Business as Usual: How Journalism’s Professional Logics Continue to Shape News Organization Policies Around Social Media Audiences

ABSTRACT

This study explores the prevailing institutional logics within Western news outlets to examine the prevalent values and concerns around the social media news audience amid a time of great upheaval in the news industry. Through a qualitative content analysis of social media guidelines from mainstream news outlets the study finds that professional logics continue to dominate news organization goals with the journalists positioned as the professionals in charge of the news and their audiences still limited to largely passive consumer roles at best allowed to comment, like and share only after publication. While the findings show that the news organizations view their audiences as a consumer rather than collaborator, the study notes the emergence of two audience-oriented values which suggest that news organizations have already begun to respond to the ways in which their audiences are being reshaped by digital and social media even if those new technologies have not—yet—reshaped the organization’s relationship with the audience. Overall, the study shows that professional logics continue to inform news organization attitudes in relation to their audiences as organizations continue to privilege the role of the news organization as the professional in charge of the content.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media policies
• news organizations
• professional logics
• institutional logics
• control
• audience
• engagement

Introduction

Journalists' work practices on social media platforms have been the focus of much research over the past decade amid the emergence of innovative technologies which, theoretically at least, enable new participatory interactions between news organizations and their audiences. While studies have consistently shown that journalists themselves do not use social media to engage with their audiences there has been little corresponding work in relation to news organizations’ attitudes around journalist/audience interactions. This study uses an institutional logics approach in an effort to help build an understanding around organizational priorities towards journalist-audience interactions on social media at a time when the industry is in some decline and such innovation has been positioned by some as a potential solution to the industry’s woes (Nelson 2021b).

The emergence of social media in the mid-to-late 2000s opened up significant opportunities for new participatory interactions between journalists and their audiences, interactions which were physically impossible prior to the arrival of social media. However, research over the past decade has persistently shown that journalists ignore such opportunities to engage with their audiences and instead use social media to converse primarily with other journalists, a pattern of behaviour that is often linked to homophily, where like gathers with like; and normalization, where new technologies are most often used to reinforce already-existing practices (see Singer 2005; Fincham 2019; Hanusch and Nölleke 2019; Mourão 2015). While research into journalists’ practice on social media is relatively well-advanced, due in no small part to journalists’ rapid adoption of social media and the public nature of their exchanges, research at the organizational level is comparatively sparse. The study is an attempt to add to our knowledge of organizational priorities around the news audience by exploring the prevailing institutional logics within news organizations in the liberal Western media systems in relation to participatory work practices. The author does this by carrying out a qualitative content analysis on social media policies, organizational texts which are a well-documented way to interrogate organizational prerogatives and priorities. This is not to say that individual journalists’ practices are necessarily linked to their news organization’s policies, indeed the research shows that most journalists ignore them (Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck 2014), but more that such policies play a key role in articulating an organization’s culture and influence the “way we do things here” in the newsroom (Breed 1955; Vaast and Kaganer 2013; Barkho 2021; Opgenhaffen and d’Haenens 2015).

Institutional logics are “socially constructed, historical pattern of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton and Ocasio 1999, 804) and an institutional logics approach offers researchers a way to understand the oftentimes overlapping and conflicting cultures within organizations (Friedland and Alford 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). Previous studies have identified professional, commercial, managerial, and technological logics as the most dominant within journalism and of these four, the professional and commercial are most prominent and are also the most likely to be seen in conflict as news outlets daily negotiate multiple domains to fulfil their obligations to both the market and the public (Lischka 2020). Accordingly, journalism is well practised, if not always skilful, in negotiating commercial and professional logics and has long compartmentalized uneasy bedfellows like advertising (commercial) and news (professional) in separate offices, if not separate buildings. That same uneasy tension exists in relation to the news audience which, while considered commercially valuable, is typically kept away from the places where news decisions are made and viewed as a passive consumer of professionally-produced information with professional journalism norms like objectivity often cited as a rationale for the need to maintain a distance between journalist and audience (Ananny 2014; Deuze, Bruns, and Neuberger 2007; Belair-Gagnon and Revers 2018; Lischka 2020; Lowrey 2018). This study asks if commercial and professional logics continue to inform news organizations’ principles regarding the newer social media audiences and to do so, the author used an institutional logics approach in carrying out a qualitative content analysis of social media guidelines from a sample of Western news organizations. While content analysis of editorial policies (see Barkho 2021) is a standard research technique, analysis of the content of social media policies is relatively new as there were few such policies in the early days of Twitter and Facebook as news organizations declined to specifically address social media with The New York Times famously claiming their journalists didn’t need any formal direction at all (Davis 2011). Since then, driven in part by several high-profile social media controversies news organizations including The New York Times have begun to create quite detailed documents (Adornato and Lysak 2017) and these texts are helpful in shedding light on organizations’ concerns around social media news audiences, although availability is somewhat limited as we will see in the Methods section. The main question in this study is to ask if the social media audience is still viewed in terms of professional logics or whether we can identify the emergence of newer logics. To explore this question, this study focuses on policies from mainstream news organizations in the broadly similar media systems of Ireland, Canada, the UK, and US, (Hallin and Mancini 2004) which while imperfect and somewhat limited in scope (Ryfe 2016) are similar enough to help researchers in identifying any developing shared set of logics in respect to news audiences.

This paper ultimately argues that professional logics are still most prominent in news organizations’ approach to their social media audiences as the news organizations are consistently situated as the ultimate news authority, with the audience generally portrayed as a traditional potential eyewitness or consumer rather than potential participant or collaborator in news work. However, the study also identifies newer audience-oriented values or themes which show that the news organizations do acknowledge that the audience has been changed by the emergence of digital and social media even as the organization’s relationship with the audience has not. The literature on news audiences and audience construction is reviewed first along with a discussion around current studies into journalist/audience social media interactions and existing studies of social media policies in Western news organizations before moving on to the theoretical framework of institutional logics. The methodological section is next and then the findings, discussion, and conclusion sections.

Literature Review

Audiences and Engagement

The audience has long played a subsidiary role in Western news organizations, viewed primarily as passive recipients of the professional content produced by the professional journalist; an abstract, imaginary concept, “newsmen’s fantasies”, with any knowledge of the news audience filtered back through market research or audience metrics, or the erstwhile letters to the editor, rather than direct knowledge or awareness (de Sola Pool and Shulman 1959, 145; Nelson 2021a). When surveyed about their imagined audiences, journalists reported soliciting feedback from peers or supervisors, not the people who paid for their product, and research has consistently shown that journalists overwhelmingly seek approval and validation from other journalists, rather than the people they say they seek to serve, and while readers could sometimes see their own thoughts and ideas in print, those letters still had to be approved by the editorial gatekeepers, again privileging the role of the professional journalist (Ananny 2014; Bossio 2017; Heinonen 2011; Heise et al. 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; White 1950). The rise of social media and its networked “always-on” (Hermida 2010, 298) platforms in the mid to late 2000s created much optimism about the potential for greater journalist/audience engagement and the prospects for pluralization and democratization that could result from agonistic audiences converging online in collaborative and equitable forms of storytelling (Heinonen 2011; Jenkins 2006; McCosker 2014; Pavlik 2000; Robinson 2011; Sumpter 2000).

However, the promise of such participatory practices and greater pluralization has largely remained unrealized with journalists adapting “slowly, if at all”, to innovative engagement practices with social media interactions typically observed only in the professional or commercial spheres such as traditional news-gathering or the business of increasing traffic (Borger et al. 2013, 127; Quandt 2018). Engaged journalism is most frequently understood as “types of participatory culture and online interactivity that go beyond users’ consumption of news” (Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019, 558) but academic studies have repeatedly shown that while journalists have been quick to adopt social media, they are more likely to use it in ways that ward off any audience incursions on their role, rather than inviting them in, with audience participation allowed only after the news is produced, echoing Hermida’s observation (2011b, 189), that “deep down, most journalists do not view the user as an active participant in the news” and spend “little time thinking about the people they intended to reach” (Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton 2012; Lawrence, Radcliffe, and Schmidt 2018; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Nelson 2021a, 16; Vergeer 2015). While there are notable exceptions to this (see García de Torres and Hermida 2017, on then-NPR social media editor Andy Carvin and his ground-breaking work in social journalism) the audience is not offered any “meaningful agency” in news selection as journalists hold on to key stages of the news work and view the news audience as something that could detract from their core role of control over content (Hermida 2011a, 21). Overall, studies show journalists continue to perceive their audience as passive consumers and display a “lingering” and “persistent” resistance to innovation with engagement efforts restricted to post-publication activities such as comments, likes or shares, all of which reinforces the role conception that journalists, “acting in their normative roles, ought to wield gatekeeping control over news content on behalf of society” (Ananny 2014; Belair-Gagnon, Lewis, and Agur 2020; Harmer and Southern 2020; Lewis 2012, 845; Schmidt and Lawrence 2020, 533).

While the literature around journalists and their audiences is well developed there is less research around organizational priorities and the social media policies provide a useful lens for this enquiry as they point to concerns that might otherwise be inaccessible. This is a timely enquiry as such policies have only recently started to become available given that news organizations originally asked only that journalists demonstrate “common sense” (Davis 2011) and emerging research has already explored the wider organizational concerns around social media (see Ananny 2014; Barkho 2021; Bloom, Cleary, and North 2015; Duffy and Knight 2019; Ihlebæk and Larsson 2018; Lee 2018; Opgenhaffen and d’Haenens 2015; Sacco and Bossio 2017; Vaast and Kaganer 2013). While not specifically focused on audience-related norms; Ananny’s (2014) inquiry into press autonomy and Duffy and Knight’s (2019) work on boundary-setting are of interest here as they both reported that news organizations were maintaining legacy practices in relation to their news audiences. This paper focuses specifically on news audience guidance in the social media policies and asks if the professional logics still prevail in relation to the news audience or if newer or even negotiated logics are developing in response to the new opportunities provided by social media.

Institutional Logics

Institutional logics were first introduced by Alford and Friedland (1985) as a way of describing the conflicting and overlapping practices and beliefs within modern Western institutions and has since been used to explore and better understand the inter-relationships between individuals, organizations, and society and how organizations work to determine accepted and acceptable goals (Friedland and Alford 1991; Scott 2013; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012; Thornton and Ocasio 2008). Researchers generally point to four types of institutional logics within journalism: professional, which considers the professional role conception; commercial, which is oriented towards business concerns; managerial, which is concerned with structures, process and operations; and technological, which is oriented towards the use of technology (Lischka 2020). The professional and commercial logics are considered most dominant in journalism, for reasons of public service and market concerns, and this study focuses only on professional logics as the central question is about the professional role conception of journalism in relation to the news audience.

Professional Logics

Professional logics largely situate the journalist as a neutral and objective gatekeeper tasked with maintaining professional control over content, and journalism’s role in the collection, production, and dissemination of information can be viewed as objective or activist; interpreter or watchdog; conceptions which place it in the fourth estate ideal where it is considered a vital, if unofficial, part of the public sphere along with the legislative, judiciary, and executive (Lischka 2020). These are important roles for a profession that lacks the formal credentialing systems of medicine or law and given that journalism derives much of its legitimacy and status from its professional role conception any incursion by outsiders would be expected to create conflict (Ananny 2014; Lewis 2012). This paper seeks to establish if professional news logics inform news organizations’ attitudes towards the social media audience or if the policies signal newer logics emerging in response to the impact of digital and social technologies. Again, this is not to say that the behaviour of journalists is tied to their organizations’ guidance but more that the policies will help identify the prevailing ideologies within the organizations themselves. This paper thus draws from the institutional logics approach to ask the following research question.

Research Question

Are professional logics most prominent within news organizations in relation to the social media news audience or can we identify the emergence of newer logics?

Methodology

Data

To answer this research question, the author collected publicly available social media guidelines from national media organizations in the four countries of the North Atlantic media systems (see Table 1). Borrowing from Ananny’s (2014) the organizations selected for this paper had to fit the following three criteria:

• (1). A major news organization in their respective country

• (2). Publicly available social media policies

• (3). Date range between 2009 and 2019 to better reveal patterns or changes over time

Table 1. Name and country of mainstream news outlet in alphabetical order along with year of last update and abbreviations when used.

Associated Press (AP)	US	2013
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)	UK	2015
BuzzFeed (BuzzFeed)	US	2019
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)	Canada	2017
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)	US	2017
The Globe and Mail (Globe and Mail)	Canada	2017
Daily Express and Daily Star (Northern Shell)	UK	2018
National Public Radio (NPR)	US	2019
The New York Times (NYT)	US	2017
Reuters (Reuters)	UK	2018
Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ)	Ireland	2013
SKY News (SKY)	UK	2015

To find the policies, the author made enquiries to the relevant news organizations, searched news organization websites, and used Google searches for phrases like “social media policies”, “social media guidelines”, “journalists”, and "journalism", a search which returned a total of 12 sets of guidelines from the four countries; one from Ireland (state broadcaster RTÉ); two from Canada (CBC and The Globe and Mail); four from the UK (BBC, Northern Shell group; Reuters, SKY News); and five from the US (AP, BuzzFeed, ESPN, NPR, The New York Times.) To ensure that other researchers could access the same data, the policies had to be publicly available to be included and while this obviously limited the number of usable policies, as some news organizations do not make their policies public, the author does not consider the sample size a substantial limitation as this data set is similar in size to those used in other published studies and news organizations are known to mimic each other’s organizational routines (Ananny 2014; Adornato and Lysak 2017; Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck 2014). The 12 news organizations are all considered industry leaders in their home countries and there is a reasonable amount of diversity in the types of outlet with four state broadcasters; (RTÉ, CBC, BBC, and NPR); one commercial broadcaster (SKY News); one center-right tabloid group (The Northern Shell group with the Daily Star and Daily Express); two center-left broadsheets (The New York Times and The Globe And Mail); two wire agencies (Reuters and AP); one sports news site (ESPN) and finally, the digital-only BuzzFeed. The 12 policies surveyed ranged in size from one-page documents (The Globe and Mail) to lengthy detailed guidelines (NPR) and were issued between 2009 and 2019.

As stated earlier, these countries were chosen as they comprise Hallin and Mancini’s Liberal/North Atlantic media system which provides a strong starting point for this type of research as there are enough similarities in these countries’ media and political systems to help explore typical governing principles or logics in Western news organizations.

The study uses Krippendorf’s six-question criteria (1980) for sampling:

• (1). Which data are analyzed? Social media policies from national news organizations

• (2). How are the data defined? Documents designed to guide journalists on audience interactions on social media

• (3). From what population are the data drawn? The four countries of the North Atlantic media system: Ireland, Canada, the US, and UK.

• (4). What is the relevant context? Institutional logics in journalism

• (5). What are the boundaries of the analysis? Publicly available social media guidelines from mainstream news organizations over a 10-year span

• (6). What is to be measured? Evidence of institutional logics

The guidelines were collected in mid-2020 and the links are available in the section labelled data at the end.

Analysis

The question about institutional logics is an important one and this paper seeks to answer this through textual analysis of the organizations’ formal policies. Following Ananny (2014) the study uses a grounded theory “open coding” approach to identify themes and potential categories in the policies rather than imposing categories at the start. Drawing from Strauss and Corbin (1998) the author started with open coding at sentence level on any text that contained language related to audience interactions and then used axial coding to create a new set of themes that combined categories and finally selected only those which were saturated with textual evidence from at least three different policies to arrive at the overall prevailing logic. The text blocks were required to be at least sentence-size but no bigger than a paragraph and centred on the same theme or, where themes overlapped, separated into individual text blocks (Vaast and Kaganer 2013). When completed, the open, axial, and selective coding resulted in the categorization of three distinct themes; audience as traditional construction; audience as new community; and audience as potential threat.

The next section discusses the findings which initially suggested newer or negotiated logics but ultimately situated the audience in the professional logics. While the newer audience-oriented themes conveyed a sense of newer logics, they instead served to show that news organizations do understand that digital and social media have changed their audience even though they have not so far changed the organization’s relationship with the audience. Overall, the professional logics are seen as dominant with the audiences portrayed as consumers or potential sources allowed contribute only after the news is published and never invited into the spaces where news is made. The three themes are discussed below.

Findings

Audience as Traditional Construct

The policies all begin with a statement encouraging journalists to use social media in ways that further journalism’s professional role, with social media typically described as an “important area for news gathering and reporting” (SKY News 2015); an essential journalism tool for “connecting readers with reporting in a timely manner” (The Globe and Mail 2017); and a new way of “giving our listeners and readers valuable insights into the day’s news” (NPR 2019). As can be seen in the excerpts above, the policies locate the social media audiences as the traditionally passive recipient and the journalist as professional news worker and expert. The audience is typically described as “readers, listeners and viewers” (NYT 2017); “those who consume our content … ” (AP 2013); people who might be able to share content “to help us do our jobs” (BBC 2019) or people who want to “post comments on our websites” (Northern Shell 2018). In this way the policies convey a sense of the audience as a passive consumer; a breaking-news source or a social media user allowed comment only after the professionally produced news is published. Audience interactions are considered primarily as vehicles to “find useful information and newsworthy content and get our journalism to new audiences … gather news and sharing links to published work” (AP 2013), and journalists are advised to initiate interactions only in the context of news gathering or breaking news, such as “putting out a call for witnesses and other sources” (Northern Shell, 2018); “locating sources … for angles and insights” (Reuters, 2018) or “contacting people who have captured photos or video that AP might want to authenticate and use” (AP 2013). Overall, journalists are positioned as the expert and “influential voices on social media” (ESPN 2017); the professionals “encouraged to answer questions about their areas of coverage” (Northern Shell 2018) “or subjects in which they have expertise or interest” (BuzzFeed 2019) and if the audience initiates any interactions the journalists are advised to respond, “time permitting” (AP 2013). In sum, social media is conveyed as an “important area for newsgathering and reporting” (SKY News 2015); an essential journalism tool for “connecting readers with reporting in a timely manner” (The Globe and Mail 2017); and a way of “giving our listeners and readers valuable insights” (NPR 2019) with the journalist situated in their traditional role of expert and the audience as the passive recipient.

Audience as New Community

While the policies present the social audience as a traditional construct in respect to the professional role of journalists and news-gathering they also suggest that the audience is being reshaped by social media in ways that merit organizational concerns both for and about the audience. For example, several of the news organizations discuss how social media communities have their own etiquette and customs, and how journalists should observe them as can be seen below.

So, we respect their cultures and treat those we encounter online with the same courtesy and understanding as anyone we deal with in the offline world. We do not impose ourselves on such sites. We are guests and behave as such (NPR 2019)

and “(We) avoid giving the impression that RTÉ is imposing itself on a community of users and its space, operate a ‘when in Rome’ approach and are sensitive to existing user customs and conventions” (RTÉ 2013). Journalists should consider the user’s “intended audience” and “whether vastly increasing that audience reveals an important story—or just shames or embarrasses a random person. We should not automatically or even typically comply with a poster’s original intention—but we should be aware of it” (BuzzFeed 2019). Journalists are advised that much of the audience content on social media “is generally for the benefit of (the poster’s) friends and acquaintances” (RTÉ 2013), and to consider the social media audience as “ostensibly” rather than intentionally public (BuzzFeed 2019) with a balance needed “between appropriate use of material that an individual may have unthinkingly put in the public domain and respect for their privacy” (RTÉ 2013) and particular care suggested around sensitive subjects such as “sexual assault, LGBT issues, and racial bias” (BuzzFeed 2019). The safety of the social media audience is paramount with journalists advised to adopt “a sensitive and thoughtful approach” (NPR 2019) to “never ask members of the public to put themselves in danger” (Northern Shell 2018) and to avoid “multiple approaches to the same person” (BBC 2015). While the policies all reinforce the idea that social media is for news gathering, journalists are advised to treat the social media audience with care and make sure that “we do not use information gathered from our interactions on such sites … without identifying ourselves to those involved and seeking their permission to be quoted or cited” (NPR 2019); “we should not simply lift quotes, photos or video” (AP 2013) or “publish photographs where the subjects have a reasonable expectation of privacy” (Northern Shell 2018) although BuzzFeed allows that such rules can be broken “in breaking news situations” (BuzzFeed 2019).

Audience as Potential Threat

While the news organizations acknowledge that “talking to people is crucial to getting the most out of social media” (BBC 2015) and that “most feedback is constructive” (Northern Shell 2018) the guidelines consistently identify journalists as vulnerable to attacks (NPR 2019) and increasingly “the targets of abuse on Twitter and other platforms”. The policies all warn that social media communities are “places where some people’s darker sides emerge” (NPR 2019); with “abusive, bigoted, obscene and/or racist comments” (AP 2013); and “people who think that rape memes are a good way to respond to a story they don’t like” (NYT 2017). Journalists are advised to model “civil discourse” (CBC 2017); “avoid flame wars” (Reuters 2018); “avoid engaging in arguments” (SKY News 2015); and “avoid protracted back-and-forth exchanges with angry people that become less constructive with each new round” (Northern Shell 2018). The news organizations list very specific processes to be followed in cases of abuse; “consulting with supervisors” (CBC 2017); “flagging” abusive individuals (AP 2013) or reporting incidents to their line manager (RTÉ). Journalists are asked to evaluate whether the tone is threatening or merely unpleasant and tailor their actions accordingly with “blocking” and similar “aggressive” actions to be used only in “cases of real offence, abuse, or spamming” (BBC 2019) and when such actions do not “unduly restrict access to our journalism” (CBC 2017). For example,

If the message is unpleasant but not threatening and is about work you’ve done, try responding with something along these lines—“I appreciate constructive feedback. Can you tell me more about what concerned you?” If the person responds constructively, you’ve got a conversation going. If the person continues to be unpleasant or becomes abusive, do not continue the conversation (NPR 2019)

and

If the criticism is especially aggressive or inconsiderate, it’s probably best to refrain from responding. We also support the right of our journalists to mute or block people on social media who are threatening or abusive. But please avoid muting or blocking people for mere criticism of you or your reporting. (NYT 2017)

Given that “issues happen and can escalate quickly online … there is an established process in place for managing potential issues and risks to our brand and reputation” (CBC 2017).

Discussion

An institutional logics approach offers a lens into the main concerns and priorities within news organizations and this theoretical framework has allowed me to demonstrate that the news audience is still considered in ways that enhance professional logics and highlights the audience’s passive role in news gathering even as social and digital media technologies continue to weaken journalism’s longstanding control over content. In the first theme, audience as a traditional construct, the social media audience is consistently portrayed as a consumer or recipient of the journalists’ professional content and offered opportunities to contribute only as a potential news source in breaking news or to comment only after publication. Where the policies do address journalist-initiated interactions it is typically to further professional news work such as soliciting quotes or eyewitness content and not newer practices such as potentially soliciting input from the audience on what issues the news organizations should cover. There is no advice on building communities or initiating or developing audience relationships and the advice from AP to respond (time permitting) is more an example of the kind of polite one-off thank-you replies noted by Parmelee and Deeley (2017) rather than a model of meaningful interaction. The second theme, audience as new community, suggested an institutional awareness of public/private tensions within the audience and thus an awareness of newer participatory practices, but this theme was more rooted in concerns around reputation management, indicating that these newer values reflect brand concerns relating more to the commercial side of the house rather than journalism practice. This theme also highlights an issue which emerges time and time again in newsrooms and classrooms around reasonable expectations of privacy on social media platforms which are only “ostensibly” public (BuzzFeed 2019). The news organizations who address this, and not all do, position journalism as a somewhat intrusive act and that mainstream media attention can result in a far larger audience than the social audience user may intend but again this enhances professional logics as it locates the journalist in the gatekeeping role. The third theme, audience as a potential threat, reflects quite real concerns about online hostility towards professional journalists and does show that news organizations have already established quite clear procedures in response to the well-documented instances of online abuse towards journalists, particularly female and people of colour, even if they are not encouraging newer participatory practices online.

The first finding, audience as a traditional construct, confirmed the prevalence and dominance of professional logics within the news organizations in relation to the social media news audience but the second two findings initially suggested the development of newer or more negotiated logics. In “the audience as new community”, the themes reveal organizational awareness of the conflicting tensions around privacy on public platforms but close analysis revealed that the main concern for the news organizations was that the journalist consider their agency to amplify (however unintentionally) the audience’s post which again enhances professional logics. The recommendations to avoid social media “pile-ons”, where multiple journalists contact the same user, signals awareness of the differing ideas of visibility and “publicness” on social media but ultimately privileges organizational concern about brand reputation (Bradshaw 2019) which again points back to professional logics. Additionally, the guidelines that advise journalists to observe social community norms can also be seen in this context as they again place the journalist in charge of information; “visiting” these communities for reporting and news gathering purposes; rather than seeking to build partnerships or collaboration. The organizational efforts to keep the audience at bay can also be seen in the context—or even “context collapse” as Marwick and Boyd (2010) termed it—of the boundary struggles taking place in journalism as news organizations attempt to ward off any further collapse of their professional role (Broersma and Graham 2016; Domingo et al. 2008; Gans 1979; Wahl-Jorgensen 2015). The emergence of social media created some expectations that audiences could take on new roles such as “produsers” (half producer, half user) in converged or hybrid media systems but the findings show that such practices have not so far been adopted by news organizations who instead “exhibit” or perform aspects of participatory social media culture only when it serves news gathering goals—and thus professional logics, (Broersma and Graham 2016; Bruns 2018, 2; Chadwick 2017; Bentivegna and Marchetti 2018, 287; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Singer 2005). Overall, the policies affirm the passive, non-collaborative role of the audience in news gathering, and show that professional logics continue to inform news organization priorities with the journalist situated as an expert and the audience viewed as either a passive consumer or potentially hostile user, given space only after the news is published. Journalists are not encouraged to use social media to invite the audience into the spaces where news is decided and there are no recommendations on how best to form relationships with the audience or initiate dialogue even as proximity to the audience is considered a strategic imperative (Nelson 2018). The findings indicate that professional logics continue to shape news organizations’ relationships with their readers, listeners, and viewers even as their ability to maintain professional control of production and dissemination of information is challenged, if not weakened, daily. However, while the findings make it clear that the news organizations do not encourage audience interactions; there are legitimate and pressing concerns about journalists’ visibility and vulnerability on social spaces where platform owners do little or nothing to protect users from hate speech and abuse. As Lewis and Molyneux pointed out in their 10-year review (2018), the “all but baked-in implicit optimism” that marked the earlier incarnation of social media, particularly Twitter, has been overtaken by the increasingly toxic reality of an environment where many journalists, particularly female and minority, have been harassed off social media, “and any meaningful interactions with the audience on these platforms in their current format may be impossible” (Lewis and Molyneux 2018).

Conclusion

One of the central themes in the findings relates to the organizational awareness that the news audience has been transformed by the arrival of social and digital media even as professional logics continue to prevail around journalist/audience interactions. The early identification of the audience-oriented themes or values had initially suggested the development of newer or more negotiated audience -related logics but closer analysis revealed these new themes conformed to existing professional logics and bracketed both professional and commercial logics in the stated concerns about threats to the individual safety and brand reputation. There was no evidence of innovation in participatory work practices in the policies with the audience limited to a passive consumer role rather than potential collaborator, consulted only for traditional news reasons such as letters to the editor, or on-the-spot quotes, and excluded from spaces where the news agenda is discussed and decided.

Researchers have suggested that engagement, even in a limited form, should be a key normative goal for news organizations. In fact US news consumers have already signalled approval of journalists using social media to interact with the audience, particularly on substantive matters such as policy issues, yet there is no evidence here of any change in priorities around the audience (Jones 2019; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Vergeer 2015). However, any efforts at involving the audience in the selection and production of news and other such activities would clearly challenge journalism's status and legitimacy and organizational resistance to such efforts may be linked to what Nelson (2018) termed the “currency” issue where news organizations will need to see a return on investment before changing practice. The study shows that news organizations still regard journalism as a product under their professional control even though the networked nature of social media and the ensuing quantity, if not quality, of information and potential actors, creates quite significant challenges to that status (Hedman 2015; Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Yiping et al. 2020). In some ways these questions of control over content mirror the contradiction at the heart of a profession that serves both private and public service goals and that historically reconciled those contradictions by “compartmentalizing” conflicting areas into separate departments but it is unclear how news organizations can compartmentalize their way through maintaining control over content given the “shock to the system” that is digital and social media; the resultant weakened control, and the resultant weakened value of information as a commodity (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Lischka 2020; Molyneux and Mourão 2019; Peer and Ksiazek 2011, 45).

As stated earlier, this paper makes no claim about the ability of such guidelines to influence the journalists’ behaviour as the effects of such policies are indirect at best (Boeyink 1994, 894) but it is known that the behaviour of individual journalists often mirrors organizational policies such as the documents studied here. In addition, the well-documented tendency of news outlets to imitate each other on organizational policy indicates that the findings here can be considered representative of the wider structural and organizational attitudes and priorities within news organizations in the liberal Western tradition (Ananny 2014, 949; Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018; Nelson 2018). However, it is important to note that this study is specific to general reporting across major mainstream news organizations, and it is likely that this research would have led to different outcomes in different contexts such as participatory or hyperlocal reportage in smaller news outlets, digital-first outlets, or indeed in other cultural conditions. The study is limited by its focus on publicly available policies, and it also does not address whether journalists adhere to the guidelines which would require substantial field work and ethnography and was beyond the range of this study.

In closing, the study shows that professional logics still play a major role in news organizations and that social media culture is appropriated when it reinforces journalists’ professional role as the people in charge. While the study notes the emergence of newer audience-oriented values, these are not seen to be located in professional logics which suggests that audience awareness is not considered a priority in the professional practice of journalism. While the study makes clear that news organizations are not (yet) inviting the audience to collaborate, the lack of any clear transactional value for publishers, the hidden costs of journalists’ unpaid labour on social media and the threats posed by a hostile audience (Nelson 2018; Lewis and Molyneux 2018; Robinson 2011) may well contribute to the continued prevalence of professional logics in journalism practice. While the study highlights that news organizations view the audience as largely passive or possibly problematic, this finding also points to the need for dedicated training in newsrooms and classrooms around social media audiences especially given the very valid fears about increasing online hostility towards journalists.

Data

Associated Press. 2013. “Social Media Guidelines for AP Employees.” Accessed December 2019. https://www.ap.org/assets/documents/social-media-guidelines_tcm28-9832.pdf

BBC. 2015. “Group Social Media Guidance.” Accessed December 2019. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/26_03_15_bbc_news_group_social_media_guidance.pdf

BuzzFeed. 2019. “The BuzzFeed News Standards and Ethics Guide.” Accessed December 29, 2019 from BuzzFeed website. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shani/the-buzzfeed-editorial-standards-and-ethics-guide#.ko3gl8lmY

CBC. 2017. “Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP) – CBC/Radio-Canada.” Accessed September 29, 2019 from Canadian Broadcasting Company website. https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/vision/governance/journalistic-standards-and-practices

ESPN. 2017. “Social Media Guidelines.” Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.espnfrontrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NOV-2-RECEIVED-UPDATED-SOCIAL-MEDIA-GUIDELINES-10.221.pdf

Northern Shell. 2017. “Guidelines for UK Star and Express Titles.” Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.ipso.co.uk/media/1659/northern-and-shell-annual-statement-2017-for-publication.pdf

NPR. 2019. “NPR Journalism Standards.” Accessed September 29, 2019 from NPR website. https://www.npr.org/ethics

Reuters. 2018. “Reporting from the Internet and Using Social Media.” Handbook of Journalism. Accessed September 29, 2019. handbook.reuters.com/?title = Reporting_From_the_Internet_And_Using_Social_Media

RTÉ. 2013. “RTÉ Social Media Guidelines.” Accessed September 29, 2019. https://static.rasset.ie/documents/about/social-media-guidelines-2013.pdf

Sky News. 2015. “Sky News Editorial Guidelines.” Accessed September 29, 2019 from Sky News. https://news.sky.com/docs/sky_news_editorial_guidelines.pdf

The Globe and Mail. 2017. “Editorial Code of Conduct.” Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/files/editorial/EditorialCodeOfConduct.pdf

The New York Times. 2017. “The Times Issues Social Media Guidelines for the Newsroom.” The New York Times. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines.html?

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article and also Prof. Jane Suiter of DCU for her wise counsel throughout.

Disclosure Statement

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