The Audience-Oriented Editor

Abstract

Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience editors from different media systems around the world. Three major findings emerge: First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

Keywords:

• journalism
• engagement
• audience
• social media
• analytics
• metrics
• digital journalism

Introduction

Web analytics and social media have opened new channels to re-discover the audience (Loosen and Schmidt 2012). The audience has been making its way into the newsroom by contributing to journalistic content, by distributing and sharing news, or simply by interacting with news websites, leaving their digital footprints that are then considered in editorial decisions (Tandoc and Vos 2016). As the debate about the paternalistic or reciprocal approaches to audiences (see Appelgren 2017; Borger, van Hoof, and Sanders 2016; Thomas 2016) continues, the relationship between journalism and the audience becomes quantified, and the presence of the audience in editorial decision-making processes continues to grow. However, while quantification of audience behavior is providing journalists with more clues about who the actual audiences are and what their preferences are, a large amount of data still needs to be processed and translated in the newsroom. Thus, news organizations have started to introduce new job titles in the newsroom that speak to what appears to be an emerging editorial role focused on navigating audience data and making sense of audience behavior.

The audience has long been considered, albeit in limited ways, in newsroom decisions. For example, many newsrooms around the world designate a public editor or an ombudsman, tasked with addressing readers’ complaints, channeling external criticism to the corresponding positions within the organization, and advocating for an ethical and professional journalistic practice (McKenna 1993; Meyers 2000). However, the emerging audience-oriented roles are conceptually different, as these new positions are primarily concerned with matching news content to the needs and wants of the audience. While the public editor or the ombudsman is tasked to react to traditionally qualitative audience feedback, engagement editors, social media editors, and analytics editors are expected to be more proactive, making sense of quantitative audience feedback to be able to predict audience preferences. More concretely, we conceptualize the audience-oriented editor as a newsworker primarily acting as an intermediary between audience data and the newsroom. This role is tasked with both informing the newsroom about audience engagement with the news and providing insight to the editorial team about how to make decisions about content in ways that may be received more favorably by the audience. With the introduction of web and social media analytics in news organizations, there is a need to pay attention to new newsroom roles employed to interpret and act on audience data. These roles, we argue, are fundamental as a mediating mechanism between metrics and the rest of the newsroom. Studying these additions to the editorial team provides a better understanding on how audience metrics are being deployed by newsrooms. While in this current study we focus on three specific positions as examples of the audience-oriented editor (i.e. engagement editors, social media editors, and analytics editors), we argue that intermediaries between audience data and the newsroom also exist in other newsrooms under different job titles. Still, we argue that, while different positions have different responsibilities, they are united in that they share the function of interpreting and acting on audience data.

Normative theories of journalism tend to problematize the balance between what van der Wurff and Schoenbach (2014) call the civic and citizen demands of news media. In other words, journalists are expected to keep a balance between what the audience needs to know and what the audience wants to know. While civic demands are usually informed by journalistic knowledge, citizen demands tend to be interpreted through the analysis of web analytics, which in turn affects the way journalists work (Tandoc and Thomas 2015). The tension between the “rhetorical invocation of the news audience” as both generative and quantifiable that Anderson (2011, 550) identifies appears to be intensifying as the role of audience quantification continues to grow in the newsroom. The question is how the institutionalization of these new audience-oriented roles affects the way metrics are translated into an understanding of the audience. The measurable audience is nothing but a construct unless data and metrics are acted upon. Whether this is a way for journalists to achieve the fragile balance between audiences’ needs and wants or a result of commercial pressure and the pursuit of customer loyalty, the ways in which news organizations conceptualize and includes the audience into news production keeps re-shaping the role of newsworkers.

Through in-depth interviews with audience-oriented journalists in different countries, this study aims to understand these emerging roles and how they articulate the audience in newsroom decisions. We argue that by introducing audience-oriented editors in the newsroom and increasingly focusing on audience quantified behavior, newsworkers risk decoupling journalism from its civic duty. If an engaged audience is understood only through metrics and analytics, then the civic foundations of journalism may only be measured through those metrics. The emergence of audience-oriented editors as key figures that interpret and act on analytics may be a sign that the vision of the quantified audience is already established in the newsroom and even gaining more relevance. Guided by the expanding literature on audience engagement and the emerging framework to understand journalistic roles, this paper seeks to understand how news organizations are redefining the notion of engagement and pursuing a better sense of their readers through the institutionalization of new audience-oriented roles.

Literature Review

From traditional conceptualizations of a passive audience, mass communication has since shifted to understanding the audience as increasingly active. This is particularly salient in the context of news consumption. The audience has always figured prominently in discussions about journalism. Normative discussions of journalistic roles point to different forms of journalists’ responsibility to the audience, such as disseminating accurate information or mobilizing people around an issue (Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976; Weaver and Cleveland Wilhoit 1996). News construction theories also identify the audience as a significant consideration in understanding journalistic processes. For example, gatekeeping theory refers to the audience as a social-institutional influence that affects news selection (Shoemaker and Vos 2009). While journalists traditionally knew little about the actual audience, studies have established that the way in which journalists imagined their audience affected how they did their work (Gans 1979; de Sola Pool and Shulman 1959). However, in an environment where new technologies often outpace professional practice, news organizations’ understanding of the audience becomes conceptually challenging (Napoli 2011).

The “people formerly known as the audience” have contributed much to how journalism is changing (Rosen 2006). No longer do journalists monopolize control over news production. Equipped with their portable information devices and logged into their social media accounts, news audiences can share to other audiences newsworthy events and pieces of information they come across first hand outside the control of traditional journalists (Hermida 2011). While Thomas (2016) argues that traditional journalistic paternalism has its merits, the transition to more active audiences favors participation against paternalism. Furthermore, the irruption of audiences’ input contributed to new forms of journalism, such as participatory journalism (Domingo et al. 2008), citizen journalism (Goode 2009), and reciprocal journalism (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014) with different degrees of success (Jönsson and Örnebring 2011; Karlsson et al. 2015). News audiences now also actively take part in news distribution, determining, to some extent, what news media output other audiences get to see, by sharing links to their networks (Ma, Lee, and Goh 2014) or acting as a re-distribution mechanism through social media (Belair-Gagnon 2015).

New audience feedback mechanisms, such as web analytics, have also strengthened audiences’ influence over journalists (Tandoc 2014). The vision of the audience by journalists is constrained by the qualitative and quantitative methods to gage audience engagement. The tensions between the visions of an empowered and a quantified audience (Anderson 2011) is shaped by the cultural, economic, and technological capacities news organizations provide to their journalists (Usher 2013). Newsrooms face the challenge of creating a balance between their editorial autonomy, while still acknowledging audience desires (Usher 2013). However, over the last few years, the prominence of audience analytics has been on the rise, and monitoring audience behavior has slowly been conceptualized as audience engagement. More comprehensive work needs to be done to understand how engagement functions as currency in the current journalistic landscape.

Audience Engagement

Audience engagement in itself is not a new journalistic aspiration. However, the understanding of how engagement manifests has also evolved. Journalists had traditionally sidelined audience feedback partly to protect their editorial autonomy (Gans 1979), and partly because they considered the forms of audience feedback they received as unreliable (Beam 1995). Letters were volunteered to the newsroom by a few readers (Schlesinger 1978). Readership surveys covered a small subset of the actual audience (Beam 1995). It was not until the digitization of news that journalists were confronted with new forms of audience feedback. Social media are a source of both qualitative comments from users and quantitative metrics such as number of comments, likes, and shares. Web analytics allow journalists to track, record, and quantify their audiences’ digital footprint. These forms of feedback reach journalists quickly, often in real-time. Therefore, compared with traditional forms of feedback, these new tools to track audience feedback are faster, more automatic, more inclusive, and more comprehensive (Lee and Tandoc 2017).

Journalists now have easy and immediate access to a wealth of information about what audiences do and say about news content (Napoli 2011) and journalists’ performance (Ferrer Conill 2017). Such availability of audience information has changed not only how journalists do their work, but also the range of work they need to do. News organizations find in audience measurement a way to gather and analyze audience information, focusing on factors rarely considered before, such as appreciation, recall, engagement, and behavior (Napoli 2011). To compete with a newer breed of news services (Carey and Elton 2010) journalists find themselves having to engage with an active audience. However, the understanding of audience engagement is still in flux. Traditionally, audience engagement was understood as civic engagement (Bennett 2008; Macedo 2005) or intensities of participation (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013). The normative values of journalism conceptualize engagement as a precondition to participation (Dahlgren 2009) or as “a dialogic flow” or “a two-way symmetrical communication between the audience and journalists” (Feighery 2011, 171).

However, as the quantification of audience behavior became a technological reality, the notion of audience engagement started to shift toward social media and web analytics (Anderson 2011). Informed by user data, civic engagement was quickly replaced by an understanding of engagement as both an emotional involvement of users (Jacques et al. 1995, as cited in O’Brien and Toms 2010) and a degree of interaction with a digital interface (Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman 1987). For online news, Ksiazek and colleagues (2016) propose that audience engagement is captured by metrics and key performance indicators of predefined user behavior. Social media interactions, exposure to the interface, time on page, perceived usability, endurability, novelty, and felt involvement (O’Brien and Toms 2010) are some of newsworkers’ operationalization of user engagement. As these forms of quantified engagement can be measured, they emerge as a form of audience currencies that are useful and appealing to news organizations (Nelson and Webster 2016). The evolution of journalists’ understanding of engagement has been one of the components facilitating new journalistic roles and positions that are oriented to cultivate and understand new forms of audience engagement. These roles are embedded in the newsroom with a diverse set of interactions between new and old journalistic roles (Singer et al. 2011). The formation of new journalistic roles is thus contingent upon changes in journalistic practice.

Journalistic Roles

Numerous studies have focused on journalistic roles, defined as “generalized expectations which journalists believe exist in society and among different stakeholders, which they see as normatively acceptable, and which influence their behavior on the job” (Donsbach 2008; 2605). Such definition looks at roles as the melding of (1) journalists’ perceptions of what is expected of them, (2) what journalists personally think is acceptable, and (3) the manifestations of such role in their actual behavior. Initial studies have examined what roles journalists conceive of, but recent studies have started exploring the link between journalists’ role conceptions and their actual behavior (Mellado and van Dalen 2013; Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2012).

However, scholarship on journalistic roles is marked by “a considerable variation in terminology” that potentially causes more confusion rather than clarifies what a role is and how it can be studied (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017, 116). For example, studies have referred to role conceptions (Weaver et al. 2007), role enactment (Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2012), role orientation (Hanusch and Tandoc 2017), and role performance (Mellado 2015), among others. Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) mapped out four categories of journalistic roles: normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated. The first two are at the level of role orientations, or “discursive constructions of the institutional values, attitudes, and beliefs with regards to the position of journalism in society and, consequently, to the communicative ideals journalists are embracing in their work” (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017, 123). Normative roles are imposed on journalists, while cognitive roles are based on journalists’ personal values and beliefs. Practiced and narrated roles are at the level of “role performance” which refers to “the roles of journalists as executed in practice, or as observed and narrated by the journalists” (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017, 124). Practiced roles are observed based on journalistic outputs, while narrated roles are based on what journalists say they do. Such distinction is important because what journalists say they do does not always match what they actually do. Furthermore, as journalistic outputs are often organizational products, they seldom bear the imprint of just one individual journalist (Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2012; Tandoc and Takahashi 2014). Normative roles, when internalized, affect cognitive roles (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017). Cognitive roles, when enacted, are expected to manifest in practiced roles. When journalists reflect on their practice, they refer to their narrated roles. Narrated roles can be normalized into new roles, or negotiated into cognitive roles (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017).

Such conceptual mapping is helpful particularly in understanding how journalism is changing with technology. Practices are evolving as technology introduces new routines in the newsroom. Such new routines create new job descriptions, increasingly more oriented to the audience, potentially changing normative expectations of journalists. How journalists make sense of these new routines and expectations can affect not only how they think of their own work, but also what they consider to be acceptable. In this period when journalists not only deal with data to inform their stories but also data about their audiences, new practices are emerging. The question, then, is how these new practices are influencing—if not changing—newsroom dynamics by slowly promoting new roles that link audience preferences and editorial decisions through their interpretation of audience data.

Audience-oriented Roles

Audience evolution (see Napoli 2011) along with technology-driven innovations allowed for gradual audience involvement in the news production process and the increasing quantification of audience behavior. This capacity to quantify audience behavior grants news organizations a deeper understanding of audiences. The easy access and the level of granularity of this information allow, if not lead, journalists and editors to incorporate the audience in their daily decisions. And while reliance on metrics and data only offers a partial representation of the audience, newsrooms are employing more audience-oriented roles to translate and interpret audience data. These emerging roles facilitate the incorporation of the measurable audience in newsroom operations as they give meaning to data that can be used to make editorial decisions. The importance of the audience for news organizations is not new, but the appearance of new audience-oriented positions—such as the engagement editor, the audience editor, and the social media editor—within editorial teams further symbolizes the institutionalization and normalization of audience-oriented approaches. Therefore, analyzing the impact of audience data on journalism requires understanding the new roles created in the newsroom tasked to make sense of these data. We need to pay attention not only to who they are and how they operate, but also to how they construct the audience and define audience behavior. If audience measurement per se, and not actual audience behavior, is what affects journalistic work (Ettema and Whitney 1994; de Sola Pool and Shulman 1959), the extent to which audience-orientation shapes newsroom decisions depends on how engagement is defined (and operationalized). Such definitions constitute the narrated roles of these audience-oriented journalists, which can be normalized into new roles in the newsroom. Therefore, this study proposes the following research questions:

RQ1: How do audience-oriented editors view their roles in relation to, or in the context of, traditional newsroom roles?

RQ2: How do audience-oriented editors define audience engagement?

Method

This study adopts a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews with newsworkers whose primary task is to make sense of audience data. Qualitative methodologies are particularly suited to address emerging phenomena that need an initial exploratory overview (Denzin and Lincoln 2011). In particular, in-depth interviews allow for deeper interrogation of informants, with the aim of understanding their perceptions and experiences (Remenyi 2011).

While attempting to locate journalists who could represent the audience-oriented editor, this study initially focused on “engagement editors,” a new job title that was increasingly gaining ground in newsrooms in the US. Thus, we first searched news organizations who had “engagement editors” or journalists who self-identified as such. As we started searching for this job title in different countries and languages, we realized that this job title is not yet universal, present only mostly in the US, the UK, and a few news organizations in Australia. However, we discovered that the role of making sense of audience data is present across media systems, albeit going by different nomenclatures. Therefore, we expanded our search and used the terms “engagement” and “audience” in sorting job titles across countries. This procedure yielded 22 potential candidates, of which eight agreed to do interviews. These journalists were all based in either the US or the UK and worked predominantly for large news organizations. Therefore, we surveyed other countries and searched for different possible nomenclature in different languages. We also corresponded with local journalists in different national contexts to ask about the potential variations of titles for this position in various countries. This procedure also pointed to the “social media editor” as performing the same audience-oriented tasks in newsrooms outside the US. Since our goal is to explore the emergence of audience-oriented roles, we conducted seven more interviews with social media editors and other journalists occupying audience-oriented positions in other countries.

Fifteen journalists were interviewed between April and August 2017. Table 1 summarizes the details of our participants. All names have been anonymized, and the names of their organizations have been omitted for purposes of confidentiality. To avoid giving away too much information, and considering these positions are relatively unique in each organization, we have given them the code NW (newsworker) and a numeral (e.g. 1). The codes are summarized in Table 1. All interviews were conducted using Skype or via telephone and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The recordings added up to 13 h and 31 min, with transcripts translating into about 245 pages of data.

Table 1 Interview participants

Code	Official Job Title	Gender	Country	News Org.
NW1	Engagement reporter	Female	US	Online only
NW2	Engagement editor	Male	US	Online only
NW3	Engagement editor	Female	US/Spain	Online only
NW4	Head of audience engagement	Male	US	Legacy
NW5	Managing editor audience engagement	Female	US/Latin America	Legacy
NW6	Head of audience	Male	US	Legacy
NW7	Director of audience	Female	UK	Legacy
NW8	Innovation and audience editor	Male	UK	Legacy
NW9	Sr. Social strategy and UGC editor	Female	US	Legacy
NW10	Social media lead	Male	Qatar	Legacy
NW11	Head of social campaigns	Male	Poland	Legacy
NW12	Opinion and engagement reporter	Male	Philippines	Legacy
NW13	Digital and social media editor	Male	Kenya	Legacy
NW14	Head of social media	Female	Spain	Legacy
NW15	Web and social media editor	Female	Sweden	Legacy

This study uses thematic analysis to analyze the interview data, following the approach proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006). The first phase of the analysis, familiarization with the data, consisted of reducing the transcriptions and textual documents into a series of 3–4 page summaries. These summaries were created in reflection of the interview guide, covering the main overarching themes, while identifying the most relevant data provided by the informants.

After the initial coding, the special formatting of the data allowed for faster analysis, giving way for an identification of patterns emerging from the data. This induces an initial data reduction that allows for a more focused coding. The intention behind the focused coding is to identify recurring ideas and larger underlying themes that connect codes and categories.

Findings

This section is organized based on our main research questions. First, we address how audience-oriented editors define what they do in the newsroom, focusing on emerging routines and roles. Our sample is comprised of engagement editors, social media editors, and audience editors, and while they all are audience-oriented their daily practice is still diverse. The focus is placed on their normative views on how journalism should relate to the audience. Second, we look into how the informants define engagement. How they define engagement brings to the fore the type of data they use to construct and represent the audience in the newsroom. Their understanding of the audience, we also found, is not uniform.

Routines and Roles

Evolving roles

Following the appearance of social media editors, new audience oriented titles, such as audience editors and engagement editors, are emerging in many newsrooms in the US. Similar roles with different names have emerged in newsrooms in other countries, such as community editors or audience development managers. What is clear is how audience-oriented roles in the newsroom have emerged and evolved. Social media editors focus mostly on managing the news outlet’s social media, creating content, managing readers, analyzing trends, and sporadically training other journalists and assisting editorial decision-making. Analytics specialists and audience editors focus on metrics and analytics tools, making reports on past performance and drafting statistical inferences to inform decisions in the future. In the US, scale has become a key factor, and engagement editors are now part of a bigger audience-oriented department that includes a social media team and an analytics team. NW9, a senior social strategy and user-generated content editor in a leading US newspaper, says:

We went from small audience development to have a full team of social media editors, SEO experts, so-called “growth editors” who were responsible for growing the traffic and the audience on different desks. And then, a few analytics managers to track our progress. We brought Facebook in from marketing into the newsroom, and we turned our social media management operation into almost a 24/7 operation.

Our interviewees, who go by different job titles with similar audience-oriented job descriptions, have common routines in the newsroom. These routines include tracking and understanding the audience, creating content on social media, and strategizing. For example, NW14 said:

The first thing I do in the morning is looking how we did the previous day, checking the aggregated analytics. Then I start gathering what is planned for the day and I either request specific content for social media or adapt stories to suit various channels, like Facebook or Twitter.

Editorial involvement

Engagement editors tend to focus more on the strategic use of audience knowledge within the newsroom. In this way, the engagement editors emerge as intermediary figures between social media editors and analytics specialists and regular journalists and editors. Their work is to distill the information gathered about the audience, conveying audience behavior to the editorial team and proposing a course of action that considers and aligns with audience insight.

In our interviews, this development is more pronounced in the US and the UK. Elsewhere, an opinion and engagement editor for a business publication in the Philippines (NW12) focuses predominantly on social media and letters to the editor. His contact with the editorial team is relegated to sporadic meetings to discuss the evolution of outreach. In Qatar, the transition continues to see integration, but new audience-oriented journalists find occasional reluctance from traditional journalists. As respondent NW10 mentions “I would say that in general, most colleagues have been very supportive. But there are still some of those legacy old-school people who don’t like social media.” In the US, however, engagement editors consider themselves the operative link between audiences and the newsroom. This is supported by accounts of their integral participation in editorial decisions. As an engagement editor in the American edition of a British news outlet explains (NW1):

We always open the morning editorial meeting, where all of the editors and reporters are, to talk about engagement from the day before. It is a daily presentation, and then we write an email with more detail from our analytics tool so that anyone can see the charts and see the top 10, top 20, top 25 different metrics.

The involvement in the editorial process is particularly relevant because it endows the engagement editor with the institutionalized legitimacy that social media editors often lack. If social media editors advise other editors, it comes from a relationship that needs to be established between them. According to our respondents, these relationships do not come without friction, and from a conscious attempt to show the value of their work to traditional journalists. Instead, engagement editors consider they have a much closer and instrumental involvement in editorial decision-making that is legitimized by the organization. Audience-oriented editors are increasingly valuable to the rest of the editorial team. For example, NW7 mentioned:

Our analysis of audiences is much more like support for the editorial team. So we come up with hunches or ideas and then we test them to make sure that we are giving the other editors solid advice based on our data.

Relationship with the audience

In general, the audience-oriented editors’ institutional legitimacy is derived from their relationship with the audience. While social media editors develop an intuition in understanding users based on their constant interaction, their task is to disseminate news content in a way that follows social media logic and spread it as much as possible. Engagement editors, however, specifically focus on how the news organization can strengthen its relationship with the existing audience and create new ones. As an engagement editor in the UK explains (NW6):

I’m responsible for making sure that our journalism reaches the widest audience possible and has an opportunity to succeed. To make sure that to be able to engage effectively with our readers, we reach our most loyal and engaged readers, the people who visit us every day and, at the same time, that our journalism is reaching new audiences, perhaps people that don’t visit us that frequently or perhaps haven’t heard of us before.

This focus on the organization’s relationship with the audience has implications on how audience-oriented editors view their roles as legitimate journalists while engaged in routines that are different from traditional journalistic functions. Our informants seem to refer to a new, more audience-oriented normative role. For example, NW9 said her organization wants to “really elevate the voice of the reader and bring them more into our coverage.” Similarly, when asked about what he does in the newsroom, NW2 said: “Yes, we fight for our readers in the newsroom.”

Defining “Engagement”

In interview after interview, all journalists proclaimed the difficulty in defining what constitutes engagement. “This is going to be complicated,” one interviewee said. “This is a tricky question,” said another. This inability to precisely define engagement is a relevant factor for two reasons. First, engagement is the word audience-oriented editors use to broadly refer to audience behavior, and therefore it is the overall measurement goal that sets the structure for them to construct the audience. If the audience is constructed through their notion of engagement, and engagement is a sum of metrics, then the understanding of the audience is done only through the prism of the metrics, providing only a skewed portrayal of the audience. Second, if the definition of engagement is contingent on the personal views of the audience-oriented editors and the tools they use, then the notion of engagement—and hence the understanding of the audience—becomes a poorly negotiated construct that holds little cohesion across newsrooms. The difficulty in defining it seems to stem from having to balance abstract definitions with how engagement is actually measured in their newsrooms. In short, there is a mismatch between conceptual and operational definitions. We define conceptual definitions as referring to what the journalists consider as ideal, unconstrained by the tools available for gaging engagement. Operational definitions refer to defining based on how engagement is measured. Most references to engagement are connected to different forms of audience metrics. However, when proposing a definition, many of the informants also referred to what they think ought to be measured. For example, NW5 said:

What is engagement? I don′t know really, I think it is the attempt to build an intimate relationship with your audience beyond the numbers, so that we can transform that into stories. And when I mean beyond the numbers, it is with the understanding that all statistical knowledge of their behavior is known and taken into account.

Conceptual definitions

The journalists interviewed use the word engagement extensively. They use it as one of the main outcomes of their work: identifying whether the readers are engaged and ultimately leading toward a more engaged audience.

The most normative understanding of engagement comes from a former head of public awareness of a newspaper in Poland. His approach to engagement needs to be situated in the context of a modernizing post-communist country that aimed for social change. The newspaper was among the first independent dailies, founded by activists and journalists calling for reforms. As such, engagement is as close as possible to the notion of civic engagement. Interviewee NW11 said:

Public campaigning and engagement, as we thought about it, was not really a goal, an objective in itself, it was a tool to basically organize people in order to help themselves and advance the democracy and self-government in the country. So, the engagement objective was not just to have conversation with people about news. The main objective was that Poland needs to be changed, Poland as a country, as a society, it needs to make a progress and in order to do it, we need to organize people around certain issues.

However, such an approach to defining engagement is an outlier in our data. For most interviewees, the words used to describe the ideal type of engagement always point to a two-way form of communication, such as “relationship,” “dialog,” “conversation,” and “interaction”. For example, NW2 said:

Engagement is somebody actually physically taking the time to write to us, to show the value by sharing something that we’ve written, or taking the step to make somebody else aware that (our publication) exists. Actual, real human interaction. Somebody actually taking the step to physically like something or click something and communicate is what we consider engagement.

This interaction with the audience is also something that has to be sustained, in a way justifying the need for audience-oriented editors. For example, the head of audience engagement in a prominent British news organization (NW4) explains that engagement means helping the audience:

have an experience that’s well-rounded, that is informative, interesting, entertaining, enlightening, delightful, in turn so that they become a regular reader. So that they become loyal. So that we develop an actual relationship with them.

The conceptual definitions of engagement from the journalists we interviewed displayed tendencies toward paternalism. Informing, guiding, and enlightening the audience is a well-established narrative, one that spills over to audience-oriented profiles. Loyalty and mutual relationships are among the prevailing lines of argument. However, there is also a clear understanding that such relationships with the audience can be harnessed financially. Once the instrumental value of an engaged audience is acknowledged, the normative views turn to measuring engagement in order to capitalize on it. At this point, informants started to define engagement as they experience it in practice, providing what we refer to as the operational definitions of engagement.

Operational definitions

When asked about how they know if the audience is engaged, the journalists’ responses rarely match the conceptual definitions. This is something that they recognize. For example, NW9 referred to a “literal definition” which is based on audience metrics. She also refers to “quality of conversation” as a definition of engagement, but then she relies on metrics to measure it:

If I see a story that has 5000 comments, and people replying and liking each other’s comments and the quality of conversation is very strong, to me that is another good, strong signal of strong engagement—or another signal of strong engagement.

This operationalization of engagement based on audience metrics seems to be contingent on the measurement tools available to them. Several of our informants offer conceptual definitions of engagement regarding journalistic impact in a traditional, normative sense, but then admit that measuring that type of impact is challenging. For example, NW15 said:

Having people wanting to contact you and talk to you and engage… like reacting with what you do in different ways. It could [be] like email. It could be sending questions when we ask them to send in their questions in some topic. It’s difficult to tell; it′s the relationship we have with the audience.

Despite the wealth of audience data that now flow into newsrooms, which makes it easy for news organizations to quantify audiences, ideal markers of journalistic impact remain difficult to gage, let alone quantify. Available metrics then become proxies to such journalistic ideals, especially for overworked journalists. This has important ramifications, as treating such metrics as goals rather than means to achieve journalistic ideals becomes a big risk. For example, informant NW3 defined engagement as:

a way to try to communicate to an audience but also not just throw information at them, not just throw them articles and not just throw content at them, but try to make them react and give you an answer, try to get some reaction from them even if it is a good one or a bad one… I guess on social media the way to see it is likes, shares, comments and things like that, so in the end you can simplify to very simple things.

This response suggests that, in the absence of a better way to quantify audience behavior, audience-oriented editors accept the metrics that are easily quantifiable and use them as their own understanding of engagement. Moreover, this understanding is constrained by the data that are compiled and the affordances of the technical tools they use. Newsrooms may have high aspirations in having a more nuanced understanding of their audiences, but their knowledge of the audience can only come from the range of metrics available to them.

Conclusion

Audience data are now readily available in online newsrooms as the use of web and social media analytics to monitor, record, and analyze audience metrics has become embedded in news routines. This has led to the institutionalization of new audience-oriented roles in the newsroom. In an increasing number of newsrooms around the world, these audience-oriented roles are elevated to the level of editors, legitimizing the tasks involved in making sense of audience data as important journalistic functions. Therefore, understanding the impact of audience measurement on news work requires an analysis of these emerging roles, who act as intermediaries between audiences and the newsroom through their interpretation and valuation of audience data. On one hand, these audience-oriented editors are tasked with bringing the voice of the audience into the newsroom. On the other hand, their reliance on metrics and social media insights questions their salience as the voice of the audience. Furthermore, they are constrained by the affordances of their tools and rely on likes, shares, number of comments and other audience metrics to define engagement. In this sense, it is user activity and behavior that becomes a proxy for the voice of the audience. This is a limited understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience. Editors can assess the performance of their editorial choices as they scrutinize metrics in real time, but they are limited by and reliant on the technological affordances of the tools they use. We argue that this dialog is predominantly informed by metrics and therefore it needs to be understood as such. It is always difficult to trace the links between behavior and engagement, but it signals an attempt to quantify and measure the audience. As Ksiazek and colleagues (2016) argue, the push for engagement seeks to strengthen audience loyalty and business viability. While it is possible that audience-oriented editors feel they are the voice of the audience, eventually they give voice to an understanding of the audience as presented by metrics.

The results from the interviews reveal two trends, one rooted in a homogenizing view of journalism, and another emerging from a heterogenic practice of journalism. The first trend is that newsrooms around the world are transitioning toward an audience-oriented reconfiguration. This is not to say that the audience was completely absent in the past. However, all our interviewees support the notion that, aided by web analytics and social media, news organizations are trying to capitalize on the newfound capacity to learn about audiences. The second trend suggests, however, that news organizations carry out this process in different ways and paces, depending on a number of factors, such as the news media environment, organizational scale and background, and individual characteristics. This is consistent with the findings of Usher (2013) that metrics and analytics are used differently across news organizations.

The journalists we interviewed understand audience behavior as a form of engagement. However, they use conceptual and operational definitions to discuss audience engagement. Conceptually, many of them define the term conceptually, referring to traditional journalistic values such as social impact and dialog with the audience. In contrast, how engagement is operationalized in the newsroom is metric-centric, intricately tied to the available tools to measure it. This reflects what Anderson (2011) refers to as the tensions in how journalists see the audience as either empowered or quantified. Our findings also display such tensions even among journalists primarily tasked to link the audience to the newsroom. However, while audience-oriented editors aspire to develop a relationship with the audience in order to understand them, they often have to rely mostly on automated, immediate, and accessible metrics quantifying audience behavior. We see the emergence of these editors as an attempt to combine metrics with human interpretation in the newsroom. How these audience-oriented editors understand and value the audience data available to them affects how they communicate and present metrics to the rest of the newsroom. A metric-based understanding of engagement can make news organizations prioritize content that increases what their metrics measure instead of less popular but potentially more important outputs.

The mismatch between conceptual and operational definitions of engagement is also manifested in how interviewees discuss their practice. When describing what it is they do as audience-oriented editors, they referred to both general roles and specific routines. Practice varies from organization to organization, contingent on institutional culture and scale. The common factor is that all increasingly bring their understanding of the audience perspective, constructed through audience metrics, right into the editorial decision-making process. Key practices include making a quantitative and qualitative assessment of current audience trends and then providing editorial advice on how to better match journalistic content to what the audience wants and expects. They also establish organizational strategies that further cement the relationship between the news outlet and its audience, as well as find new avenues that secure audience growth and loyalty. The strategies are far from the two-way symmetrical communication between the audience and journalists that Feighery (2011) proposes, and echoes the commercial need to have a large, loyal audience.

Audience-oriented roles coexist and also have distinct roles. The engagement editors we interviewed, in particular, are endowed with a greater editorial involvement than the other audience-oriented roles, which legitimizes their decisions. They participate in editorial meetings providing insight into the content that has performed well in the recent past and suggesting lines of action to maintain or improve those trends. This is in contrast to only a few years ago, when web analytics data in news organizations were collected and examined by analysts working under the marketing or advertising departments, isolated from day-to-day editorial operations (Napoli 2011). Now, these types of roles are embedded right within the editorial team and involved directly in editorial processes. This has important implications, especially when examining audience influence on news production processes.

Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) argued that practices can shape journalists’ narratives around their roles, which can then be negotiated into cognitive roles or normalized into normative roles. In this study, we see a mismatch between practices and narratives around engagement, which also manifest between practiced roles (what journalists do) and narrated roles (what journalists say they do). Which one becomes normalized has implications in the future of not only audience engagement routines, but also the extent to which audiences figure in the news construction process, affecting not only what is produced, but how news is produced.

This study’s findings, however, need to be examined in the context of several limitations. First, the study is based on in-depth interviews, which are particularly good at addressing informants’ sense-making strategies, but when it comes to examining journalistic work, they get us closer to narrated performances rather than actual performances (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017). Future studies on the role and routines of audience-oriented editors can employ ethnographic methods. Second, our analysis was primarily interested in our two main questions: how audience-oriented editors define what they do, and how they define engagement. And yet, throughout the study, since our interviewees are from news organizations across different countries, we have acknowledged the variations based on media context. Future studies should focus on the differences across media contexts to provide a more nuanced understanding of journalism’s reconfiguration in terms of audience orientation.

Funding

No specific funding was received for this piece of research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Matt Carlson and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.