Obstacles to audience engagement
Audience engagement sometimes leaves journalists feeling worse about their readers than they did before.
As I describe in my new book “Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public,” how journalists listen to their audiences, and the size of those audiences in the first place, are two important factors when it comes to journalists’ attempts to engage with their audiences.
As part of my research, I interviewed journalists at the Chicago Tribune, many of whom described the newspaper’s audience as massive and broad. They spoke about listening to that audience via emails and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Those interactions were typically not meaningful, constructive conversations, they said. More often, they were belligerent, angry and even threatening.
“They’re not reaching out to these people with story ideas,” one journalist said about the readers’ comments to reporters. “They’re just telling them, ‘You suck and you’re ugly and you’re biased and your hair sucks.’”
This type of audience feedback is increasingly widespread, and is indicative of what journalism studies scholar Thorsten Quandt calls “dark participation,” which he defines as “the evil flipside of citizen engagement.” It is also typically focused more at female journalists than their male counterparts.
BuzzFeed journalist Anne Helen Petersen described remarks she hears on social media in a report for Columbia Journalism Review: “Rot in hell. You’re a cunt. Maybe you wouldn’t be so mad if you weren’t so ugly.”
As one of the Tribune’s columnists said when asked about the trolling they often encountered: “When they all come after you at once, it kind of gives you the chills a little bit.”