Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience editors from different media systems around the world. Three major findings emerge: First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audienceoriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study it primarily through quantifiable data, is limiting. In response, we develop a heuristic theory of audience engagement with news comprising four dimensions-the technicalbehavioural, emotional, normative and spatiotemporal-and explicate these in terms of different relations of engagement between human-to-self, human-to-human, human-to-content, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. Paradoxically, this model comprises a specific theory of audience engagement while simultaneously making visible that constructing a theory of audience engagement is an impossible task. The article concludes by articulating methodological premises, which future empirical research on audience engagement should consider.

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The prominence of "fake news" today has sparked an open challenge to the legitimacy of traditional news media. As a result, a series of independent data-driven organisations are emerging to fact-check legacy news media as well as other news sources. This study examines how these actors advocate and adopt journalistic practice and the perceived impact they have on news journalism. We draw our data from in-depth interviews with 14 practitioners working in three organisations-Code for Africa, Open Up and Africa Check-that are currently leading major data and fact-checking operations in sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings show that while these non-journalistic actors are at the periphery of news media as institutions, their operations, activities and goals are at the heart of journalistic discourse. In their data strategies, they emerge as data advocates and activists seeking to reformulate fact-checking processes within news media.