unhelpful comments they came across in their online articles, for example, Brandel would respond, “Comments were not the greatest design…. Of course you’re going to think they [the public] suck if the only times you hear from them are when they suck.” The Hearken mechanism for soliciting audience input was pitched as more collaborative, specific, and inviting, which its employees argued would lead to better, more thoughtful input.

(2) Another central component of Hearken’s public-powered journalism model is the notion that involving citizens in the reporting process enhances journalism because it enables “journalists to know before publishing that their work is relevant” (“Hearken,” 2019). In making this argument, Hearken’s pitch also presupposes that citizens are alienated from journalism because journalism in its current form frequently fails to put a spotlight on the curiosities and concerns of “everyday” people. In interviews, Hearken employees consistently described members of the public as feeling left out of both the ways in which news stories were typically reported, as well as the finished form those stories inevitably took. As Hearken engagement consultant Ellen Mayer explained, “If you’re not an elected official or celebrity, the only way that you get into the news is if you have done something truly terrible or something incredibly remarkable. . . so I think one of the things that Hearken does is make space in the news for people who are just valuable because they have a question, you know, and everybody has questions.”

In other words, members of the public, from Hearken’s perspective, don’t want to just consume news. They want to have a relationship with the news, one based on what they perceive as accurate representations of themselves and their stories by journalists. Hearken employees pitch their offerings as an opportunity for newsrooms to solve these two problems simultaneously. In doing so, they argue, news organizations can improve the quality of their journalism as well as its appeal to audiences. As Brandel explained, “It’s a natural phenomenon that when people are paid attention to by institutions or people with more power than them, it’s exciting…. That’s a fundamental thing that newsrooms could do a better job recognizing and capitalizing on.” By involving audience members in the reporting process, representing “average” citizens becomes both a method and a goal.

These two normative ideals are connected by the conviction that if news organizations more actively communicate with ordinary citizens, they will produce better stories that tap into more relevant community issues, which will lead to a larger, potentially more diverse audience. Hearken’s pitch to news organizations thus aims at challenging traditional notions of journalists’ roles. But how are journalists responding to this call?

Implementing engaged journalism

Since the newsrooms in our sample are early adopters of Hearken’s tools and services, it comes as little surprise that all our interviewees embraced audience involvement in news production, something that clearly motivated their decision to implement the company’s offerings. We find a clear pattern indicating that journalists in our sample have internalized Hearken’s assumptions that public participation enhances journalism. Several journalists mentioned that they wanted to improve the relationship not just with their audience but with the community at large. For example, before signing up to Hearken, editors from LancasterOnline wrote in a strategy document that their “first goal is to gain trust and readership from our audience.” They also acknowledged that they “don’t have a relationship with the community today.” Some journalists in our sample described the use of Hearken as a as a form of “listener outreach” (Tom Michael, Boise State Public Radio) or “listening campaign” to better feel “the beat of the community” (Ethan Magoc, WUFT in Gainesville). Taken together, we find that journalists in our sample have successfully translated Hearken’s normative goal (“Participation enhances journalism.”) into specific cognitive roles, that is, “journalists’ individual aspirations and ambitions and the communicative goals they want to achieve through their work” (Hanitzsch and Vos: 125).

However, in order to actualize these ideals of citizen participation, journalists have to enact these ideals in their daily practice. To assess whether this enactment is successful, journalists do not rely so much on conventional metrics but rather deem audience participation in the news-making process as successful if it shapes the news product in meaningful ways. “I like that it introduced us to bringing the listener, the community, into the reporting process a lot earlier, [helping us rethink] the way that we decide what our coverage is,” said Michelle Maternowski (WUWM, Milwaukee). As Laura Ellis (WFPL, Gainesville) put it, “It definitely makes us think about who we’re involving in a story. There’s always this cliché of, ‘Let’s find a real person who’s going to be affected by this story and see what they’re saying.’ I think that at least for me, I think more about how can this person shape the story? How can this person’s experience or curiosity determine things about how this story ends up sounding?” Ultimately, for most newsrooms in our sample, giving the public more voice in the news also means giving people more opportunities to shape the stories that are being produced.

Enacting the ideal of audience involvement is particularly important when it comes to a central element of Hearken’s model of public-powered journalism: the inclusion of question-askers in the reporting process. To many of the journalists we talked to, bringing ordinary people along during reporting and having them play a role in shaping the process of gathering information constitutes an ideal type of participatory journalism. At The Columbian, for example, “We liked the idea of engaging the readers” in reporting, said John Hill, particularly because it might offer a way to preempt public perceptions of media bias and accusations of fake news because audience members would be given a voice in reporting stories.

However, Hill also pointed out one central challenges of audience involvement: a lack of interest to participate. When he and his colleagues started reaching out to readers, they were surprised to find that most question-askers didn’t want to be involved in the reporting process. “We thought they would be jumping at the chance,” said Hill. KQED in San Francisco and WBEZ in Chicago are two of the most active newsrooms in our sample when it comes to involving audience members in the reporting phase. But both organizations told us about substantial limitations. “It’s a challenging thing to do,” said Olivia Allen-Price (KQED), “because you’re usually having to schedule a question-asker who has a 9-to-5 job, a journalist and a source, all during work hours. It’s a trickier piece of the puzzle than I wish it was because I wish we could do it more often than we do.”

In some cases, she and her colleague at least tried to update the question-asker about the process and let him or her know about questions that might arise as they reported the story. While many of these news organizations report a robust interest from audience members to participate as question-askers, their experiences also indicate that many people are not that curious about being part of the reporting process. Taken together, we find a clear discrepancy between the role orientation (“The audience wants to participate (in the reporting process)”) and the actual role performance. In this sense, journalists were not able to successfully align new practices with normative ideals of engagement. As Ethan Magoc (WUFT) put it, “Most people would just prefer to send their questions to us and have us go ahead and report it.”

Negotiating tensions

This dissonance between an ideal type of participatory journalism and the reality of lackluster audience participation requires journalists to negotiate tensions and potentially adjust their expectations regarding the question of how much listeners and readers really want to be involved in story creation. “The uncomfortable answer, after doing it awhile, is that the easier it is for them to do, the more likely they’ll do it,” said Shawn Allee of WBEZ. “It doesn’t mean that they won’t do the hard stuff, it’s just that fewer of them will.” At KCRW, reporter Jenny Hamel included question-askers several times in her reporting. “But for the most part it’s hard,” she said, “because you’re a little busy, you’re trying to coordinate with these listeners.” As a result, Hamel focuses her energy less on participation and more on notification (e.g. sending updates to question-askers about the reporting process). “They’re all usually involved in the beginning and then, of course, I reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, I’ve answered your question. Here’s the blog post. Here’s the audio file. Share with your friends.’” This reaction – simultaneously acknowledging the limits of participation in the reporting process yet embracing the outreach to readers and listeners – was a common one. As Lindsey Blest (LancasterOnline) put it:

I think it actually embodies what I hope to do as a journalist to a degree in that it is driven by what people want to know, and I think journalists have the ability to find answers to things and accessibility to information and time to find information that other people in the public may not have.

The lack of audience interest was not the only indication of divergence between the ideals and practices of engaged journalism. For some newsrooms, even when public response is more robust, finite resources and capabilities prevent journalists from realizing the full public-powered engaged journalism ideal. “There’s really no shortage of enthusiasm,” said Angela Evancie (VPR). “It’s just a matter of what we can manage on our end in terms of all of that connection.” As Marcia Parker (CALmatters) put it, the biggest challenge was building the new workflow and philosophy into the DNA of the newsroom. “Everybody’s busy, right? So you just have to constantly keep it in front of everyone and remind us at every editorial meeting, ‘OK, where is there a Hearken engagement opportunity in whatever you're doing?’”

Despite these tensions, however, we also find that many of the journalists we interviewed normalized their experiences toward viewing the public as partners in setting the news agenda. Through the process of implementing the Hearken model, many of these journalists have adopted the notion of citizen participation as the “new normal” within their newsrooms, at least to some extent (in some cases, this vision is what drove their interest in Hearken in the first place).

Some journalists mentioned that they got fresh ideas about coverage, sometimes about issues that were overlooked. For John Hammontree (AL.com), for example, hearing from readers has “solidified our expectation that the audience knows what it wants. That we should trust the audience when they say, ‘This is something that we’re interested in,’ even if we think, ‘Oh, well. Nobody would ever be interested in that story.’ If the audience says they are, then they are. I think that we expect our audience to ask good questions, and they expect us to give good answers now. And so, I think, to some extent, that’s changed the way we do engagement.” Some reporters changed their perspective on the public’s ability to contribute to the news agenda only after overcoming initial skepticism. “One of the things that Hearken does,” Ann-Elise Henzl (WUWM, Milwaukee) said,

is it encourages us to use a voting round for listeners to select what they want to hear. I remember [when] that was being presented to us at the initial meeting and I thought, ‘Oh, come on, we’re going really turn over control to listeners?’ Because again, I had no idea what people would be interested in. Maybe I just didn’t respect how constructive their ideas would be, or how creative, and how interested they are in things that are around them.

Validating the perspective of ordinary people as meaningful and important was a recurring theme when journalists talked about the value of picking up questions from their audience. As Ashlie Stevens (WFPL, Louisville) put it, “I think that maybe sometimes what we need to realize as reporters. . .[is] that the people who are actually living it have questions that we may not even think about.”

To sum up, when we compare the rhetoric of engaged journalism (i.e. role orientation) with the perceptions and experiences of journalists in our sample (i.e. role performance), the following picture emerges: (1) Many journalists we talked to internalized and enacted ideals of deep audience engagement, confirming that Hearken’s conceptualization of engaged journalism is resonating in newsrooms. (2) But our findings also indicate that actual audience expectations and desires (as perceived and experienced by journalists) look somewhat different from assumptions about the audience underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism. This indicates a discrepancy between Hearken’s philosophy, which is grounded in optimistic conceptualizations of everyday citizens and community engagement, and journalists’ experiences of a more reticent audience. (3) Moreover, our analysis also finds that limited financial and human resources in newsrooms shape and constrain how much audience members can be involved in the news-making process.

Discussion

A growing number throughout the news industry believe that journalism must embrace the philosophy of “engagement” in order to solve its current crises of revenue and public trust. This study set out to uncover what happens when that philosophy gets implemented within news production. By comparing data collected from those who are attempting to persuade newsrooms to embrace this more collaborative approach to their audiences with data collected from newsrooms actually attempting to make this approach a reality, this study provides a useful side-by-side comparison of the rhetoric and performance of engaged journalism. In particular, it offers the first close look at how engaged journalism proponents at one leading organization conceptualize the audience, and how well that conceptualization matches the experiences of journalists implementing the model. In doing so, it attempts to identify and understand the gap between the assumptions underlying “engaged journalism” – specifically surrounding what the public wants from journalism – and the reality that journalists find themselves facing “when the rubber meets the road.”

We find that Hearken’s model rests on a philosophical reorientation of news production wherein journalists act as facilitators of public participation. This approach to journalism rests on an assumption shared by its advocates about unmet audience demand for greater participation in the news. However, our interviews suggest that even as journalists internalized and even normalized that role conception, some also experienced a gap between the public participation they expected and that which they actually experienced. Conversely, we also find that some newsrooms we interviewed experienced the opposite: journalists reported feeling overwhelmed by their audience’s input and organizationally unable to respond to it all. The result is a situation in which – either because of journalists’ expectations or audiences’ reactions – a gap has emerged between the promise and reality of engaged journalism.

Limitations

We faced some limitations in this study. First, there were aspects relating the affordances of Hearken’s tools that we could not explore due to space constraints. For example, for this study, we did not explore if and to what extent Hearken’s software structures interactions between journalists and audiences in patterned ways (see Schmidt and Lawrence [2020] for such an analysis). Second, since this wasn’t a longitudinal research project, it is impossible for us to conclude if the “normalization” we observed is temporary or if it does indeed seep “into the DNA” of the newsrooms in which Hearken has been adopted. On the one hand, previous research has found that when those within a newsroom most excited about Hearken leave their organization, those newsrooms become more likely to drop Hearken’s services (Nelson, 2018b). On the other hand, Hearken’s impact could be broader than newsrooms that have paid for their services. Some newsrooms that have used Hearken may stop not because they do not believe in the philosophy of engaged journalism, but because they have decided they can’t afford it or have decided either to seek out alternative providers of engaged journalism services, or to make do on their own.

This possibility gets at another limitation: although this study focused on Hearken, that company is far from the only one promoting engaged journalism, nor is it the only possible iteration of this philosophy (Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019). To be sure, this study is more than an evaluation of Hearken’s practices. In fact, Hearken mainly serves as a focal point to analyze the intersection of individual motivations and institutional patterns in the interest of exploring how emerging practices of engaged journalism point toward institutional change (if at all). By analyzing first how Hearken employees conceptualize journalistic norms and values, and then how these norms and values are interpreted and enacted by journalists, we seek to illuminate how the dialectic between rhetoric and role performance creates both a community of practice with distinct journalistic routines and outlooks but also occupational and professional tensions that are not easily reconciled. In short, we examine how the rhetoric of public-powered journalism is translated into journalistic practices, and we analyze how normative assumptions (that is, what engaged journalism advocates argue engagement with citizens should look like) are enacted through the lived experiences of journalists (that is, what journalists’ attempts at engagement with citizens actually looks like).

Finally, this study does not reflect the actual views of audiences about their willingness to participate as the Hearken model of engaged journalism suggests that they will. Rather, our findings reflect the views of journalists who have been working to evoke and respond to public participation. Yet our findings point in the same direction as other studies that find moderate public response (at best) to new participatory affordances (Borger et al., 2016; Domingo et al., 2008; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). It is interesting to consider to what extent the negative feedback loop described by Borger et al. (2016: 722), in which “the viability of participatory projects could. . .be diminished by a need and wish for, but a factual lack of, reciprocity” was at work in the newsrooms we studied. As noted above, some we interviewed spoke of the difficulty of responding effectively to audience input, which may have lead some in the public to conclude the efforts weren’t truly reciprocal (see also Belair-Gagnon et al., 2019). Finally, it is possible that the forms of participation newsrooms pursue affect the public response. Strategies that invite the public into journalistic spaces (ride-alongs with reporters and visits to the newsroom, for example) may be viewed differently by members of the public than initiatives that bring journalists into community spaces – a possibility worthy of future research.

The future of engaged journalism research

Understanding the way in which an idea about how journalism should be produced becomes an actual set of practices within newsrooms – as well as the extent to which the assumptions underlying such ideas align with reality – is essential for understanding both the philosophy behind the ongoing attempts to repair journalism, as well as the likelihood that those attempts will succeed. To put it more simply: understanding the path that audience-focused interventions in journalism take from theory to practice reveals more than just how journalism may or may not change. It also shows how aligned journalists’ and reformers’ ideas about the public are with how the public actually behaves.

With that in mind, we do not mean for our findings to suggest that journalists should cease pursuing engaged journalism techniques such as those advocated by Hearken. On the contrary, many we interviewed were happy with the changes to newsroom practices that using Hearken brought to the news agenda and to their metrics. Instead, we hope that these findings illustrate something that has long gone unsaid in journalism: it is extraordinarily difficult to know what audiences want. This is something that is quite obvious within the wider world of media: If movie studios could predict how audiences would react, there would be far fewer box office bombs. Yet it seems necessary for this notion to be made explicit within journalism specifically. The assumption underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism – that audiences want to participate more in the news production process – is clearly true for some people in some markets, but less true for others. It may also depend on what kind of relationship already exists between an outlet and the various communities within its market. As reported in Schmidt and Lawrence (2018), many newsrooms that take up Hearken’s tools struggle with how to expand their reach beyond those (often white and affluent) communities that are already active consumers of their work (see also Wenzel, 2019).

Ultimately, as engagement journalism is taken up by more newsrooms, the questions that journalists – and the scholars who study them – grapple with may shift from whether to encourage more public participation in news to the questions of how much participation is desirable and to what end. The Deweyian impulse to enable broader public participation in democracy has resonated – and invited criticism – for decades precisely because the question of “how much participation is enough” is not easily settled. Newsrooms experimenting with community engagement may find the public response is either more enthusiastic or less so than they imagined. In either case, as journalism’s pursuit of audience engagement continues, we believe scholarly attention should begin to shift away from the how and more to the why. Doing so will shed light not only on journalism’s approach to the public, but also on their expectations of the public as well.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Thomas R. Schmidt

Jacob L. Nelson

Author biographies

Thomas R. Schmidt is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University of California, San Diego, and the author of the book Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism (University of Missouri Press, 2019) as well as numerous journal articles (e.g. in Journalism, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice). He was inducted into the Kappa Tau Alpha National Honor Society for media scholars and received competitive fellowships such as the Fulbright Scholarship and the Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

Jacob L. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the relationship between journalism and the public. His research has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Journalism, and Journalism Studies, as well as in public-facing outlets such as Columbia Journalism Review and The Conversation.

Regina Lawrence is the Associate Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication Portland and the Director of the Agora Journalism Center. She is a nationally recognized authority on political communication, civic engagement, gender and politics, and the role of media in public discourse about politics and policy. Her two latest books are Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail and When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, winner of the Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award from the Political Communication section of the American Political Science Association.

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