ABSTRACT
Many news professionals and researchers have urged that journalism be evaluated by measures of audience engagement rather than audience size. They argue that privileging engagement would lead to higher quality, more trusted news and reward publishers by building stronger bonds with their audiences. Unfortunately, industry stakeholders have never agreed on what engagement metrics should measure or how they are to be used. This confused state of affairs can leave newsrooms uncertain about their methods and priorities, dimming the prospects of engagement journalism. To investigate this problem, the researcher reports on an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a tech company that provides about a hundred news organizations with an online audience engagement platform. Findings illustrate how hard it is for newsrooms to turn audience engagement into agreed upon outcome measures, and describes the implications of that confusion for the pursuit of “engagement journalism.”
