How to tackle the conceptual inconsistency of audience engagement? The introduction of the Dynamic Model of Audience Engagement

Abstract

Scholars repeatedly argue that ‘audience engagement’ as a concept and, consequently as a practice, remain inconsistent and ambiguous. Such conceptual inconsistency is in tension with the relevance that the phenomenon of audience engagement has gained in contemporary discussions about journalism. In this article, we tackle the conceptual inconsistency of audience engagement by conducting a qualitative examination of all academic peer-reviewed publications (217) that dealt with ‘audience engagement’ and interrelated terms such as ‘user engagement’, ‘news engagement’ and ‘engaged journalism’, published between 2007 and 2018. Grounded in this empirical examination, we found that, first, definitions and operationalisations of audience engagement emphasised the production context of journalism over that of reception, yielding relatively unbalanced insights into the phenomenon. Second, we offer a Dynamic Model of Audience Engagement composed of four dimensions: normative, habitual, spatio-temporal and embodied. By grasping the complexity and multidimensionality of audience engagement and by aligning audience engagement with the notion with journalism’s democratic goal of informing the citizenry and more concretely its audience, our Dynamic Model of Audience Engagement facilitates future academic discussions in and around the topic of audience engagement.