“Engaged” Journalism: Studying the News Industry’s Changing Relationship with the Public

Abstract

As journalists across the globe continue to face distrustful audiences and uncertain economics, many have begun experimenting with novel forms of news production and community engagement with the hope of solving the news industry’s ails. These efforts tend to focus specifically on improving the relationship between journalists and the communities they cover, often by attempting to provide those communities with more agency in the process by which their stories are told (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018; Lawrence, Radcliffe, and Schmidt 2018; Nelson 2018; Wenzel 2017). For example, many newsrooms now use tools provided by audience engagement companies like Hearken and GroundSource to solicit questions from community members or provide themwith interactive information. Others have begun hosting “public newsrooms” and “listening sessions” in order to improve journalists’ understanding of who their readers are and what they expect from the news. And still others are transitioning from ad-supported to membership-supported revenue models in hopes of creating a financial incentive to better serve their audiences. The excitement within the news industry surrounding these innovations has been accompanied by a growing number of academic studies focused on their implementation, as well as their implications for journalism and the public. These studies tend to explore important questions, such as: How likely are these innovations to endure? How should they be measured and/or monetized? To what extent are they changing journalism roles and norms? And perhaps most importantly, how are they interpreted by the very audiences they hope to affect? This special issue of Journalism Practice will investigate these issues, by bringing together original research focused on these “engaged” approaches to news production. Successful submissions will be theoretically and methodologically rigorous, and will address new methods, conceptualizations and practices for engagement in journalism. These topics may include, but are not limited to: