Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the book’s central findings and explores their implications for journalism research and practice. Many who work in or study journalism are clamoring for solutions to the profession’s challenges. Increasingly, those solutions are more focused on improving journalism’s understanding of and relationship with the news audience than at any other point in the profession’s history. Yet, as the previous chapters have shown, the assumptions underlying attempts to improve the journalist–audience relationship ultimately reveal more about those pursuing them than they do about whom the audience comprises and how the news actually enters into their everyday lives. They also overwhelmingly stem from the reasonable yet inaccurate notion that reshaping journalism’s relationship with the public is firmly within journalists’ control. The author concludes that journalists must embrace journalistic humility. They must accept the limitations they face as they try to change audience behavior if they are to successfully navigate the news industry’s most pressing problems.

When Data and Intuition Converge

How is it that, in an age of sophisticated audience data, there continue to be widespread uncertainty and inconsistency throughout the news industry surrounding what people want and expect from news? This chapter explores this question by examining the relationship of journalists with audience measurement data. While the previous chapter examined the differences within journalism’s imagined audiences, this chapter explores the origins of journalism’s imagined audiences. In doing so, it identifies the way these differences emerge—and, more importantly, how they persist—in an increasingly data-driven news culture. The author’s overarching argument is that audience measurement data are neither as straightforward nor comprehensive as the discourse surrounding them suggests. Instead, these data continue to leave ample room for interpretation, and the interpretations vary from one journalist to the next.

The Journalist–Audience Relationship

This chapter reflects on one of the most important—yet least studied—aspects of journalism: the connection between how journalists perceive and pursue their audiences. Journalists, like all media producers, can never possibly know precisely who sees what they publish. Instead, they create what communication scholar Eden Litt calls an imagined audience that includes the people with whom they believe they are communicating. Once journalists imagine their audiences, their goals become not just producing the news, but producing news in such a way that it will resonate with those they hope to reach. This chapter explores how journalists have traditionally imagined and pursued their audiences, and how both of those things are beginning to change.

Journalism’s Imagined Audiences

This chapter offers an overview of the primary differences in imagined audiences between production-oriented audience engagement news organizations like Hearken and City Bureau and more traditional news organizations like the Chicago Tribune. Because City Bureau and the Tribune both focus on Chicago, each organization’s conceptualization of its specific audience demonstrates how profound differences can unfold even when audiences overlap. Hearken, however, does not publish news. Instead, it provides tools and services to newsrooms to help them improve their relationships with their audiences. Hearken’s imagined news audience is, therefore, a general one. The author concludes that, despite the fact that the journalists diverge dramatically when it comes to news audience composition and expectations, they see eye to eye on one important thing: Their imagined audiences emphasize the audience’s relationship with news above all else.

The Promise of Audience Engagement

Though there is widespread agreement surrounding the problems journalism faces, there also is a growing rift among journalism professionals and researchers about how best to solve them. A growing number of journalism stakeholders argue that the news should focus more on “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that generally involves journalists’ incorporating more audience input in news production to more accurately reflect their lived experiences. Those at City Bureau and Hearken believe this more collaborative form of news production will increase the audience’s trust in news as well as the amount of value they derive from it. Others, including many at the Chicago Tribune, disagree. In addition to offering a comprehensive definition of audience engagement, this chapter also traces the disagreement surrounding it to enduring differences in how journalists perceive the public.

The Obstacles to Audience Engagement

This chapter explores the challenges that journalists face as they attempt to more meaningfully practice audience engagement. The first is that, at a moment when the news industry’s financial stability is far from guaranteed, it is difficult to empirically demonstrate that engaged journalism yields an economic benefit. This is primarily because of the limitations of audience measurement data, which tend to privilege measures of exposure above all else—such as more qualitative measures of audience preferences or reactions. The second challenge stems from the reality that the pursuit of engaged journalism—and the more explicit awareness of the audience that it entails—can lead journalists to ethical dilemmas as they grapple with who they are writing about, who they are writing for, and what to do when those two groups diverge. Finally, those who pursue more meaningful and deliberate efforts to communicate and collaborate with their audiences increasingly must reckon with unexpected and unwelcome outcomes.

Understanding News Audience Behavior

This chapter offers a counter-narrative to the notion that journalists play the primary role in determining how news gets received by the public. Instead, it suggests that the interplay between different forces within the media environment shapes news consumption. News providers cannot alone determine how their content will be received, nor can audiences alone go out and find exactly what will leave them most satisfied. Consequently, even as news publishers make large, bold changes, these strategies are far from guaranteed to affect the way that audiences currently do (or do not) interact with the news. Structures and habits are powerful things and lead to a profound stubbornness when it comes to news audience behavior. In short, making the news better will not necessarily make it more profitable, simply because audience behavior is hard to change and even harder to predict.

First Imagined, Then Pursued

This chapter draws on Hearken’s efforts to challenge journalism’s audience perceptions—as well as the audience pursuits unfolding within City Bureau and the Chicago Tribune—to explore the connection between the way journalists imagine their audiences and the steps they take to reach them. This chapter also explores another dispute unfolding throughout the news industry: the lens through which journalists conceptualize their own expertise. Traditional journalists tend to take for granted the assumption that their professional training and skills make them significantly better equipped to report the news than the people they hope to reach. This is different from those advocating for more audience engagement, who see their audiences as being more valuable as news collaborators than they are typically given credit for and also view journalists themselves as being in need of exactly this sort of collaboration.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s overarching questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences? Who gets included in these conceptualizations, and who is left out? Perhaps most important, how aligned are journalism’s “imagined” audiences with the real ones? It also introduces the book’s ethnographic data, collected from three news organizations: the Chicago Tribune, City Bureau, and Hearken. Both the Tribune and City Bureau publish news, while Hearken offers tools and services to newsrooms interested in improving their relationship with their audiences. Each has its own distinct take on what people expect from news, which leads all three to chart remarkably different paths in their shared quest to make high-quality, valuable, and publicly appreciated journalism. Taken together, these data reveal how journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences.