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https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920934246
DOI: 10.1177/1464884920934246
Practice in “Engaged journals.sagepub.com/home/jou
Journalism”
Thomas R. Schmidt
University of California, San Diego, USA
Jacob L. Nelson
Arizona State University, USA
Regina G. Lawrence
University of Oregon, USA
Abstract
A constellation of journalistic tools, platforms, companies and nonprofit funding has
recently emerged, promoting the idea that allowing the audience to contribute to the
news agenda is a promising strategy to increase trust in journalism, create new revenue
streams and foster community-building. Despite a growing body of research, however,
two main issues remain currently unexplored: (1) the extent to which engaged journalism
as a practice aligns with engaged journalism as a theoretical construct, and (2) the
extent to which the audience assumptions underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism
align with actual audience expectations and desires. This paper begins to address both
of these issues by comparing how advocates of engaged journalism conceptualize the
public’s interest in participating in journalism with observations of actual instances of
that participation. We find that there is indeed a gap between engaged journalism theory
and practice, which we attribute to a distinction between what engaged journalists
believe audiences want from news and how those audiences actually behave. At the
same time, we also find that institutional rigidity in newsrooms that leads to some
reluctance with regard to making news production more collaborative.
Corresponding author:
Thomas R. Schmidt, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503, USA.
Email: t1schmidt@ucsd.edu
2 Journalism 00(0)
Keywords
Engaged journalism, ethnography, Hearken, participatory journalism, public journalism
“Engaged journalism” has been heralded by some journalists, entrepreneurs and non-
profit foundations as a promising strategy to increase trust in journalism, create new
revenue streams, and foster community-building (Das, 2017; Green-Barber and
McKinley, 2019; Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy, 2019). This grow-
ing network of proponents, practitioners and scholars has coalesced around the norma-
tive idea that journalists better serve the public when they go beyond the role of detached
arbiters who authoritatively decide what is newsworthy. Instead, they believe journalists
should work with their audiences by soliciting their ideas, experiences, questions, and
opinions throughout the news production process. As a result, these advocates put forth
a reform agenda, blending elements of a past journalism movement (public journalism)
and current technological capabilities of interactivity. From the perspective of its propo-
nents, then, engaged journalism de-centers journalists’ power in favor of news created
collaboratively with citizens.
The engaged journalism philosophy has clearly caught on in some corners of the
profession. Journalism foundations such as the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund,
and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism have poured millions of dollars into initiatives
that draw on engaged journalism techniques to improve the relationship between news
publishers and their audiences. And hundreds of newsrooms across the globe have used
their diminished capital to pay for services provided by audience engagement compa-
nies, such as Hearken and GroundSource. The enthusiasm behind engaged journalism
has grown even more pronounced as news publishers increasingly look to audience-
supported revenue models (e.g. subscriptions, memberships, and donations) to offset
losses in advertising revenue – or to replace advertising revenue altogether (Hansen and
Goligoski, 2018; Kiesow, 2018).
A growing number of academic studies has illuminated certain aspects of these
engaged journalism efforts (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc, 2018; Lawrence et al., 2018;
Lawrence et al., 2019; Nelson, 2018b; Schmidt and Lawrence, 2020; Wenzel, 2019);
however, the institutional dynamics and professional challenges of this approach to
journalism invite closer examination. Two issues specifically currently remain unex-
plored: (1) the extent to which engaged journalism as a practice aligns with engaged
journalism as a theoretical construct, and (2) the extent to which the assumptions about
audiences underlying the pursuit of engaged journalism align with actual audience
expectations and desires.
This paper begins to address both of these issues by comparing the evolution of the
normative ideals of engaged journalism with the implementation of these ideals in daily
journalistic routines. We draw on the interplay between Hearken, a company that offers
digital tools and consulting services to newsrooms, and 15 news organizations in the
U.S. that have implemented its tools and its model of “public-powered journalism.” We
specifically explore (1) how willing journalists are to reshape their practices based on the
engaged journalism philosophy, which frames audiences as eager and untapped potential
participants in news-making, and (2) how successful they feel in executing those changes,
Schmidt et al. 3
especially with respect to audience participation. We find that there is indeed a gap
between engaged journalism theory and practice, which we attribute to a distinction
between what engaged journalists believe audiences want from news and how those
audiences actually behave. We conclude with a discussion about what this gulf between
expectation and reality means for a news industry that is increasingly sure that its future
depends on how well it understands the people that it hopes to reach.
Literature review
The emergence of engaged journalism
Faced with uncertain economics (Jerde, 2019), political polarization (Newman et al.,
2018), and the rise of misinformation (Fawzi, 2019), a growing number of news publish-
ers, funders, and collaborators have embraced “engaged” journalism as the remedy to
these ails (Nelson, 2019; Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy, 2019). In
this context, engaged journalism has been defined as “an inclusive practice that prior-
itizes the information needs and wants of the community members it serves, creates col-
laborative space for the audience in all aspects of the journalistic process, and is dedicated
to building and preserving trusting relationships between journalists and the public”
(Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019). The emphasis on working collaboratively with the
public sets “engaged journalism” apart from broader “engagement” trends both across
media industries generally and news media specifically that frequently focus more on
how audiences interact with news content after the fact rather than with news reporters
as they go about preparing their stories (e.g. Ksiazek et al., 2016).
Advocates of engaged journalism believe that journalism’s economic and credibility
issues are entwined: people don’t support the news because they don’t trust it. They
therefore argue that, to earn public trust, journalists must be more transparent and col-
laborative. Rather than deliver news stories that are largely pre-determined in the news-
room, for example, journalists should solicit the public’s input throughout the reporting
process in order to tap into people’s curiosities and lived experiences. And rather than
assume the public will believe that the news is credible simply because it comes from a
professional news organization, news organizations should be more responsive and
collaborative.
long assumed that citizens are innately uninterested in public affairs, public journalists
embraced John Dewey’s philosophy about citizens. They argued that the public wants to
be involved in civic life, and that journalists should help them to do so (Dewey, 1927).
Like today’s engaged journalism advocates, public journalists believed that news pro-
duction should include listening to the stories and ideas of citizens, reporting on public
problems in ways that would most likely help citizens solve them, and systematically
communicating with the public throughout all stages of the reporting and publishing
process (Voakes, 2004). As the public journalism movement receded and the idea of
“participatory journalism” took root, this notion of a public longing for deeper engage-
ment continued. As Hermida et al. (2011: 6) put it, “a Deweyan ethos underlies much of
the rhetoric on participatory journalism.”
Throughout the evolution of these ideas, however, there has been some reason to
doubt that the public would jump at the chance to play a part in making the news – doubts
sharpened in the social media era. Indeed, the so-called 90-9-1 rule – that “lurkers” make
of roughly 90 of social media interaction with news and brands, versus 9 percent who
participate occasionally and 1 percent who participate heavily – is well known among
practitioners. As a result, many express skepticism about the public’s eagerness for
meaningful engagement, particularly through comments sections (Nelson, 2018a;
Quandt, 2018). Nonetheless, today’s engaged journalism movement contains a strong
element of Deweyan optimism and hopefulness about the potential for greater public
engagement with news. In essence, engaged, participatory journalism promises to trans-
form the news by tapping into a latent public appetite to participate in making the news.
In short, public reluctance might limit the actual practice of engaged journalism on the
audience side.
Figure 1. The process model of journalistic roles (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017).
and contestation” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 6). This framework (see Figure 1) allows us
to identify two analytically distinct levels of engaged journalism: role orientation and role
performance. “Role orientations refer to discursive constructions of the institutional val-
ues, attitudes, and beliefs with regards to the position of journalism in society and, conse-
quently, to the communicative ideals journalists are embracing in their work” (123). On
the other hand, “Role performance refers to the roles of journalists as executed in practice,
or as observed and narrated by the journalists. The performative properties of journalists’
roles may thus be analytically extracted from direct observation of their work or from self-
reports of journalists” (124).
According to Hanitzsch and Vos’s theory, role conceptions are articulated through
normative ideals and cognitive orientations. Within this study, for example, Hearken’s
public-powered journalism model suggests a particular role conception for journalists as
“hearkening” to a public brimming with ideas and curiosities to be heard. Role perfor-
mance, on the other hand, encompasses professional practices and journalists’ “narrated
performance” of their work. In short, our study examines how journalists narrate their
attempts to actually implement the role conception espoused by Hearken. As we will
show, the normative ideal of citizen participation promoted in the Hearken model has
been adopted at to some extent in the newsrooms we study, but that ideal also creates
practical challenges as well as institutional tensions.
Following the five analytically distinct vectors in the Hanitzsch and Vos model, we
trace if and to what extent journalists internalize, enact, reflect, negotiate and normalize
6 Journalism 00(0)
RQ1: What normative ideals of engaged journalism does Hearken construct and pro-
mote, particularly with respect to audience participation?
RQ2: How do journalists reshape their practices based on the engaged journalism
philosophy and how successful are they in executing those changes (i.e. to what extent
do their practices align with the previously identified normative ideals)?
RQ3: What are the tensions and inconsistencies between engaged journalism’s philo-
sophical notions about the public and the pursuit of participatory journalism in
practice?
Methodology
This study looks at both Hearken and at newsrooms using Hearken’s tools and services.
It draws from a dataset combining interviews with and observations of Hearken employ-
ees (conducted by researcher 1) and interviews with editors and reporters at 15 news-
rooms around the country (conducted by researchers 2 and 3). The data sets were initially
created for separate purposes with no interaction until both data sets were completed.
After both data collection on both projects was completed independently, we realized
that the data sets could be combined to assemble a comprehensive study of how audience
engagement gets first conceptualized and subsequently implemented.
Hearken was founded in 2015 and currently partners with more than 130 newsrooms
across the globe. A for-profit firm, it sells newsrooms digital tools with which news-
rooms can solicit questions from their audiences and, through its consulting services,
encourages newsrooms to increase opportunities for journalist-audience collaborations.
It offers an online platform that allows audiences to submit questions directly to news
organizations, and tools to allow audiences to vote on these questions, with the winning
question eventually (in theory) becoming the focus of a news story. Hearken’s revenue
model is based on providing its services to newsrooms for an annual subscription fee,
which averages about $8,500.
Along with the software tools it sells to newsrooms, Hearken promotes a philosophy
of journalism centered on a vision of the public as active participants in news. Hearken
advocates for including the public in every stage of the news-making process, from pitch
to story assignment to reporting, as well as at the feedback stage after publication (where
most current engagement efforts focus). Hearken also provides consulting to help news
organizations implement its model and by encouraging newsroom staff to transition from
perceiving the public as consumers of news active participants in its production.
To gather the first data set, Researcher 1 spent January through March of 2017
observing and interviewing Hearken employees in their office space in downtown
Schmidt et al. 7
Chicago. He spent approximately 250 hours total observing, which included time spent
sitting in on internal meetings as well as presentations to potential newsroom clients.
Because Hearken is such a unique company, Researcher 1 chose to rely on observa-
tions to inform his interview questions rather than on assumptions about how its
employees approach their work. Consequently, these observations were a necessary
prerequisite for the interviews with Hearken employees, which were continual through-
out the data collection period (see Table 1). For example, Researcher 1 observed
Hearken employees meeting to discuss strategies for pitching their offerings to news-
rooms. Researcher 1 observed that these discussions typically involved finding ways
to persuade newsrooms that their audiences wanted to participate in the news produc-
tion process, which led him to ask about the origin of that news audience perception
during subsequent interviews.
The second data set is based on a sample of newsrooms researchers 2 and 3 selected
from a list provided by Hearken of 33 news organizations that had been using its plat-
form for a least a year as of December 1, 2017. The researchers selected an initial sample
of 15 organizations, stratifying the sample to achieve diversity in terms of geography,
newsroom size, and medium (radio, print, online); we also considered the level of audi-
ence involvement that, according to Hearken, each newsroom had achieved using its
tools, though that was not a determinative factor in constructing our sample. Since we
were interested in examining journalists’ practices across various organizations, we
decided to analyze “narrated role performances,” described by Hanitzsch and Vos (2017:
127) as “subjective perceptions of and reflections that journalists carry out in practice,”
and determined that semi-directed interviews would be the most efficient and fitting
method for data collection. For each news organization, the researchers aimed to inter-
view one editor who supervised the production of Hearken-driven stories and one jour-
nalist who produced those stories (see Table 2). Interviews with 28 journalists were
conducted, 26 interviews over the phone and two in person, between January and April
2018, with the shortest interview lasting 18 minutes and the longest 1 hour and 1 minute.
Following a semi-structured protocol, the interviews covered areas such as main reasons
for using Hearken, challenges when using Hearken and questions about expectations and
attitudes with regard to audience engagement. Interviewees were given the opportunity
to share experiences off the record to encourage frank conversations without fear of any
Table 2. Interview details for newsrooms.
8
Organization Location Hearken project Interviewees/job title at time of interview
AL.com Alabama Ask Alabama/Reckon Elizabeth Koekenga-Whitmire, Senior Director of Audience
John Hammontree, Managing Producer
BOISE STATE PUBLIC Boise, Idaho Wanna Know Idaho Tom Michael, General Manager
RADIO (BSPR) Lacey Daley, Digital Content Coordinator
CALmatters California The question tool is Marcia Parker, Publisher and COO
attached to individual stories Matt Levin, Data and Housing Reporter
THE COLUMBIAN Vancouver, Washington Clark Asks John Hill, Editor
KCRW Los Angeles, California Curious Coast Caitlin Shamberg, Digital Editor
Jenny Hamel, Reporter
KQED San Francisco, Bay Curious Olivia Allen-Price, Producer and Host
California Jessica Placzek, Reporter
KUOW Seattle, Washington Local Wonder Brendan Sweeney, Managing Producer
Jim Gates, Senior Editor
LANCASTERONLINE Lancaster, Pennsylvania We The People Dustin Leed, Digital Editor
Lindsey Blest, Reporter
TEXAS TRIBUNE Austin, Texas Texplainer Amanda Zamora, Chief Audience Officer
Alex Samuels, Community Reporter
VPR Vermont Brave Little State Angela Evancie, Managing Editor and Host
WBEZ Chicago, Illinois Curious City Shawn Allee, Senior Editor of Editorial Operations
Katherine Nagasawa, Multimedia Producer
WDET Detroit, Michigan CuriousiD Sandra Svoboda, Special Assignments Manager
Shelby Jouppi, Multimedia Producer
WFPL Louisville, Kentucky Curious Louisville Laura Ellis, Senior Producer
Journalism 00(0)
Ashlie Stevens, Reporter
WUFT Gainesville, Florida Untold Florida Ethan Magoc, News Editor
Christina Morales, Reporter
WUWM Milwaukee, Wisconsin Bubbler Talk Michelle Maternowski, Digital Services Coordinator
Ann-Elise Henzl, News Director
Schmidt et al. 9
potential repercussions. However, there were only two minor instances when interview-
ees requested to make comments off the record.
We recognize that in partnering with Hearken to create our interview sample we
traded access for full autonomy in determining the population of newsrooms on which
our sample is based. Nevertheless, we remain confident that our sample was big and
diverse enough to encompass a variety of viewpoints. Moreover, consulting directly with
Hearken was by far the most efficient way to determine what newsrooms around the U.S.
are using its services.
Data analysis unfolded as an iterative process among the three researchers, adopting
the theoretical framework of “discursive construction” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017). First,
the Hearken-focused researcher summarized the interview data specifically outlining
elements that denoted role orientations. In a second step, the other two researchers exam-
ined the interviews with journalists and identified how descriptions of their work aligned
or contrasted with those role orientations. These themes were then discussed among the
researchers with regard to referential adequacy (i.e. “checking preliminary findings and
interpretations against archived raw data, previous literature and existing research to
explore alternative explanations for findings as they emerge” (Erford, 2015: 102).
Finally, in a third step, the researchers determined master themes and recurring patterns
and tensions, illuminating key elements of enacting Hearken’s model in particular news
outlets and their variation across organizations.
We are not the first to analyze journalistic practices with respect to potential gaps
between role conceptions and role performances (see Mellado and van Dalen, 2014) but
to our knowledge, there have not been attempts to do so in the area of engaged journal-
ism. Moreover, while our analysis focuses on tensions and potential inconsistencies
between the “rhetoric” of Hearken and the “role performance” of journalists in our sam-
ple of newsrooms it is not our intention to single out Hearken and its philosophy as test
case for all kinds of engaged journalism. Consequently, this research strategy fore-
grounds a situational analysis of discursive practices in the interest of understanding how
norms, values and practices of engaged journalism are constructed.
Findings
Conceptualizing engaged journalism
Our interview and observational data reveal that that Hearken conceptualizes and advo-
cates for a set of interlinked normative ideals around citizen participation in the news.
Two ideas animate Hearken’s philosophy of “public-powered journalism:” (1) Citizens
want to be part of journalism but haven’t been given access and tools. (2) Participation
enhances journalism: Giving citizens voice makes news more “relevant, useful, and orig-
inal” (Hearken, 2019).
(1) Hearken encourages news organizations to see the public as partners in setting
the news agenda. The company designs its tools and offerings to provide news
organizations the means with which journalists can actively include the audience
in their journalistic practices. To that end, its pitch focuses on persuading
10 Journalism 00(0)
newsrooms that news audiences want this sort of inclusion in the first place. For
instance, when describing why people would welcome the opportunity to partici-
pate in the news production process, Hearken co-founder and CEO Jennifer
Brandel explained, “I don’t think human beings will ever not be curious. I don’t
think people will ever stop asking really important questions.”
This is a stark contrast to the notion that the public is somewhat apathetic toward civic
life, a notion that Hearken employees said came up often during meetings where they
would attempt to pitch their offerings to newsrooms. Another counter-argument Hearken
employees reported hearing when they made this optimistic argument about ordinary
citizens was that news organizations already have mechanisms in place for hearing from
the public – such as social media channels, email, and online comments – and rarely is
that input valuable for the news production process. To these objections, Hearken
employees were in the habit of suggesting the tools available to the public for engaging
with journalists are to blame for lackluster communication between the two. When jour-
nalists would lament the mean-spirited, unhelpful comments they came across in their
online articles, for example, Brandel would respond, “Comments were not the greatest
design.. . . Of course you’re going to think they [the public] suck if the only times you
hear from them are when they suck.” The Hearken mechanism for soliciting audience
input was pitched as more collaborative, specific, and inviting, which its employees
argued would lead to better, more thoughtful input.
In other words, members of the public, from Hearken’s perspective, don’t want to just
consume news. They want to have a relationship with the news, one based on what they
perceive as accurate representations of themselves and their stories by journalists.
Hearken employees pitch their offerings as an opportunity for newsrooms to solve these
two problems simultaneously. In doing so, they argue, news organizations can improve
the quality of their journalism as well as its appeal to audiences. As Brandel explained,
“It’s a natural phenomenon that when people are paid attention to by institutions or
Schmidt et al. 11
people with more power than them, it’s exciting.. . . That’s a fundamental thing that
newsrooms could do a better job recognizing and capitalizing on.” By involving audi-
ence members in the reporting process, representing “average” citizens becomes both a
method and a goal.
These two normative ideals are connected by the conviction that if news organiza-
tions more actively communicate with ordinary citizens, they will produce better sto-
ries that tap into more relevant community issues, which will lead to a larger,
potentially more diverse audience. Hearken’s pitch to news organizations thus aims at
challenging traditional notions of journalists’ roles. But how are journalists respond-
ing to this call?
Negotiating tensions
This dissonance between an ideal type of participatory journalism and the reality of lack-
luster audience participation requires journalists to negotiate tensions and potentially
adjust their expectations regarding the question of how much listeners and readers really
want to be involved in story creation. “The uncomfortable answer, after doing it awhile, is
that the easier it is for them to do, the more likely they’ll do it,” said Shawn Allee of
WBEZ. “It doesn’t mean that they won’t do the hard stuff, it’s just that fewer of them
will.” At KCRW, reporter Jenny Hamel included question-askers several times in her
reporting. “But for the most part it’s hard,” she said, “because you’re a little busy, you’re
trying to coordinate with these listeners.” As a result, Hamel focuses her energy less on
participation and more on notification (e.g. sending updates to question-askers about the
reporting process). “They’re all usually involved in the beginning and then, of course, I
reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, I’ve answered your question. Here’s the blog post. Here’s
the audio file. Share with your friends.’” This reaction – simultaneously acknowledging
Schmidt et al. 13
the limits of participation in the reporting process yet embracing the outreach to readers
and listeners – was a common one. As Lindsey Blest (LancasterOnline) put it:
The lack of audience interest was not the only indication of divergence between the
ideals and practices of engaged journalism. For some newsrooms, even when public
response is more robust, finite resources and capabilities prevent journalists from real-
izing the full public-powered engaged journalism ideal. “There’s really no shortage of
enthusiasm,” said Angela Evancie (VPR). “It’s just a matter of what we can manage on
our end in terms of all of that connection.” As Marcia Parker (CALmatters) put it, the
biggest challenge was building the new workflow and philosophy into the DNA of the
newsroom. “Everybody’s busy, right? So you just have to constantly keep it in front of
everyone and remind us at every editorial meeting, ‘OK, where is there a Hearken
engagement opportunity in whatever you're doing?’”
Despite these tensions, however, we also find that many of the journalists we inter-
viewed normalized their experiences toward viewing the public as partners in setting the
news agenda. Through the process of implementing the Hearken model, many of these
journalists have adopted the notion of citizen participation as the “new normal” within
their newsrooms, at least to some extent (in some cases, this vision is what drove their
interest in Hearken in the first place).
Some journalists mentioned that they got fresh ideas about coverage, sometimes about
issues that were overlooked. For John Hammontree (AL.com), for example, hearing from
readers has “solidified our expectation that the audience knows what it wants. That we
should trust the audience when they say, ‘This is something that we’re interested in,’ even
if we think, ‘Oh, well. Nobody would ever be interested in that story.’ If the audience says
they are, then they are. I think that we expect our audience to ask good questions, and they
expect us to give good answers now. And so, I think, to some extent, that’s changed the
way we do engagement.” Some reporters changed their perspective on the public’s ability
to contribute to the news agenda only after overcoming initial skepticism. “One of the
things that Hearken does,” Ann-Elise Henzl (WUWM, Milwaukee) said,
is it encourages us to use a voting round for listeners to select what they want to hear. I remember
[when] that was being presented to us at the initial meeting and I thought, ‘Oh, come on, we’re
going really turn over control to listeners?’ Because again, I had no idea what people would be
interested in. Maybe I just didn’t respect how constructive their ideas would be, or how creative,
and how interested they are in things that are around them.
To sum up, when we compare the rhetoric of engaged journalism (i.e. role orientation)
with the perceptions and experiences of journalists in our sample (i.e. role performance),
the following picture emerges: (1) Many journalists we talked to internalized and enacted
ideals of deep audience engagement, confirming that Hearken’s conceptualization of
engaged journalism is resonating in newsrooms. (2) But our findings also indicate that
actual audience expectations and desires (as perceived and experienced by journalists)
look somewhat different from assumptions about the audience underlying the pursuit of
engaged journalism. This indicates a discrepancy between Hearken’s philosophy, which
is grounded in optimistic conceptualizations of everyday citizens and community
engagement, and journalists’ experiences of a more reticent audience. (3) Moreover, our
analysis also finds that limited financial and human resources in newsrooms shape and
constrain how much audience members can be involved in the news-making process.
Discussion
A growing number throughout the news industry believe that journalism must embrace
the philosophy of “engagement” in order to solve its current crises of revenue and pub-
lic trust. This study set out to uncover what happens when that philosophy gets imple-
mented within news production. By comparing data collected from those who are
attempting to persuade newsrooms to embrace this more collaborative approach to their
audiences with data collected from newsrooms actually attempting to make this
approach a reality, this study provides a useful side-by-side comparison of the rhetoric
and performance of engaged journalism. In particular, it offers the first close look at
how engaged journalism proponents at one leading organization conceptualize the audi-
ence, and how well that conceptualization matches the experiences of journalists imple-
menting the model. In doing so, it attempts to identify and understand the gap between
the assumptions underlying “engaged journalism” – specifically surrounding what the
public wants from journalism – and the reality that journalists find themselves facing
“when the rubber meets the road.”
We find that Hearken’s model rests on a philosophical reorientation of news produc-
tion wherein journalists act as facilitators of public participation. This approach to jour-
nalism rests on an assumption shared by its advocates about unmet audience demand for
greater participation in the news. However, our interviews suggest that even as journal-
ists internalized and even normalized that role conception, some also experienced a gap
between the public participation they expected and that which they actually experienced.
Conversely, we also find that some newsrooms we interviewed experienced the opposite:
journalists reported feeling overwhelmed by their audience’s input and organizationally
unable to respond to it all. The result is a situation in which – either because of journal-
ists’ expectations or audiences’ reactions – a gap has emerged between the promise and
reality of engaged journalism.
Limitations
We faced some limitations in this study. First, there were aspects relating the affordances
of Hearken’s tools that we could not explore due to space constraints. For example, for
Schmidt et al. 15
this study, we did not explore if and to what extent Hearken’s software structures inter-
actions between journalists and audiences in patterned ways (see Schmidt and Lawrence
[2020] for such an analysis). Second, since this wasn’t a longitudinal research project,
it is impossible for us to conclude if the “normalization” we observed is temporary or if
it does indeed seep “into the DNA” of the newsrooms in which Hearken has been
adopted. On the one hand, previous research has found that when those within a news-
room most excited about Hearken leave their organization, those newsrooms become
more likely to drop Hearken’s services (Nelson, 2018b). On the other hand, Hearken’s
impact could be broader than newsrooms that have paid for their services. Some news-
rooms that have used Hearken may stop not because they do not believe in the philoso-
phy of engaged journalism, but because they have decided they can’t afford it or have
decided either to seek out alternative providers of engaged journalism services, or to
make do on their own.
This possibility gets at another limitation: although this study focused on Hearken,
that company is far from the only one promoting engaged journalism, nor is it the only
possible iteration of this philosophy (Green-Barber and McKinley, 2019). To be sure,
this study is more than an evaluation of Hearken’s practices. In fact, Hearken mainly
serves as a focal point to analyze the intersection of individual motivations and institu-
tional patterns in the interest of exploring how emerging practices of engaged journalism
point toward institutional change (if at all). By analyzing first how Hearken employees
conceptualize journalistic norms and values, and then how these norms and values are
interpreted and enacted by journalists, we seek to illuminate how the dialectic between
rhetoric and role performance creates both a community of practice with distinct journal-
istic routines and outlooks but also occupational and professional tensions that are not
easily reconciled. In short, we examine how the rhetoric of public-powered journalism is
translated into journalistic practices, and we analyze how normative assumptions (that is,
what engaged journalism advocates argue engagement with citizens should look like) are
enacted through the lived experiences of journalists (that is, what journalists’ attempts at
engagement with citizens actually looks like).
Finally, this study does not reflect the actual views of audiences about their willing-
ness to participate as the Hearken model of engaged journalism suggests that they will.
Rather, our findings reflect the views of journalists who have been working to evoke and
respond to public participation. Yet our findings point in the same direction as other stud-
ies that find moderate public response (at best) to new participatory affordances (Borger
et al., 2016; Domingo et al., 2008; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). It is interesting to con-
sider to what extent the negative feedback loop described by Borger et al. (2016: 722), in
which “the viability of participatory projects could. . .be diminished by a need and wish
for, but a factual lack of, reciprocity” was at work in the newsrooms we studied. As noted
above, some we interviewed spoke of the difficulty of responding effectively to audience
input, which may have lead some in the public to conclude the efforts weren’t truly recip-
rocal (see also Belair-Gagnon et al., 2019). Finally, it is possible that the forms of partici-
pation newsrooms pursue affect the public response. Strategies that invite the public into
journalistic spaces (ride-alongs with reporters and visits to the newsroom, for example)
may be viewed differently by members of the public than initiatives that bring journalists
into community spaces – a possibility worthy of future research.
16 Journalism 00(0)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iDs
Thomas R. Schmidt https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4497-9180
Jacob L. Nelson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2714-9924
Schmidt et al. 17
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Author biographies
Thomas R. Schmidt is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University of
California, San Diego, and the author of the book Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling
Movement in American Print Journalism (University of Missouri Press, 2019) as well as numerous
journal articles (e.g. in Journalism, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice). He was inducted
into the Kappa Tau Alpha National Honor Society for media scholars and received competitive
fellowships such as the Fulbright Scholarship and the Transatlantic Media Fellowship.
Schmidt et al. 19
Jacob L. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at Arizona State University, and a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the relationship between
journalism and the public. His research has been published in academic journals including New
Media & Society, Journalism, and Journalism Studies, as well as in public-facing outlets such as
Columbia Journalism Review and The Conversation.
Regina Lawrence is the Associate Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication Portland
and the Director of the Agora Journalism Center. She is a nationally recognized authority on politi-
cal communication, civic engagement, gender and politics, and the role of media in public dis-
course about politics and policy. Her two latest books are Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White
House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail and When the Press Fails: Political
Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, winner of the Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book
Award from the Political Communication section of the American Political Science Association.