Who Has the Power to Change the News? The Pursuit of ‘Audience Engagement’ in Journalism

Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. The term is increasingly portrayed as a cure-all for the news industry’s ails – audience engagement will increase audience loyalty, build audience trust, and make journalists’ work more relevant. Those who hope to make audience engagement both normative and measurable face enormous barriers to success. They need to convince news industry stakeholders, each with their own interests and opinions, to rally around a novel interpretation of journalistic practice. They also need to settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement itself should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning—let alone metric—it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, and who within the field has the power to change it.

This project will investigate these efforts by drawing on interviews with and observations of news publishers, foundations, and audience analytics firms that are currently playing key roles in the ongoing conversation surrounding audience engagement. The pursuit of a shared definition of audience engagement is a question of agency: how much power do its advocates have to change what news production looks like? And how powerful are the structures obstructing their efforts? This project will attempt to answer these questions. In doing so, it will reveal how and why news industry stakeholders are attempting to change what form journalism takes, how its produced, and where the audience fits into that process.

Project lead: Jacob L. Nelson