Jacob Nelson, assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University
Engaging readers has become a growing challenge for print and digital news outlets in the 21st century. Print newspapers have become mere ghosts of their former selves, while digital sites face competition from social media and reader resistance to paying for online access to information. Jacob Nelson, an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, examines the issues in “The Next Media Regime: The pursuit of audience engagement in Journalism.”
Nelson finds that people don’t decide what news to consume based only on preferences for specific news outlets, but also based on social, economic, and technological factors. Nelson, also a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University has written a book, Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
A link to the article is here.
Journalists “continue to rely in no small part on their assumptions and intuition when making decisions about their audiences comprise and what they want from news.” Nelson says.
How did you become interested in this topic and this research?
I have been interested in the relationship between journalists and their audiences since I graduated from journalism school in 2010. I was hired straight out of school as an editor for a hyper-local online news company launching sites all over the U.S. During the three years I worked for the company, I was constantly focused on understanding the audience and what they expected – and wanted – from a local news source. Despite the analytics tools at my disposal, my sense of the audience relied just as much on my own assumptions as it did on empirical data. My own curiosity about how journalists conceptualize their audiences – combined with the audience’s growing importance for a news industry increasingly focused on improving public trust and revenue – led me to pursue a research agenda focused on the journalist-audience relationship.
What were some of the major research findings in the academy or industry that preceded your work?
The research findings that most resonated with me came from journalism studies scholars who drew on ethnographic data collected from newsrooms. Reading Herbert Gans and Phyllis Kaniss, for example, made me realize that journalists have always drawn from their own assumptions and instincts when making determinations about their audiences and what they want from news. C.W. Anderson, Caitlin Petre, Angele Christin, Valerie Belair-Gagnon (just to name a few) have published research into the growing role that audience measurement tools play in shaping how journalists quantify, conceptualize, and ultimately pursue their audiences.
A growing subset of journalism research, focused on how journalists attempt to “engage” with their audiences, led to some really important insights. For example, in her recently published book, Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust, Andrea Wenzel explores the causes of distrust among the public and argues for a community-centered approach by journalists to improve the relationship between themselves and the communities they seek to serve. In Reckoning, another recently published book, Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young dissect systemic racism, especially in journalism’s approach to and conceptualization of communities of color.
James Webster, Harsh Taneja, Su Jung Kim, and Thomas Ksiazek, for example, have shown that people do not make decisions about what news to consume or ignore based solely on their preferences for specific news outlets. Instead, forces that shape how people navigate the media world include their social, economic, and technological factors. Finally, a number of scholars have begun exploring an aspect of the journalist-audience relationship that is easy to overlook: news avoiders. Stephanie Edgerly, Ruth Palmer, and Benjamin Toff have recently published research exploring peoples’ motivations for tuning out the news, which has been very useful to me as I’ve gone about understanding journalists’ efforts to get more people to tune in to the news.
What did you learn from your research?
The research featured in this academic article (excerpted from the book coming out next year) explored how journalists conceptualize “audience engagement,” an increasingly common term that speaks to the industry’s focus on improving its relationship with the public. This research draws from ethnographic data I gathered from a traditional newsroom (the Chicago Tribune), an audience engagement company (Hearken), and a nonprofit, local news organization (City Bureau). I learned from this research that advocates of audience engagement feel strongly that journalists must communicate with their audiences to better understand and serve them. Doing so, they believe, will produce news that incorporates a wider variety of viewpoints, which will make those audiences more loyal—and, newsrooms hope, more likely to pay subscription fees.
However, because there is no agreed upon definition of audience engagement, implementation and results vary considerably. This variation reveals not only differences in how journalists think they should interact with their audiences, but also differences in how journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place. Consequently, the distinctions in how journalists define and pursue audience engagement suggest that they continue to rely in no small part on their assumptions and intuition when making decisions about their audiences and what they want from news.
A summary of my article was published last year in Columbia Journalism Review.
What are the implications of your research?
The pursuit of audience engagement makes it clear that journalists’ assumptions about the public continue to be an influential force in shaping news production. This has important implications for both journalists and the people they hope to reach. For example, how aligned are journalists’ assumptions about their audiences with the ways that audiences actually behave?
The pursuit of audience engagement also speaks to a larger question with important implications for journalism research and practice: What do audience engagement advocates believe “successful” journalism should look like in the first place? Is this explicit pursuit of the audience something new, or have we seen it before? I argue that the current open-arms approach to the news audience—and the ambiguity surrounding this approach—is part of journalism’s transition to a model that is still emerging. As I conclude in my article, the excitement around audience engagement presents an opportunity to discover how journalism is changing and predict what it might look like going forward.
This interview was conducted by Bill Arthur.
