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The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies

Bob Franklin, Scott A. Eldridge

Revisiting the Audience Turn in Journalism

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Irene Costera Meijer, Tim Groot Kormelink
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34
REVISITING THE AUDIENCE
TURN IN JOURNALISM
How a user-based approach changes
the meaning of clicks, transparency,
and citizen participation

Irene Costera Meijer and Tim Groot Kormelink

Attention for audiences is growing. Yet, journalism too often runs on assumptions and gut
feelings about what audiences want and how they consume news. While a decline in ratings
and revenues and the introduction of new digital platforms has forced news organizations to
become more considerate of their users, the habit of thinking for them rather than consult-
ing the users themselves is still deeply ingrained. Journalism scholars are not much better,
as Picone, Courtois, and Paulussen (2015) point out. The fact that even research dealing
explicitly with digital audiences tends to rely on information provided by news profession-
als rather than audiences themselves (cf. Anderson, 2011b; MacGregor, 2007; Vu, 2014) is
illustrative of the strength and persistence of the ‘newsroom-centricity’ of journalism studies
(Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009). This pattern leads to biased results, as our user-centered studies
show: news users’ habits, demands, and experiences are often more layered, nuanced, and
complex than news organizations can imagine. Drawing from these studies—conducted under
the auspices of the first author—we will challenge three dominant assumptions about the
impact of the digitization of journalism on its users. These assumptions illustrate how despite
increasing attention for audiences, a genuine audience turn in journalism and journalism
studies is needed to avoid systematic bias and to truly understand what journalism means from
a user perspective.
The first assumption is that interest in news can be captured in clicking metrics; we pre-
sent research results that illustrate what clicking and not clicking actually means for people
and how clicks are a limited instrument for capturing users’ interests. The second assumption
is that users appreciate what the digitization of journalism can offer them: more transpar-
ency and insight into how news is constructed. We demonstrate that journalism scholars
tend to overrate the value of transparency for audiences. The third assumption we will chal-
lenge is that citizen participation in professional journalism practices after initial enthusiasm
is doomed to fail. We show that the limited success of participatory journalism is due to an
underestimation of citizen journalists’ capabilities and confusion of tongues between users and
producers. Finally, we suggest that the systematic and automatic bias about news users is not

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only connected with the newsroom centricity of scholars, but may also be enhanced by single
method research, often surveys or web metrics.

Assumption 1: Clicks are a reliable standard of users’ interests

The recent availability of very large data sets (‘Big Data’) has enabled us to trace people’s digital
news practices. Tools like Google Analytics and Chartbeat let news organizations observe in real
time how many users are clicking on their news items. News professionals are increasingly taking
these clicks as a directive to their editorial choices and policies, including altering or removing
poorly clicked headlines, keeping or placing heavily clicked stories prominently on the website,
and expanding or following up popular stories (Anderson, 2011a; Boczkowski and Mitchelstein,
2013; Lee, Lewis, and Powers, 2012; Tandoc, 2014). Metrics are not only employed by com-
mercial news media to generate more traffic; public news media use clicks as evidence of their
public relevance (Karlsson and Clerwall, 2013), and journalists who do not have to deal with
economic concerns still monitor metrics to see if their stories are doing well: “It’s a gauge of my
work. […] If only five people are reading my stuff, I’m sad about it” (Usher, 2013). Throughout,
web metrics are seen as reliable data to gauge user preferences: clicks as a measure of news
interest. Because these metrics suggest that news readers are in essence primarily interested in
so-called junk news (entertainment, sports, crime, etc.), becoming more responsive to news
users’ preferences is not without consequences. It might even endanger our democratic society,
as argued by Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) and Nieuwsmonitor (2013).
However, making use of news might not be equivalent to finding it important or even hav-
ing an interest in it. And vice versa, nonuse may not mean people find it unimportant or do
not have an interest in it, as we concluded in an earlier study (Costera Meijer, 2008). Still,
measuring interest or value through usage frequency is a common research practice.
Rather than taking clicks at face value, in a recent study we not only employed the ‘think-
aloud-protocol’ to follow people’s digital news use closely and in real time but also used a
sensory ethnographic approach in our interviews (N = 56) to investigate what clicking meant
and when and why they clicked or did not click on news, resulting in a more complex story
(Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2016). The results suggest that there is no one-to-one
ratio between clicking behavior, demographic variables, and the level and type of interest
in news. Illustrating that the reasons people have for clicking are much more diverse than
the presence or absence of interest, we distinguished 30 distinct considerations, including
visual appeal, supersaturation, and informational completeness (see Groot Kormelink and Costera
Meijer, 2016, for full list).
Rather than their clicking patterns, people’s browsing behavior (which cannot be auto-
matically traced by web metrics) appears to be far more representative of their news interests.
For instance, when browsing the Al Jazeera website, Jelena (age 26) shows a keen interest in
the news, but this interest is not always captured in clicks:

I just look what it says on the main page and those are usually things of which I’m
already aware they’re happening. […] but then I just look at the headlines like uh,
what has happened last night. […] If I know a lot is happening, I’ll check a couple of
times per day to see if anything new has been added.

Jelena only needs to scan sentences and words to get the gist of what is going on, as she
is already aware of the main developments behind the headlines. This browsing behavior

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updates her about important developments without involving any clicking. As a result, when
looking purely at clicking patterns, one might erroneously conclude that Jelena has little
interest in this news.
The participants were not inclined to click on informationally complete headlines that
already told them all they wanted or needed to know about an event. Tessa (age 20) illus-
trates: “Very often you read the headline and then you already know, ok. […] if you can kind
of estimate what it says, […] why would I read it?” This, however, as Jelena also illustrated,
does not mean that the user does not pay attention to the headline itself. During the time
of the interviews, the Syria conflict was featured heavily in the news. While many partici-
pants did not click on these news items, they did want to stay informed about the situation,
gathering enough information from the headlines, and waiting to click until—from their
perspective—something ‘really new’ happened.
Not accounting for browsing patterns without clicks, then, metrics tend to overrate the
interest in headlines that invite users to click and underrate the significance of audiences’
appreciation of headlines that simply inform. This leads to a no-win situation where jour-
nalists grudgingly give the audience more of the junk news they think it wants (Strömbäck,
Karlsson, and Hopmann, 2012), whereas the users—while certainly also interested in click-
ing on funny or remarkable news—receive less of the important and recent news they expect
professional journalists to present them with (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2014).
In addition, some of the reasons for (not) clicking we found suggest that on top of traditional
journalistic values like relevance and topicality, users have additional criteria for what counts
as ‘valuable journalism’ (Costera Meijer, 2013a; Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015),
including feeding their inquisitiveness by getting a different perspective on a well-known
topic or finally understanding an issue by receiving the whole story rather than an isolated
update. This mismatch between what journalists think they know the audience wants and
what the audience actually wants, between perceived interest and actual interest, may lead to
a downward spiral where, as O’Shea (2011) and Rosenstiel et al. (2007) suggest, journalism
loses both quality and users.

Assumption 2: Transparency displaces ‘objectivity’ as

primary standard for good journalism
Transparency is a new standard for journalism. The digitization of journalism and the
dwindling trust in news media have “prompted calls for a normative shift from objectivity
to transparency in journalism” (Karlsson, Clerwall, and Nord, 2014: 669). Most journalism
scholars focus on what Karlsson (2010: 537) aptly named ‘disclosure transparency,’ which
implies “that news producers can explain and be open about the way news is selected and pro-
duced.” This kind of transparency has been ascribed the potential to (re-)establish the trust of
the public and to enhance the credibility of journalism (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007; Hayes,
Singer, and Geppos, 2007). When news organizations become more transparent about the
newsmaking process, the character of news changes. From a finished product (published after
it was found to be right and thus true) news becomes a continuous process of truth-seeking,
enabling “the website audience to literally see in real time … segments of the gathering and
processing stages of news work” (Karlsson, 2011: 289). Research suggests that journalists
themselves are hardly dying to let the audience see what is “hidden behind the curtain,”
but feel they have little choice due to decreasing audience trust and increasing competition
(Chadha and Koliska, 2015: 225), as illustrated by a Washington Post editor:

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We are really aware that people have very high levels of suspicion about the media
generally. Rightly or wrongly, the public does not trust us and so we have to make
an effort to ‘show’ readers that we are professional in the way we do our job … also
there’s definitely the aspect of competition.
(2015: 221)

As Craft and Heim (2009: 226) rightly pointed out, this focus on credibility is a “focus on the
needs of the news organization, not the readers or viewers.” They suggested examining what
methods of transparency work best for them. Following this suggestion, Doeve and Costera
Meijer (2013) investigated two assumptions underlying most research: (1) transparency will
enhance trust and credibility and (2) the user is interested in a look behind the scenes.
Contrary to scholarly and journalistic expectations, getting insight into the construction
process of news was not appreciated by the majority of the respondents. In-depth user inter-
views (N = 19) (including cue card exercises to let participants rank transparency in relation
to other news values like reliability and objectivity) suggest that both people’s understanding
as well as their appreciation of ‘transparency’ were limited. When the distribution of these
findings was checked through a survey (N = 270), the majority of the participants preferred
to experience news as a completed product, showing little interest in disclosure practices.
These news users did not experience transparency as a positive value in its own right—like
objectivity, for instance—and they preferred to hold on to the ‘magic’ quality of news. In line
with the results of Van der Wurff and Schönbäch (2014: 128) who state that “[n]o more than
12 percent of the [Dutch] population would like to know how news items come about,” “just
getting the regular news” was more than enough for this majority. In fact, receiving updates
all the time meant you could never be sure when the news you read represented the ‘full story’
and could therefore be trusted. As Stijn, a 25-year-old neuropsychology student, explained:

When I read something, I often tend to believe it. And more so when it’s in the paper
than on the internet. I know that doesn’t make sense [laughs], but that’s just the way
it feels. Because on the internet you can write something down so quickly, whrrrrrr,
enter [makes rapid typing movements on an imaginary keyboard], and there it is. …
They update the news so often. It’s like: o, this is it. O, no, it isn’t. We changed what
we just said, again.
(Doeve and Costera Meijer, 2013: 5)

Merely a small minority experienced disclosure transparency as increasing the reliability of news.
These news users also loved being informed about the process of news production, preferably in
real time, through hyperlinks, tweets from journalists, or alternative sources. What drove them
to closely follow the news as process was the opportunity to learn something and to experience
the news from the angle of the reporter, as if being a participant observer of journalism-in-
action. This inclination resembles the ‘body snatching’ preference—experiencing the news
through the ‘body,’ the perspective, of the protagonist of the news item—of news consumers
(Costera Meijer, 2008).
If participants were able to experience news as permanent work in progress, which of course
news is by its very nature, they welcomed strategies to enhance the transparency of its produc-
tion process. If on the other hand participants demanded from news that it was a completed,
finished (and thus ‘true’) product, they found it difficult to deal with disclosure transparency,
because it emphasized the provisional, constructed, man-made nature of journalism. In the
participants’ experience, the digitization of journalism, including the increasing possibilities

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for the audience to question, contribute, and criticize its truth, challenges journalistic author-
ity by the online exposition of the constructedness of news. Generally, participants did want
to be sure news organizations were held accountable for any mistakes they might make, but
apart from initiatives which would increase journalism’s trustworthiness like actor and source
transparency (Heise et al., 2014), the vast majority had no desire to be confronted with dis-
closure transparency in their everyday news use (cf. Groenhart, 2012; van der Wurff and
Schönbach, 2014).

Assumption 3: Citizens are unable to participate

in professional journalism
As Borger et al. (2013b) point out, most academics initially agreed that digital technologies
would enable and encourage audiences to participate in the making of news. However, as it
turned out, one inhibitory factor is that the majority of journalists have a hard time incor-
porating participatory ideals and practices into their conventional journalistic values, roles,
and routines (Borger et al., 2013b; Deuze, Bruns, and Neuberger, 2007; Williams, Wardle,
and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011). Even frontrunners who pioneered user participation and who
are therefore expected to be more open-minded than ‘regular’ editorial staff, reframed user
participation—an active term which underscores users’ agency—into a passive genre ‘user
generated content’ (Borger et al., 2013a; Costera Meijer, 2013a). This genre, as Hermida
(2012: 313) concluded, is appreciated by professionals but only in exceptional circumstances
like natural or man-made disasters. Ordinarily, as Heise et al. (2014: 422) suggest, journalists
tend to assume that citizens are unable to participate in professional journalism, because they
lack professional standards and routines like objectivity, and their motivations are “rather
driven by affective and self-centered motivations (venting anger, self-display).” When we
displace the focus in participatory journalism studies from the newsroom and the professionals
involved to a citizen’s point of view, a different picture surfaces.
Firstly, participation of citizens in professional journalism apparently works out when and
if professionals and citizens have corresponding expectations of each other’s roles and respon-
sibilities. Citizenside France offers a good example (Nicey, 2013). This news photo agency pays
amateurs for their original content, which is mediated, checked, and certified by professionals,
who use classic gatekeeping procedures in addition to metadata, geolocation, and community
management to transform “testimony into news information” (Nicey, 2013: 210).
When financial compensation is not available or sought after, Abma (2013), Costera
Meijer et al. (2010), Costera Meijer (2013b), Heise et al. (2014), Fröhlich, Quiring, and
Engesser (2012), and Borger et al. (2014) observed how citizens were willing to participate
in professional journalism in return for learning the trade and improving one’s job qualifica-
tions, a sizable audience, the expansion of one’s network, recognition, or appreciation. When
the news organization was unable or unwilling to provide such quid pro quo compensations,
citizens would gradually lose interest.
Thirdly, it is not only journalists who accuse citizens of not being able to meet professional
standards of factuality and objectivity. Allegations of routine subjectivity and self-centeredness
also come from citizens. When interviewing citizen reporters participating in a hyperlocal
project of a regional public broadcaster, they were critical about professional journalists who
“only come if there are riots” (Costera Meijer, 2013c; Costera Meijer et al., 2010). Citizen
reporters accused their professional counterparts not only of a lack of facticity and objectivity,
they also distanced themselves explicitly from the dominant conflict frame used by journalists
to dramatize and spice up what happened in their neighborhood.

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Paul: Well, I think we are quite objective. In any case, more objective than the
national journalists. (...)
Interviewer: And why is that?
Paul: Because we do not earn our bread with it.
Frank: Right.
(Everyone laughs)
Paul: Because we don’t necessarily have to get high ratings. We don’t have to be liked.

These participatory journalists were proud that their amateur status gave them the freedom
and independence to report about reality with an open mind instead of having to deliver news
items within preconceived journalistic frames. Paradoxically, as we concluded, the success of
this particular participatory journalism project depended on the regional broadcaster’s will-
ingness to grant them the freedom to produce their own weekly series and to provide techni-
cal support by professionals who understood the art of storytelling rather than newsmaking
(Costera Meijer, 2013c; Costera Meijer et al., 2010).
Yet, even in a situation where the professional news organization explicitly aims to inte-
grate citizens’ initiatives in its professional routines, citizen journalists will encounter numer-
ous obstacles, as Abma (2013) found out through three case studies. Citizens have trouble
getting heard by professionals when they do not conform to conventional roles as sources,
tippers, PR, or activists. In one case, a citizen named Harry had made a video about an alder-
man’s changing views about admitting new energy-generation windmills.1 He had taken pains
to shoot this video as if he were a journalist (and not an activist) and had followed journalistic
procedures like hearing both sides and asking all the relevant questions. His story was, even in
classical journalistic terms, an important one. Yet, weeks after he had e-mailed the video, he
was still not contacted by the broadcaster. Abma (2013) retraced the entire process and asked
an editor to explain what could have gone wrong. One explanation of why the message had
remained unnoticed was that it was e-mailed to the broadcaster’s general e-mail address; an
address no one feels particularly responsible for. Second, even if the e-mail had been noticed,
the regional newscaster might have had difficulties downloading it because it used a mail
system that was not easily compatible with the file-sharing software “We-Transfer” Harry had
used. A third and more viable explanation was that the message was not written in terms of a
recognizable genre, for example, a press release, and on top of that contained as return address
noreply@wetransfer.com. Although the message was accompanied by Harry’s personal expla-
nation and his mail address, both a press release format and a clear sender were indispensable
to recognize valuable information. The editor explained: “If someone sends a press release
about a big happening, I would have known what to do with it. In this case I had to find out
for myself.” This event illustrates how both the broadcaster and the citizen reporter need new
conventions to recognize when and where citizens are acting as journalists and thus are step-
ping outside their accepted roles as source, tipper, PR, or activist. An expansion of journalistic
discourse and citizens’ and professionals’ imagination of networked journalism is needed as a
precondition for collaborating constructively in news making projects.

Conclusion
This chapter argued for a genuine audience turn in journalism studies by approaching web
metrics, professional values, and user-generated content from the angle of audiences, users,
and participants instead of journalism professionals as is customary. This approach enabled a

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debunking of three powerful assumptions about the meaning of clicks, transparency, and par-
ticipatory journalism. First the newsroom centricity of journalism studies results in an incor-
rect assessment of audiences’ news use practices. Journalists often assume that users’ attention
for news is reflected by their clicking patterns indicating a limited scope of news favorites:
sports, crime, and celebrity news. We concluded, however, that browsing patterns (including
checking, scanning, and snacking) provide more insight into what counts as useful or valuable
journalism to its users. Ignoring browsing as yardstick for measuring users’ concerns might lead
to a downward spiral of both quality and use of journalism.
The second bias is the incorrect assessment of audiences’ appreciation of particular news
values. Contrary to newsroom expectations, disclosure transparency is not a convincing strat-
egy to regain audiences’ trust in news; only a small minority is able to enjoy its experience.
The vast majority of the participants did not appreciate the uncertainty such openness results
in and tended to trust news insofar as it reports rounded off events.
The third bias corresponds with an incorrect assessment of citizens’ competences and will-
ingness to participate in news production. From the participants’ perspective, participatory
journalism works if news organizations supply a free zone in which new gatekeeping proce-
dures, new routines around networking and collaboration, and new forms of storytelling are
developed to incorporate user-generated content into their professional news making proce-
dures. In addition, a shared discourse is needed as a condition for collaborative journalism.
Finally, if we recognize that the digitization, the globalization, and the increasingly partici-
patory character of journalism require us to listen more often and more carefully to audiences,
users, and participants, we will need to radically alter our approach. A genuine audience turn
in journalism studies may start from the principle of ‘requisite variety,’ or the need for tools
and instruments “to be at least as complex, flexible, and multifaceted as the phenomena being
studied” (Tracy, 2010: 841). Requisite variety may provide a better starting point for journal-
ism research than the one-method approach (often surveys) that is habitually being used (cf.
Costera Meijer, 2016). This is not only important from a scientific point of view but also
because news media justify their policies and their financial and personal investments on the
basis of these journalism studies.

Further reading
A prime example of a study that starts from a genuine audience perspective is Media consump-
tion and public engagement: Beyond the presumption of attention (2007) by Nick Couldry, Sonia
Livingstone, and Tim Markham. Kim Christian Schrøder’s News media old and new fluctuating
audiences, news repertoires and locations of consumption (2015) is also indispensable. Criteria
and directives for good audience research are further discussed in Practicing audience-centred
journalism research by Irene Costera Meijer (forthcoming). Pablo Boczkowski’s and Eugenia
Mitchelstein’s The news gap: When the information preferences of the media and the public diverge
(2013) provides further exploration of the differences in selection choices by news profession-
als and news users as measured through most clicked stories, whereas Tim Groot Kormelink’s
and Irene Costera Meijer’s What clicks actually mean: Exploring digital news users practices (2016)
provides a detailed account of clicking explored from a user perspective.

Note
1 An extensive version of this story can be read in Domingo, Masip, and Costera Meijer (2015).

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