The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media: Exploring “Engagement” as Relationship-Building between Journalists and Citizens

ABSTRACT

Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive spaces. In addition, we analyze what kinds of engagement are happening in these spaces, and how citizens’ expectations are being articulated, in terms of journalist-audience relationship—an organic resultant of engagement. We found that journalists are taking on new kinds of roles in social spaces—often in the name of “engagement”—but that work is not always particularly interactive with citizens; rather, content is engaged with. In contrast, citizens look to journalists to play a number of roles that range from civic guide to therapist. Thus, relationship building happens sporadically. Furthermore, engagement level is dependent on the platform and its affordances. This research offers a continuum of social media engagement conceived as relationship building that can reconcile the disparities in how we define engagement, and suggests newsrooms appreciate the nuances via a series of recommendations.

KEYWORDS:

• News audience
• engagement
• relationships
• social media
• journalistic roles
• participatory journalism
• media trust

Disclosure Statement

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

ORCID

Yiping Xia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1483-2006

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The work of information “repairing” in scholarship typically refers to when a reporter goes rogue not following the codified rules and norms of the profession and other journalists quickly swoop in to “other” the wayward soul, assuring the populace that he or she is “different” than other reporters. The profession then is what is “repaired.” Here we are thinking of “repairing” as work that citizens can do in these social spaces, flipping the agency of repair and calling out the reporter as “other”—at least in terms of bad content.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John S. & James L. Knight Foundation [grant number MSN216188]; University of Wisconsin–Madison [grant number MSN216622].