“We are the In-betweeners”: Communicating the Expertise of Boundary Spanning Audience-Oriented Professionals in Media Organizations

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the audience turn in journalism being actively embraced, media organizations are increasingly hiring audience-oriented experts. Drawing on interviews with 57 audience-oriented professionals working in 46 U.S. news organizations, this study situates audience-oriented roles as boundary spanning experts and aims to understand how they conceptualize engagement through job roles and routines and communicate the value of their expertise within the organization. The findings suggest that these individuals are faced with challenges of communicating their expertise to the various actors in news work, especially when faced with a paradox of adaptability to journalistic authority and institutional norms. These experts face structural challenges including continuous lack of understanding and acceptance of engagement experts within news organizations, despite the growing emphasis placed on audience engagement. Media organizations are internally resisting the expertise of these nominated boundary spanners by being bound to traditional institutional models of news production and promotion.