“Engaged” Journalism: Studying the News Industry’s Changing Relationship with the Public

Wenzel, Andrea; Nelson, Jacob L.

doi:10.1080/17512786.2019.1585121

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Developing and maintaining a loyal audience appears to be essential both today and for journalism to have a future (Wenzel and Nelson, 2020). Within this landscape of abundant news offerings, loyal audiences provide sustained attention that translates into highly profitable measures of engagement, such as clicks, time spent and shares (Cherubini and Nielsen, 2016;Hansen and Goligoski, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Truly Engaging Audiences

Gajardo Leon

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This dissertation studies how journalism can meet audiences’ needs as citizens, from an audience perspective. From a traditional normative perspective, it is understood that if people do not consume news, democracy loses an informed basis for an engaged citizenry (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956). Consequently, the main democratic function of journalism is to inform citizens so that they can deliberate about the issues that matter and make sound decisions (Christians, et al., 2010; Schudson 2008; McNair, 2009). However, at the start of this dissertation, Chile presented strong contrasting cases of increased news consumption compared with the low level of civic engagement. This apparent contradiction between theory and practice prompted me to enquire more closely into the seemingly automatic relationship between journalism and democracy: how—in both theory and practice—does journalism’s democratic role of informing the citizenry relate to civic engagement? How does the audience experience journalism as truly engaging, and how do journalists feel they truly engage with their audiences? The results of this dissertation indicate that meeting the audience’s needs as citizens encompasses both the provision of information—a selection of topics, sources, and angles—as well as the communication of that information. This means that journalism’s democratic role might not only focus on the production and distribution of news stories, but also implies carrying out non-content-related but rather audience-related communication practices (cf. Dewey). With the above, this dissertation’s bottom-up standpoint led to rendering Dewey's postulates on the relationship between audiences, journalism, and democracy into concrete and empirical terms, not in opposition but rather in combination with Lippmann’s predominant informational view. Consequently, when studying the democratic framework of journalism from the perspective of the audience, the figure of the triangle may no longer seem adequate for schematising the relationship between citizens, journalism, and democracy. Instead, the findings of this study account for the emergence of the figure of a spiral; a dynamic of informational and communicational feedback between practitioners and their audience.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%