By Insisting Journalists Engage With Their Audience, News Organizations May Be Setting Them Up For Abuse
News organizations are trying to do a better job connecting with their audiences, in hopes of overcoming the profession’s credibility problems and ensuring its long-term survival.
To do this, a growing number of newsrooms have for years embraced what’s called “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that typically refers to efforts to increase the communication between journalists and the people they hope to reach.
These efforts take many forms, and vary from online – for example, the use of social media to interact with readers about a story after it’s been published – to offline – for example, meetings between journalists and community members to discuss a story currently being produced.
At its best, engagement shows audiences that journalists are real people, with the training a...