Power to the People? Conceptualising Audience Agency for the Digital Journalism Era

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual framework for the concept audience agency, which plays a vital role in the current audience turn in journalism (research). It presents two types of audience agency, deliberate and incidental, and three levels at which they can manifest: the micro level of the individual, the meso level of organised groups and the macro level of collective audiences. While incidental, individual agency is much more commonplace, both media professionals and scholars increasingly aggregate and study – and risk to misinterpret – individuals’ behaviour at a deliberate audience level. Finally, future research avenues are suggested to advance knowledge and debate on audience agency within digital journalism, including studying the concept through editorial, commercial and/or democratic lenses.

Keywords:

• Agency
• audience engagement
• audience studies
• audience analytics
• big data

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Prof. Helle Sjøvaag for her ongoing support and guidance, for this manuscript and far beyond.

Disclosure statement

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