Catch, Engage, Retain: Audience-Oriented Journalistic Role Performance in Canada

ABSTRACT

To understand audience-oriented journalistic role performance, one must understand how journalists conceptualize and cater to their audience. Giving the audience what it wants is a complex endeavor, with varying goals and hybridized end results, in newsrooms with fewer resources serving increasingly polarized audiences. Through a triangulation of data—content analysis at the subdimension level to examine the range and hybridity of audience-oriented journalistic product presenting the civic, service and infotainment roles; a survey to identify journalists’ attitudes toward the use of audience data and social media in their work; and interviews with journalists that revealed how their journalistic practice and audience perceptions were impacted by quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative data (comments/social media interactions)—this research fills a gap in understanding about the connection between journalists, their audiences, and audience data when it comes to journalistic role performance. Findings show that in Canada the infotainment role is a significant part of reporting, but entertaining often comes with a goal of educating, as does service journalism. There are no “bad” journalistic roles, but there are a lot of journalists trying to figure out which ones might best catch, engage, and retain an ever-shrinking news audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic role performance
• audience data
• journalism
• social media
• journalists
• infotainment
• metrics
• analytics

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Canadian data were not included in the first wave of the JRP project.

2 One hundred and thirteen of these surveys met the requirements to be included in the international data set for gap analysis, which had specific requirements based on a minimum number of surveys per newsroom, results of which have been previously published (Blanchett et al. 2022a).

3 Participants are not always linked to organization(s) in order to adhere to deidentification agreements. REB# 2019-479 Toronto Metropolitan University.

4 Huffington Post closed its newsrooms in Canada on March 9, 2021.

5 Acknowledging some broadcast or other stories may not have been labelled as wire service content.

6 The codebook can be accessed at https://www.journalisticperformance.org/appendices. There were 11 coders in total, two professors and nine students. Based on Krippendorff’s alpha (Ka), the final intercoder reliability score in Canada was 0.73, indicating substantial agreement (Krippendorff 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mitacs, The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, Journalism Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, Centre d’études sur les médias, and Toronto Metropolitan University.