In an Open Relationship: Platformization of Relations Between News Practitioners and Their Audiences

ABSTRACT

Past studies conceived of journalists-audience relations as largely dyadic, highlighting the interaction between the two sides. The current study argues that such a conceptualization should now be modified to fit today’s media environment, where these interactions obtain on social media platforms. Through a process of platformization—the subjugation of news production to social media logic—these platforms are reshaping journalists’ and social-media editors’ conceptions regarding audience, its role in news production, and its expectations vis-à-vis the newsroom. These beliefs translate into news professionals’ everyday practices as concerns contact with audiences, and ultimately influence news production. Based on interviews with 18 social-media editors and 24 journalists, the study demonstrates how each of the above relational aspects has been modified in line with social media’s economic, governmental and infrastructural logic. It also shows how, due to their diverging goals, news organizations and journalists have come to cultivate a semi-autonomous relationship with audience members, thus introducing new tensions into the newsroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience-journalist relationship
• inclusion expectations
• media logic
• platformization
• social media
• journalists-editors' relations

Much like journalistic work itself, the relations between audience and journalists transformed with the introduction of interactive digital media. Specifically, when on their platforms, media organizations offered tools that allow communication with audiences, the interactions between the sides became more direct, reciprocal, and visible (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Loosen, Reimer, and Hölig 2020; Wilhelm, Stehle, and Detel 2020). The latest stage in this development has been marked by the rise of social-media platforms that offer new communication channels for journalists and their audiences, thereby dispensing with the need for audience-participation mechanisms provided by institutional media (Wilhelm, Stehle, and Detel 2020; Loosen, Reimer, and Hölig 2020). Thus, for the first time, a substantial part of journalist-audience relations play out on non-proprietary territories governed by social-media logic, rather than within the domains of news organizations (Molyneux and Mourão 2017; van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018).

It is argued here that the tension between the different media logics that was previously documented in other aspects of journalistic work (Tandoc Jr and Maitra 2017; Toff and Mathews 2021; Tsuriel et al. 2019; Van Es and Poell 2020) is now also evident in the relations between news organizations and audiences. We explore this change analytically, using a theoretical framework anchored in the concept of platformization (Nieborg and Poell 2018). This model maps the dimensions through which the accommodation of cultural products to the logic of platforms occurs. Using this framework allows us to delimit the role technology plays in mediating this relation. Many of the existing models describe journalist-audience relations as dyadic (e.g., Loosen and Schmidt 2012), as a kind of dialog between the two sides. We contend, however, that such a conceptualization overlooks the intermediary position of social media—a technological layer interposed between news organizations and audience members (Christin 2020; van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). The study highlights platformization as an organizing principle for exploring the relation between news organization and their audiences.

The Relations Between Journalists and Their Audiences

Journalists form ideas and beliefs about their audience, about its expectations of journalism, and about its role in news creation (Wilhelm, Stehle, and Detel 2020; Schmidt and Loosen 2015, 260). These beliefs are part of what Loosen and Schmidt (2012) termed as “inclusion expectations,” which in turn, frame journalists’ inclusion performances: “all practices and mediating features that stimulate, articulate and aggregate communication between journalists and their audience” (Schmidt and Loosen 2015, 260). Together, inclusion expectations and performances dictate the nature of journalist-audience relation.

Journalists’ inclusion expectations and practices have changed over time. Only a few decades ago, journalists distanced themselves from audience, mostly because they feared getting to know their audience's preferences would erode their professional and editorial independence (Gans 1979; Meijer and Kormelink 2018). In their professional work, journalists relied mostly on their instincts and tastes, leaving audience to play but a negligible role. However, over the last quarter of a century, news industry has faced a series of changes, foremost of them the growing popularity of commercial TV, the digitalization of journalism, and the introduction of audience engagement matrices. As a result, “reckoning with audiences and users of news changed from a threat to a condition for the survival of journalism” (Costera Meijer 2020, 2327). Commercial necessity, technological possibilities, and a growing need for alternative, more collaborative and reciprocal models of journalism—combined, these factors have rendered audience more present in the newsroom (Frischlich, Boberg, and Quandt 2019).

Perhaps the most prominent hallmark of this gradual transformation has been the rise of the concept of audience engagement (Nelson 2018; Wenzel and Nelson 2020). According to Nelson (2018), the belief underlying the numerous interpretations of this notion is that “journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place” (Nelson 2018, 528). This approach gained sway in the news room (Xia et al. 2020; Napoli 2011), whether journalists embraced it or remained committed to the idea that it harms the integrity and independence of their work (Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019).

Scholarly writing did not lag behind: “[T]he story of digital capabilities facilitating the potential for audience inclusion in news production, particularly amid a decade-long diffusion of social media … is one of the most well-developed lines of journalism studies research” (Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019, 560). Scholars who subscribe to this approach have suggested that the rise of dialogical modes of communication have enabled a more direct interaction with audiences, characterized by reciprocity and visibility (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Loosen, Reimer, and Hölig 2020; Wilhelm, Stehle, and Detel 2020). The idea—it was contended—that audience is not only to be “measured” but could potentially be included in the conversation about news and news production (Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019) may restore audience trust in journalism (Wenzel and Nelson 2020).

Importantly, this strand of scholarship conceptualizes audience-journalist relations as dyadic, such that all interactions, expectations and performances are influenced solely by the other side. For instance, both Loosen and Schmidt (2012) and Wilhelm, Stehle, and Detel (2020) offer models based on a dialog between a journalist and his or her audience. The current study argues that such an approach overlooks a “silent partner”—the technology that mediates this relationship. Journalists’ understanding and perceptions of their audience were always mediated and shaped by the technological tools at their disposal (Bourdon and Méadel 2014). These dynamics are even more pronounced in today’s newsroom, owing to two related factors. First, as already mentioned, audience engagement matrices have become widely used and visible to all (Tandoc and Vos 2015). Second, with the development of digital technology, most of these interactions have extended to social-media platforms (Heise et al. 2014). These changes, as Molyneux and Mourão (2017) argue, clearly mark a precedent:

Journalists have historically provided the spaces in which journalist–audience interactions occur, but now are meeting their audiences (sometimes reluctantly) in spaces created and managed by others. Silicon Valley perhaps did not build social media platforms with journalists in mind, and journalists are now the ones who must continually adapt to the affordances provided by the platform and its algorithms. (249)

This set of issues is explored in depth in the current study, which is guided by the question, How do inclusion expectations and practices change and adapt to the reality of social media? At the center of the inquiry is the mind’s eye of a journalist, as it were: Whether and how has social-media logic penetrated and affected journalists’ positions? In what follows, we argue that, much like other aspects of news production, journalist-audience relations have been reshaped to fit social-media logic and have undergone platformization (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Van Es and Poell 2020).

Platform Dependency and Platformization

A sizable proportion of news consumption occurs today on social media. Social-media platforms and Facebook in particular “[deliver] news stories to audiences and audiences to news media organizations” (Meese and Hurcombe 2021, 2369)—a circumstance that has fostered news organizations’ dependency on such technological platforms and undermined their economic sustainability (Nielsen and Ganter 2018). This dependency is evident in the many changes introduced to journalistic practices, all aiming to incorporate social media as part of news production routines (Toff and Mathews 2021; Van Es and Poell 2020; Carlson 2018; Molyneux and McGregor 2021). Together, these developments constitute a process of platformization, whereby social systems sacrifice their own logic to accommodate platform logic (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). The literature on news production processes presents numerous examples attesting to this dynamic, and the corpus keeps growing rapidly all the time (e.g., Meese and Hurcombe 2021; Tandoc Jr and Maitra 2017; Van Es and Poell 2020). The current study investigates whether the same patterns are also evident in journalist-audience relations.

Scholars have observed that platformization takes place when “economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms” penetrate cultural industries (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 4276). The infrastructural logic of social-media platforms has been defined as “the sociotechnical features of platforms [that] allow and prompt end-users to afford particular types of activities, connections, and knowledge” (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 4280). This dimension of platformization is perhaps the most explored in the context of news production and journalists-audience relationship. Loosen and Schmidt (2012), for example, contend that “[t]he particular features of audience participation rely on technological means, the shape of which is usually outside of journalists’ control but rather provided by IT professionals who develop the software tools” (p.874). Accordingly, affordances provided by social media structure the information presented and dictate the parameters through which news organizations conceptualize their audiences (Xia et al. 2020). On this definition, news engagement as the sum of Likes, Shares, and Comments, in and of itself, is an artifact of the technological infrastructure, which “limits [journalists’] understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience” (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc Jr. 2018, 448).

The encroachment of platforms’ economic logic into news organizations is evident in the move from a market with two players in which news organizations and audience interacted directly, to a market with multiple players—or as Nieborg and Poell (2018) term it, a “multisided” market—where news competes with all types of content for audiences’ attention. In such a market, platforms constitute a technological stratum with news organizations and audience members on either side (Christin 2020; van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). A multisided market of this kind also renders the once dyadic connection between a journalist and his or her audience an essentially open relationship. When news organizations present participatory tools as part of their platforms, two-sided communication is inherent to the medium. However, when social media platforms “host” communication, the directionality of such interactions is no longer clear-cut. Put differently, social media allow many-to-many communication, in which all types of content vie for audience attention and engagement.

Platforms’ governmental logic invades news production through algorithmic-curation processes, which have replaced the mass communication model in which news organization solely selected and circulated the news (Carlson 2018). Social-media platforms can now control the visibility of news stories and the size of the audience they will reach. Thus, they determine the traffic a news organization will garner, as well as its revenues (Nielsen and Ganter 2018). As a result, news organizations have been compelled to align the presentation of their social-media content with algorithmic preferences (Tandoc Jr and Maitra 2017). Yet, algorithmic curation dictates not only the reach of a news organization, but also with whom news practitioners can communicate. A precondition for any communication or relations on social media is the visibility of the content over which they occur (a news post, news organization or journalist’s page/account). Therefore, by making news content visible, algorithmic curation increases the likelihood of communication between journalists and their audiences. It follows that journalists are dependent on a third party (social media) to communicate with and get to know their audiences.

In light of the above, we pose the following question regarding practitioners’ perceptions of audience, its role in news production and its expectations, as well as their understanding of their own jobs and of organizational routines:

RQ1: Are all these aspects of inclusion expectations and performances influenced by the economic, governmental, and infrastructural dimensions of the logic of social-media platforms?

From Relations with a Journalist to Relations with an Organization

Literature hitherto has addressed the relationship between journalists and audiences. However, alongside journalists, news organizations have formal accounts on social media that are managed by their social-media editors (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc Jr. 2018). The role of social-media editor emerged during the past decade with a view of maximizing users’ engagement (Lischka 2021), sometimes by overriding traditional journalistic criteria (Lischka 2021). Indeed, in managing social-media accounts, social-media editors consider mostly the economic and market needs of the news organizations (Tsuriel et al. 2019). Most journalists, on the other hand, have their own, personal accounts, which they manage themselves (Hedman 2017), not necessarily guided by such pragmatic concerns (Molyneux, Holton, and Lewis 2018).

This suggests that, when accounting for relations over social media, one should acknowledge the complexity of a structure in which interactions take place between audience members, on the one hand, and journalists alongside news organizations, on the other. What was once a centralized and integrated relationship between a news organization and its audiences has, in the conditions of the multisided market fostered by social-media platforms, become fragmented, disparate and discontinuous. Thus, fragmentation, in and of itself, can be regarded as a sign of platformization: it serves as a means through which the economic logic of social media redefines the relations between audience and organizations. The question that arises in this context is whether, in this highly fragmented arena, the relations of journalists and organizations with audience can be subsumed under a single theoretical framework. Although the possibility of different relational models has so far not been considered by research, some studies have suggested that journalists and social-media editors might occupy different professional niches on social media. The professional role assigned to social-media editors centers on “cultivating brand loyalty by encouraging user interactions with the organization over social media and creating traffic to the organization’s website” (Tsuriel et al. 2019, 6)—and accordingly, their modus operandi is subject to editorial and managerial scrutiny (Sacco and Bossio 2017). Journalists, on the other hand, often use social media to promote their own interests and advantages, e.g., as a self-branding tool and a digital business card (Hedman 2017; Molyneux, Holton, and Lewis 2018).

Such a positional divergence entails that, when connecting with audiences via social media, social-media editors and journalists have different objectives, which are the driving force behind inclusion performances.

Therefore, we ask:

RQ2: Do the inclusion expectations and performances of social-media editors and journalists align or do they diverge?

Method

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 social-media editors and 24 journalists. Interviewees were contacted directly by the authors after ensuring they had a professional account at least on one of the two most popular platforms in Israel: Facebook and Twitter. To account for a broad range of journalists’ perceptions of social media, we made a point of selecting 17 journalists with a high social media profile, 5 who are active but have a smaller audience, and 2 who do have an account, but with a very low volume.

Editors and journalists work for 21 news organizations, which represent the majority of Israeli media, namely: seven print newspapers that also operate online via their websites; eight news websites that are digital only (though one of them is part of a large media group); four TV stations that use websites as well (three broadcast, of which one is public and two are private; one cable); one magazine; and one radio station (the two latter organizations operate online).¹ The breakdown information on interviewees and the number of their followers and “friends” on social media are presented in Appendix A.

Interviews were conducted by the authors during June and July 2020. Due to Covid-19, the interviews were conducted via phone, Skype or Zoom. Each interview lasted around half an hour; the interviewees were not remunerated for their time. The interview guide included 33 questions. We targeted their use of social media and media matrices, their perceptions of audience engagement (Likes, Comments etc.), and their beliefs about the audiences’ view of engagement.

We analyzed the interviews using thematic content analysis, that will “often focus on what a phenomenon, event or social interaction ‘looks like’ to the individual of interest” (Rivas 2012, 367). This is a fair description of our interviews, that asked journalists and social-media editors about their experiences and beliefs regarding their daily work. Following Rivas (2012), we used open codes to analyze the interviews according to the platformization framework and inclusive expectations. Iteratively we tightened the list of open codes to broader categories and then to themes, according to which we will present the findings: Image of the audience was manifested through categories like the goal to increase their audience and its effect on treating comments, differentiating the audiences along platforms, and dividing “high” and “low” quality audience. Audience expectations included categories such as journalists’ and editors’ motivations to engagement, audience's use of social media as a commodity, and how the audience perceive journalism and its role. Audience function included categories like traffic as value, how journalists perceive audience's engagement and importance of engagement. Lastly, job perception and organizational routines included categories such as journalists’ dependency on audience and the use of analytics, job description and work procedures, importance of engagement, journalists’ self-positioning; and editors’ focus on the algorithms.

Findings

Let us quote Heise et al. (2014) to reiterate that inclusion expectations “consist of journalistic role perceptions, images of the audience and its place and function within journalistic practices, as well as strategic considerations of media organizations” (413). In the following section, we demonstrate how social-media economic, governmental and infrastructural logic percolated to each of these domains. All these aspects will be studied from the perspective of both journalists and social-media editors. However, since in the analysis, the social-media editors’ and journalists’ views of audience image turned out to be similar, we omit the section devoted to that topic from the comparison and opt for a holistic representation (see Table 1).

Table 1. Journalists and editors’ inclusion beliefs and practices, as shaped by each of the dimensions of platformization.

Dimension of platformization		Theme	Economy: multisided market	Governance: algorithmic curation	Infrastructure: meta-data and affordances
Relational dimension
Perceptions regarding audience	Journalists & Editors	An opportunity to branch out and reach new, bigger, and more diversified audiences; but at the same time, audiences are less attentive to news. This leads to competition for attention and to negative engagement.	●	●	●
		Audience is defined by the platform. Platforms provide specific affordances that attract different audiences.			●
Beliefs about what audience expect of journalists	Journalists	Dyadic communication: A conversation between journalists and audience members. Journalists are motivated by a need to demonstrate accessibility to other users (visibility of communication).	●		●
	Editors	Networked communication: users talk among themselves through news; communication is not directed to the editors, and is thus immaterial.	●		●
Beliefs about audience role in news production	Journalists	Inclusive reciprocal relations which are shaped by social-media affordances. The level of collaboration is determined the platform affordances.			●
	Editors	News distributor, creates traffic.	●	●	●
Job perception and organization routines	Journalists	Self-branding, cultivate intimacy and authenticity. Detachment from organization (sometime at the expense of organizational goals).	●		●
		Internalized organizational pressures: engagement as an indication of a job well done. Reciprocity as a tool to create engagement (a minority).		● (a minority)	●
	Editors	Increase revenues. Traffic vs. engagement model. Use audience to win over the algorithm.		●	●

Image of Audience

Practitioners did not speak of audience; they spoke of audiences (Xia et al. 2020; Lewis and Molyneux 2018). Based on the clear distinction interviewees drew between Twitter and Facebook (and to a certain degree also Instagram), it transpires that, for them, audiences are defined and constructed by the platform they use. Seeing that platforms provide specific affordances (the infrastructure dimension), they attract different audiences. All agreed that Twitter is the place to be if you want to target the elite; it’s where you “have to be witty” [J1] and “sharp … [because] there, a high-school mentality determines who is part of the in-crowd and who is not” [J12]. This is due to its anonymity and shorter responses, according to J17. By contrast, Facebook was generally felt to be for “old people”: “You have to explain the joke” [J1]. At the same time, it was also seen as “a place where I can get audience support for the stories I want to tell … [by contrast] on Twitter you come as a know-it-all story-teller” [J12]. J24’s utterance attests to the affinity practitioners perceive between a platform and its audience. She closed her Twitter account claiming that she found no value in Twitter because

[t]he ‘star’ journalists on Twitter, they don’t follow anyone, just other journalists. So what makes you relevant? Is this just another venue to publish what you already said on another platform? They don’t really engage in a dialog with the public, just among themselves. In my view, this is a betrayal of the profession. Our role is to serve the public and work with the public, not to inflate our bubble, to be stars in our own eyes … You want to talk to other journalists? Go to the break room at work.

This quote vividly expresses that a platform’s infrastructure dictates practitioners’ image of the audience, which in turn translates to their expectations regarding communication. Therefore, practitioners’ preference for platforms seemed to emanate from their perception of audience’s role (as will be elaborated below). All social-media editors relied on Facebook, but journalists had favorites, depending on their idea of how inclusive audience should be (Costera Meijer 2020).

The second notable finding was that almost all participants saw social media as an opportunity to reach new audiences (Van Es and Poell 2020). This theme is anchored in the economic dimension of platformization: a move to a multisided market in which all types of content are presented to all users. Such a structure offers benefits since one is no longer “in the Ghetto of [NAME OF WEBSITE]; [there] I wrote for a small audience” [J5]. But being part of a multisided market also involves costs, since one deals with users who do not seek news intentionally, as in the case of news-organization platforms, in keeping with the two-sided model. For example, E2 said: “It allows us to reach audiences that did not download our app … today some people don’t want news on their mobile all the times. They want it as part of their Facebook scroll … rather than going to the app on purpose to get news—that’s not fun at all.” Such a set up creates stronger competition: “On Facebook, you don't have a captive audience, like on the 9 o’clock news. On Facebook, you are exposed to everything” [E3]. The full impact of platformization is manifested in J13’s hope that, one day, he would be able to open a WhatsApp or Telegram group for her audience members, since “this is the reader’s personal space … This means someone really wants to read your content. On Facebook, there is the algorithm, and you don’t get all of my content. But this [WhatsApp] is more valuable than any other platform.” Thus, in an endeavor to revert to a two-sided journalist-audience communication model that is not subject to the governmental logic of social media, J13 can't think of a solution other than switching to a different platform.

For some, the issue is fraught with even a bigger dilemma, as the possibility to reach new audiences, while enticing, opens the door to those users whom practitioners would have been happy to leave out. First, since some of the audience consume news as a sideline, they do not really read, let alone fully engage with an item: “A lot of times, when I post something, people will comment, ‘TL; DR [too long didn’t read] for us’ [requesting a summary of the item]. I ignore it. It’s laziness. If you are interested, read it” [J7]. The second kind of criticism was harsher, and some users who routinely comment were described as trolls (Frischlich, Boberg, and Quandt 2019). J6 cited Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, who had compared Twitter today to a tea break at Oxford in the sixties—but only to mock the idea: “Nice analogy, but there is one difference: in Oxford there were only Oxford people; street-sweepers from Camden were not admitted.” J17 acknowledged using social media meta-data (infrastructure dimension) to understand who the users that commented on his page actually are, so as to decide whether they are “worthy” of a response, and thereby ultimately “improve the level of the conversation.” Although trolling, and more generally negative engagement (Xia et al. 2020), is not a new phenomenon and could be traced back to comment threads on news websites, still, practitioners directly tied this behavior to the platforms’ affordances, and reported using platform affordances to fight it. Thus, for instance, E13:

This is a huge issue. The dialog with the audience didn’t exist; you had letters to the editor. But now with social media, you can do it … it’s a virus, a Corona of the mind; the ability to monitor everything; analytics; to get engagement from anyone – this is what social media are, and we need to find a vaccine … It is all binary: you either get a Like, or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if you will commit a rape or a murder. This makes our job very hard. As a journalist, the only leverage you have is social norms. When you don't have social norms, but only compliments and Likes, your criticism loses its bite. Because people aren’t looking for compelling arguments, they are only interested in your [political] alliance.

E13’s statement outlines the impact of social-media architecture: from establishing a dialog with the audience; to the price paid for the culture sustained by social-media logic; to the possible implications of this environment for the journalistic profession (Lewis and Molyneux 2018). All in all, this picture captures the interactions between the different dimensions of inclusion expectations. With the change of the audience image from news consumers who maintain a long-term relationship with news organizations to casual acquaintances who saunter in and out of social-media platforms, the other dimensions of practitioners’ inclusion expectations must needs be altered as well.

The Role of Audience in News Production, and Practitioners’ Perceptions of Audience Expectations

While journalists and social-media editors harbored a similar image of their audiences, their perception regarding audience role diverged dramatically.

Audience Expectations

In addition to fostering social visibility (infrastructure), the multisided market structure has created conditions under which audience members expect to be included, or so journalists believe. Thus, J7 said: “You respond politely. It’s part of the job today … Today we are easier to reach than our predecessors, who had no platform through which people could get in touch with them.” Even J19, who had very little interest in communication with audience members, mentioned that he had once hired what he called “a status minion” to respond to comments in his Twitter account, since “it’s a matter of good manners.” While communication with audience, in and of itself, is not a sign of platformization, the opinions cited above suggest that the considerations motivating such interactions do attest to this phenomenon. For example, J1 said he responds to audience “so other users will see I’m not being evasive” (J1); J5 said, “It is good to respond to trolls because other users see it and follow suit.” Thus, at the heart of these interactions are the visibility and multisided structure of social media.

As opposed to journalists, social-media editors hide behind an organizational façade: they have no social persona of their own. As such and unlike journalists, who regard communication with their followers as dyadic, social-media editors see it as networked, whereby the majority of audience conversations over news are directed at other users, rather than at them. Speaking about audience use of affordances, J13 described it as personal messages to herself, using the first-person pronoun: “Like means ‘I saw what you wrote’ … Share means ‘I think you wrote something important I want to share with my friends.’” In striking contrast, E16 claimed: “I don't read comments, I mostly look at traffic. I don’t remember myself or any other social-media editor responding to comments. Why do people comment? ‘Commento ergo sum.’” These quotes highlight the key distinctions between the two groups: In a multisided market (economic dimension), social-media editors believe that audience members use news as a social commodity to establish their position within their network (Lewis and Molyneux 2018). Accordingly, they do not perceive affordances as a reciprocal apparatus—only one social-media editor reported communicating with audiences.

Audience Function

For journalists, both audience role and audience expectations are the function of audience image. The attitudes expressed by interviewees invoke the traditional poles between which journalists’ perceptions of their audience oscillate (Gans 1979; Costera Meijer 2020), albeit updated in accordance to social-media affordances.² The majority of journalists embraced the opportunities brought by interactive technologies, welcomed the reach afforded by social media, and championed reciprocity in relations with their audiences (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Heise et al. 2014).³ Some, however, perceived discourse on social media as deconstructive and rejected the idea that audience can contribute to news production. They were disillusioned with social media and feared its “corruptive” influences. Thus, J8 spoke of “the [outrageous] abuse of Likes and Comments.”

Social-media editors do not share journalists’ dyadic approach or their perception of audience role. They see audience as traffic generators: “When you [user] share a post, it brings more engagement, Likes, and comments; and it will bring new people as well … Isn’t it amazing!?” [E10]. Such perception of audience role in news production is anchored in all the three dimensions of platformization: In the multisided configuration of the market (economic dimension), news has been transformed into a visible social commodity of which users avail themselves to establish their position vis-à-vis other users (Lewis and Molyneux 2018). This is the foundation on which the additional layers are built: The infrastructure of social media facilitates the “monetary system” of attention economy for both users and social-media editors (Tandoc and Vos 2015; Carlson 2018), marking some content as “worthy” based on audience engagement. Lastly, with respect to the governance dimension, algorithmic curation reinforces the importance of engagement as the key determinant in reaching audiences.

Job Perception and Organizational Routines

The last section of the analysis relates to organizational routines and practices, and the rationale behind them as derived from the interviews. It is worth noting that the reliance on social media affordances for interacting with audiences attests, in its own right, to the platformization of routines. This dependence is so great that a big daily news organization had decided to remove the comment section from their website since “all the conversations are on social media anyway, so what’s the point in users’ comments?” [J17]

Journalists tend to see themselves as “lone riders” [J17], a result of what J1 termed a “precarious” state of the news industry, which does not afford journalists any job security (Molyneux, Lewis, and Holton 2019). By communicating with the audience via social media they seek to secure their own position, rather than that of their news organizations (Hedman 2017). J5, for instance, described social media as “your own display window,” a view echoed by J1: “The platform [i.e., the news organization you belong to] is sometimes too small to contain all the things you want to do … If you want to keep in touch with your audience, you need to establish your presence and tweet stuff that is not news; your persona, or character, needs to be versatile, multifaceted.” J1’s words allude to two themes. First, social media allow journalists to overtop the limits imposed by their news organizations and push agendas they cannot promote in their more official capacity. Some even mention in their social media bios that the opinions they express are their own, not representing the media organization they work for. Second, social media demand that journalists project their private persona: “Facebook is a more flexible medium. The writing is more intimate … people want to connect to you, identify with you; it [social media] make you more accessible” [J13]. In consideration of attention (economic dimension), social media require journalists to be more personal in their communication with audience (Molyneux, Holton, and Lewis 2018).

Journalists’ working routines are yet another indication of their weaker attachment to their organizations. This is most evident in the “war over traffic”: Journalists do not see traffic as a goal in its own right, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of social-media editors. “I have an internecine war on my hands,” E3 deplored. “Journalists in their assets post a full item and not a link. They don’t care how many visits the site gets. They only care about their own exposure … that viewers will know them.”

Indeed, many interviewees noted that, for a journalist, the number of followers is an issue of paramount importance: “It’s a competition over who’s is bigger” [J6]. It is the number of followers that reflects a journalist’s rank in an internal popularity contest, be it real or imagined (Costera Meijer 2020).⁴ But this criterion is also a token of internalized organizational pressures, forasmuch as engagement (infrastructure), in the social-media definition of this term, has come to be regarded as an indication of a job well done (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc Jr. 2018; Lischka 2021). According to J16’s own admission, “[w]hen they started with the dashboards, I asked my friends and family to click on my stories. I even opened a WhatsApp group called ‘Get me traffic!’.” In this way, the infrastructure and logic of social media were put to use in solving the very problem they had created.

Getting engagement could be achieved by “sacrificing” full text, or opening Facebook groups. Several journalists were aware of algorithmic curation, and took advantage of their interactions with the audience to “outsmart” it. For instance, J16 said: “I make a point of replying [to comments], even though it takes a lot of energy.” It transpired, however, that her effort was not motivated by an idea of reciprocal relations; “[it’s] because I know Facebook likes the action,” she admitted—meaning, the algorithm will promote her post. J5 described even a more sophisticated stratagem: He had once asked his followers to comment on a post using terms like “mazel tov” or “congratulations,” in order to “trick” the algorithm and increase circulation. “They were willing to invest their time in promoting this post,” he added. “It’s so much better than sponsoring a post.” It may be inferred from these examples that reciprocity on users’ part sometimes reflects the grip of the governance dimension over journalistic practices.

Although the designated role of social-media editors is to oversee news organizations’ connection with the audience (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc Jr. 2018), interviewees did not dwell on such communicative aspects. Instead, they portrayed audience as liaisons, and its role as transforming engagement into revenues and exposure (economic dimension) (Costera Meijer 2020). For instance, E4 stated: “My goal is to understand which channel of distribution creates the biggest impact for the website and how I can redistribute resources more efficiently.” He went on to describe the different ways to achieve these objectives using terms from the marketing world like “bounce rate” and “stickiness” (Tsuriel et al. 2019).

Indeed, although today social-media editors are in a position to better understand their audience, only rarely does this potentiality translate into action, since instead of imagining their audience, social-media editors are preoccupied with the algorithm (governance dimension).⁵ This is not to say that the audience is no longer social-media editors’ endgame, but that they focus on the algorithm, which governs their modus operandi and everyday work (Tandoc Jr and Maitra 2017). For instance, E3 explained that the frequency of his posts is algorithmically determined and that he would not edit a post even if he found a mistake because “it will harm the algorithm [performance].” E11 relayed that a social-media editor will often add a sentence, calling users to tag their friends, dubbing such items as “tagging posts.” However, in spite of the overt appeal for participation, this practice does not foster communication or connection with the audience. Instead, it prompts users to participate with the view of “gaining points” with the algorithm. With regard to the governance dimension, social-media editors’ aim may be seen as eliciting users’ communication and engagement, thereby reaching new audiences and impacting the algorithm.

In thus tackling the algorithm, social-media editors choose one of two strategies, engagement-driven or traffic-driven, which they believe to be incompatible. E12 explained that, to get traffic for a post, social-media editors must leave out interesting information, thus “luring” users to click on the link. This means that users are unable to engage with the post before getting more information, but also that, after reading it, they will probably not go back. It follows that editorial choices between traffic and engagement could be an important factor that shapes news organizations’ relations with their audiences. Yet, considerations that drive these choices are centered not on the audience, but rather on Facebook’s algorithm. The algorithm promotes content that creates engagement since the platform’s interest is to keep users on Facebook. As E2 perspicaciously put it, news organizations need to “find the fine line” between promoting posts and obtaining traffic.

The decision as to which approach to adopt—based on engagement or traffic—depends on the news organization's business model. The pattern we found resembles a U-curve, where organizations that are either the strongest or the weakest in terms of their market share tend to be engagement-driven, while those toward the middle are traffic-driven. E1, who manages the social media of one of the biggest news organizations in Israel, explained that he wasn’t concerned about traffic, since his website already has it in abundance. Nevertheless, he still depends on social media to “create a buzz” and promote the brand. Weaker organizations behave similarly, albeit for an opposite reason: Their aim is to be noticed because, to quote E, “without Facebook, I can't exist.” E14 likewise stated: “We want as many people as possible to read us. We don't measure social-media convergence rate.”

As stated, traffic-driven organizations are positioned in the middle of the spectrum. E3, who works in a news organization that used to be very strong but has recently suffered cutbacks, described how their business model has changed:

The goal now is to bring traffic. It is a strategic move. In the past, we tried to build the brand through social media, and we were prepared to pay the price … All the traffic stayed on Facebook, but you reached more people. Today the directive is that everything must go back to our website, instead of letting Zuckerberg enjoy our assets.

Thus, an organization’s routines and work rationale are shaped primarily by the governance dimension of social media. However, since social media have now become an organization’s front, its channel for communication with audiences, any decision about the forms of such interactions is considered through the prism of algorithmic curation.⁶

To sum up, the interviews revealed a sharp discrepancy in the perceptions and uses of social-media affordances between social-media editors and journalists. Social-media editors direct their energies at achieving the business objectives of their organizations (economic dimension) and make use of social media to that end, even if this entails relinquishing some of their control (governmental dimension). Engagement with audiences becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In contrast, journalists’ conceptions are more in keeping with the ideas of reciprocal journalism.

The shift to the multisided market has fostered an environment in which news organizations and journalists no longer present a united front in communicating with the audience (Molyneux, Holton, and Lewis 2018); rather, they represent two different vertices in the audience-journalist-organizations relational triangle. This split attests to the fragmentation of the relations between news organizations and the audience.

Discussion and Conclusions

With the advent of the digital age, and especially of social media, the relations between news organizations and their audiences have been gradually transformed. In a not so remote past, journalists were not preoccupied with their audience and considered its involvement a threat to their own professional independence (Costera Meijer 2020). Today, journalists and news organizations are willingly using social media's affordances to get to know their audiences’ tastes and preferences, and shape the content they produce as well as their work practices accordingly (Xia et al. 2020; Nelson 2018; Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc Jr. 2018).

This study has investigated the perceptions of news practitioners regarding their communication and relationship with their audiences over social media. Social media are essentially a constellation of non-proprietary platforms that operate according to a logic of their own, and thereby undermine the independence of news organizations (Nielsen and Ganter 2018; Molyneux and McGregor 2021; Meijer and Kormelink 2018; van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). We assumed at the outset that social media interpose themselves between news organizations and their audiences, platformizing the relations between the two (Nieborg and Poell 2018).

Our findings demonstrate that relations which play out on social media are, to use a rather frivolous simile, akin to an open marriage, in that they are influenced by several stakeholders. These interactions are shaped by a constant presence of other users, as well as by the abstruse and hidden workings of the algorithm—and both these forces need to be contended with in analyzing their dynamics. The changes that have occurred in the media arena are anchored in all three dimensions of platformization and have given rise to a new set of agendas that govern newsrooms’ work practices (Meijer and Kormelink 2018; Lischka 2021).

The strong dependency journalism has developed on social-media platforms is evident in all aspects of the audience-newsroom relations, which are now subject to social-media logic (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). The distinctive feature of this dependency is universality, in the sense that it encompasses the relations between journalists and audiences, editors and audiences, and even between journalists and editors. However, each of these vectors is impacted in its own, distinct way.

Our findings show that the different organizational roles fulfilled by journalists and editors (Sacco and Bossio 2017) preclude a commonality of objectives when engaging with audiences. In keeping with previous research, we found a lack of uniformity in attitudes regarding audience involvement in news production: some embraced the idea, while others contested it (Costera Meijer 2020). However, for the most part, journalists aligned their work with the participatory principles (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014), resulting in a close and personal relation with their followers. This strong rapport has come to be taken so much for granted that journalists are now considered by their audience as service providers (Xia et al. 2020). Bossio and Holton (2019), for one, characterize this behavior as “relational labor, or practices and strategies that creative professionals have adopted to create stronger emotional and thus commercial relations with audiences” (5).

The use journalists make of their two main platforms, Facebook and Twitter, differs substantially. On Facebook, they distribute their work to the audience and communicate with it as well as with sources. By contrast, on Twitter they all but ignore their audience and communicate solely with other journalists and political elites—a practice that contributes to their branding and facilitates information gathering (Molyneux and Mourão 2017; Molyneux and McGregor 2021). Such a divergence is entrenched in the infrastructure dimension of platformization, namely, the construction of different audiences, whether real or imagined, through the different affordances of these platforms.

Social-media editors, on the other hand, have largely opted for the position of silent listeners, studying their audiences with the purpose of increasing revenues. To achieve their fiscal objectives, news organizations, irrespective of their size, have all adjusted their behavior to the imperatives of algorithmic curation (Tsuriel et al. 2019). Thus, the same editors who used to ignore marketing data, treating it as immaterial, are now hanging large screens in the news rooms and expect the figures displayed on them to affect journalists’ work (Meijer and Kormelink 2018). In spite of considerable frustration, social-media editors do not stop to reflect on the toll social media exact in terms of their relations with audiences. Neither do they seem to regret having left their platforms in favor of social media to communicate with audiences, or even having to resort to “tricks” to increase engagement. They seem to take it for granted that the rules on the playing ground could be inequitable, yet stepping down in protest is simply not an option.

Social-media editors’ relations with journalists have changed as well, and here, too, tension is palpable. To quote Molyneux, Lewis, and Holton (2019), due to the destabilization of the journalistic profession, “journalists’ personal interests come into conflict with organizational prerogatives” (838). The findings of the current research corroborate this trend: Journalists demonstrated little interest in organizational goals; the majority of interviewees in this group fit the model of “self-made journalists,” described by Molyneux, Lewis, and Holton (2019) as more “entrepreneurial and relational in spirit” (850). As already noted, this pattern could be partly ascribed to the harshness of the Israeli media market, which does not provide job security. All in all, journalists’ relations with both their audiences and their organizations have been altered under the mutual influence of relational labor and the lack of career-sustaining employment in the precarious Israeli job market. Crucially, the overlap of these two relational spheres is only partial.

Taken together, platformization processes shape all aspects of news production, from the content itself, through the organizational goal, to the perceived norms of the sides involved. More than ever, technological platforms empower the audience, and enable it to redefine news and recalibrate its relations with journalists. Future studies should ask whether the audience is aware of this new power and acts upon it.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ERC under grant number 680009.

Notes

1 Israel news market includes: 3 broadcast TV stations and 1 public TV station; 8 public radio stations and 12 local and 2 military-owned radio stations; 8 legacy media newspapers that also have websites; 2 major news websites, and 5 small niche news-websites.

2 For instance, the view of one journalist deviated from the majority concerning whether or not audience engagement figures should be taken into account when selecting what issues to cover: “Some journalists couldn’t care less about the issues they twit so passionately about, they only do it to get engagement” [J14].

3 For instance, two journalists had opened their own Facebook groups and described the experience as: “one of the most amazing things that have happened to me in my whole career … It feels good to get feedback, to hear what people think about your work, their ideas. It is a very fruitful dialogue that I can't get anywhere else” [J13].

4 Editor E5, on the other hand, gave no concern to the number of followers their page has, on the grounds that such matters “worry people that are not part of the industry; but [for the algorithm] it doesn't matter – not as it used to, anyway.”

5 It is important to note that, in keeping with Nieborg and Poell (2018), we found clear evidence of the effect of social media infrastructure on the transformation of the news product to a contingent commodity. An example is E3’s statement regarding the insight they gained through the use of analytics: Analyzing data they realized that the path users take when navigating the site displays a gender difference, whether or not they start their navigation in the home page. As a result, they changed the pictures in the home page, putting up images that appeal more to the gender group that visits the home page.

6 We didn't find any essential differences in this regard between news practitioners from different media (print newspapers, TV channels, and news websites). However, two nuanced observations were made. First, TV editors hire analysts whose job is to understand Facebook's algorithmic priorities and how to benefit from this knowledge. No other media go to such a length. Second, while the primary objective of all editors is to increase traffic, print newspapers' editors try to balance it out against editorial considerations. They negotiate their way between the click-bait type of content and content more akin to what is published in print or on websites.

Appendix A:

Journalists’ and editors’ breakdown

Journalists

Table

	Medium	# of followers/friends on Twitter and Facebook*
J1	TV	117K
J2	Newspaper	94K
J3	Newspaper	45K
J4	Website	38K
J5	Website	31K
J6	TV	25K
J7	TV	21K
J8	Newspaper	18K
J9	Website	12K
J10	Newspaper	10K
J11	Newspaper	9K
J12	Newspaper	6K*
J13	Newspaper	4.8K
J14	Website	4.3K
J15	Newspaper	4.1K
J16	Newspaper	4K
J17	Newspaper	3.5K
J18	Website	3K
J19	Newspaper	2.8K*
J20	TV	2.5K
J21	Newspaper	2K
J22	Newspaper	1.3K
J23	Newspaper	220*
J24	Website	*

*Facebook allows its users to hide their friends and followers, thus star indicates the minimal number of friends and followers. The actual number is much higher.

Editors

Table

	Medium	# of Twitter followers and Facebook likes
E1	Website	1300K
E2	TV	1100K
E3	TV	757K
E4	Newspaper	650K
E5	Newspaper	650K
E6	Newspaper	500K
E7	Newspaper	271K
E8	Newspaper	270K
E9	Newspaper	166K
E10	Website	122K
E11	TV	107K
E12	Newspaper	96K
E13	Website	77K
E14	Website	69K
E15	TV	59K
E16	Website	44K
E17	Radio	42K
E18	Website	4K