Journalism Studies

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(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with

News

Steen Steensen, Raul Ferrer-Conill & Chris Peters

To cite this article: Steen Steensen, Raul Ferrer-Conill & Chris Peters (2020) (Against a)
Theory of Audience Engagement with News, Journalism Studies, 21:12, 1662-1680, DOI:
10.1080/1461670X.2020.1788414

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JOURNALISM STUDIES
2020, VOL. 21, NO. 12, 1662–1680
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1788414

(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News

a b,c d
Steen Steensen , Raul Ferrer-Conill and Chris Peters
a
Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway; bDepartment of
Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden; cDepartment of Media and Social
Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway; dDepartment of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University,
Denmark

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary Audience engagement;
discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create behavioural; emotional;
sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied metrics; normative;
spatiotemporal
to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience
behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new
currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing
tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and
study it primarily through quantifiable data, is limiting. In
response, we develop a heuristic theory of audience engagement
with news comprising four dimensions—the technical-
behavioural, emotional, normative and spatiotemporal—and
explicate these in terms of different relations of engagement
between human-to-self, human-to-human, human-to-content,
human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. Paradoxically, this
model comprises a specific theory of audience engagement while
simultaneously making visible that constructing a theory of
audience engagement is an impossible task. The article concludes
by articulating methodological premises, which future empirical
research on audience engagement should consider.

Introduction
Audiences have been ascribed a diverse set of roles with varying degrees of significance
throughout the history of media and communication research in general and journalism
studies in particular. They have been portrayed as masses that are manipulated, citizens
that are informed, consumers that select, products that are sold, individuals that seek or
avoid, networks that form, participants that co-produce, users that interact, groups that
meet, and phantom constructs that are imagined, among many other—often incommen-
surable—conceptualizations (Napoli 2003; Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2005). Even
though such varying notions of audiences have different discursive “baggage”, most of
them imply a common interest in audiences as behaviouristic beings. It is the behaviour
of audiences that primarily drives media companies and researchers’ interest in them:

CONTACT Steen Steensen [email protected]

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
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 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1663

what they do when they engage with news and other forms of media content; how, where,
and when they do it; and what motivates their behaviour.
In recent years, as we have entered the “media analytics stage” of technological media
(Manovich 2018), audience metrics have come to the fore in these discussions, especially
within the news industry, which relies on metrics not only to monitor audience behaviour
but also, increasingly, as the preferred way to analyze the inner and perhaps unconscious
motivations driving audience engagement (e.g American Press Institute 2019). Academics
focusing on the institutional state-of-the-art understandably follow in tandem, researching
the uses, feelings, and social integration of analytic systems (e.g., Tandoc 2019; Zamith,
Belair-Gagnon, and Lewis 2019). However, marshalling data in this way conflates what
metrics actually do (a system logic that aggregates measurable digital signals, and correlates
this with pre-existent data through models, algorithms, and machine learning) with what
they seem to imply (a market logic that hopes to predict people’s preferences and predispo-
sitions). Within journalism studies, researchers have been preoccupied with the connections
between audience metrics, engagement and news, arguing that engagement is a significant
factor for the business models of digital-born and legacy news media (e.g., Batsell 2015;
Nelson and Webster 2016), and that newsroom practices are increasingly shaped by the
analysis of audience metrics in order to create news suited to engage the audience
(e. g. Cherubini and Nielsen 2016; Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018; Zamith, Belair-Gagnon,
and Lewis 2019) even though the adoption of audience metrics in newsrooms might have
been slower and less universal than first assumed (Nelson and Tandoc 2019). In recent
years, new roles such as “engagement editor”, “engagement reporter”, “head of audience
engagement” and similar titles have emerged in newsrooms, predominantly in the US, the
UK and Australia. Their work is “to distill the information gathered about the audience, con-
veying audience behaviour to the editorial team and proposing a course of action that con-
siders and aligns with audience insight”, according to Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc (2018, 444).
There are, however, at least two interwoven conceptual and empirical challenges with the
ways in which industry representatives and some researchers often deal with issues of
engagement in the current stage of media analytics. First, engagement—which is closely
linked to personal wants and needs, emotions and other qualitative aspects of social life—
is typically treated as a quantifiable and measurable phenomenon. It is therefore difficult
to assess to what degree audience metrics can actually capture the essence of engagement.
Second, engagement metrics are not, in reality, metrics of engagement—they are actually
measures of interaction and participation, or simple popularity cues (Haim, Kümpel, and
Brosius 2018). In other words, the metrics used to analyze engagement are aggregated snap-
shots of digital traces that signal behavioural actions which do not necessarily translate to key
considerations of how engagement occurs. In other fields of research, such as social psychol-
ogy, public engagement is often linked to concepts with more ethereal qualities like trust and
respect. Similarly, in political communication and social movements literature, engagement is
frequently equated with ideals of citizenship. Boeckmann and Tyler (2002), for example,
found that civic engagement increases when people feel they are respected members of a
community, something which is difficult to capture and measure with behavioural metrics.
The broader problem, to put it simply, is that while engagement can take many forms, the
metrics media companies are able to generate and rely upon only provide insights into a
small portion of what engagement is and entails. Moreover, researchers tend to adopt this
industry discourse, which further conflates audience metrics with audience engagement.
1664 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

This article addresses these issues to argue against the continuation of a tendency to
truncate our knowledge of what audience engagement is in relation to news, lest we
lose sight of its more profound conceptual implications. Specifically, we illustrate how
the dominant technical and metrics-oriented understanding and operationalization of
audience engagement leads to a confusion between engagement as an emotional state
that spans across time and space on the one hand, and technical behaviours like digital
interaction and participation that carry normative implications on the other. Based on
this argument, we unpack four dimensions we believe should be invoked to theoretically
assess audience engagement with news: (1) the technical-behavioural dimension, which
accounts for the actions that come out of audience engagement and the digital traces
those actions leave behind; (2) the emotional dimension, which covers how audience
engagement is the result of social-psychological and affective connections between
media and audiences; (3) the normative dimension, in which distinctions between
wanted and unwanted, good and bad forms of audience engagement are made; and
(4) the spatiotemporal dimension, which makes visible that audience engagement is
shaped by social context across time and space, as opposed to something that spon-
taneously occurs in the here and now, only to then abruptly vanish again. Following
from this, we explicate these dimensions in terms of different relations of audience
engagement, specifically between human-to-self, human-to-human, human-to-content,
human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine.
It is crucial to note that this four-dimensional heuristic approach to conceptualize audi-
ence engagement is not intended to be an all-encompassing, “grand theory”. Rather, we
argue that audience engagement is so complex that, at best, one can modestly aim to pro-
blematize, systematize and clarify key dimensions that shape engagement. In order to
offer pragmatic ways to attend to such challenges, in the final sections of this article,
we highlight some of the implications of our audience-centric theorizing of engagement,
deconstruct our own argument to expose some of its limitations, before finally offering
some methodological premises to help inform research designs.

What is Audience Engagement?

Several scholars have raised explicit concerns about the lack of concrete definitions of
engagement (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018; Meier, Kraus, and Michaeler 2018; Nelson
2018). However, scholarship on audience engagement often agrees that it “refers to the
cognitive, emotional, or affective experiences that users have with media content or
brands” (Broersma 2019, 1). Such an open approach positions engagement as a slippery
concept because it is experiential, which implies concrete forms of action and interaction,
while at the same time emotional, which connotes a highly subjective relation with media.
In that sense, Hill (2019:, 6) offers a pragmatic conception of engagement, which posits it
as an all-encompassing term to represent how audiences “experience media content, arte-
facts and events, from (their) experience of live performances, to social media engage-
ment, or participation in media itself”. We align with such an audience-centric
understanding of engagement, but recognize that this only accounts for one possible per-
spective of engagement related to journalism. Nelson (2019), for instance, distinguishes
between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement, the latter pointing to
how news organizations encourage audiences to contribute content and story ideas to
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1665

news. However, such a distinction is not as clear-cut as it may seem, as the ways in which
news publishers utilize reception-oriented engagement through audience metrics clearly
impact the production of news (Tandoc 2015), and vice versa. For example, if reception-
oriented metrics indicate that certain types of news create more engagement, news
organizations will probably choose to produce more such news. Similarly, the algorithmic
prioritization of most read, liked, or shared stories makes audiences more likely to encoun-
ter and potentially “engage” with them. This means that such automated parsing of behav-
ioural engagement can shape news consumption by recommending readers what others
have consumed.
In this respect, distinguishing between reception and production-oriented engagement
can be important in understanding how, for example, for-profit and nonprofit news pro-
viders relate differently to audience engagement (Belair-Gagnon, Nelson, and Lewis 2019).
However, such a distinction does little to address the underlying epistemological problem,
namely that engagement is predominantly conceptualized as behavioural. A first step
towards a clearer understanding of audience engagement is therefore to distinguish
between felt and behavioural engagement. Felt engagement relates to affective outcomes
and intentions, while behavioural engagement relates to performance (Stumpf, Tymon,
and van Dam 2013) and what Lawrence, Radcliffe, and Schmidt (2018) call “practiced
engagement”. In practice, the issue is that identifying and quantifying engagement
favours behaviour over emotion. This is likely attributable to the fact that behaviour is,
undoubtedly, easier to pinpoint. As humans—and relatedly, as researchers—while we
are not always adept at identifying emotions, we have learned to observe behaviour, as
well as building systems to record and interpret it. The result is increasingly sophisticated
technical systems that operationalize a desire to quantify behaviour in all walks of social
life (Espeland and Stevens 2008). Measuring felt engagement is much more difficult,
despite continued efforts in disciplines such as psychology, computer science, neuro-
science, and linguistics to model quantifiable behavioural cues—such as facial expression
or word choice (Zeng et al. 2009), and even mouse cursor movements (Hibbeln et al.
2017)—said to capture particular affective states.
In Figure 1, which offers a heuristic overview of some common practices of engage-
ment with the news, we can clearly see this challenge. The figure illustrates various
kinds of audience engagement with news along two axes, technicality and emotionality,
which also vary in terms of intensity. The types of engagement on the upper half of the
figure, the ones that news organizations tend to spend time and money capturing, are
the only ones that can be reliably captured and measured by audience metrics. Paradoxi-
cally, the types of engagement in the lower half of the figure, the ones that are difficult to
capture with audience metrics, are the ones that might be the most profound. This is the
kind of engagement that affects people, that perhaps changes views and behaviours and
therefore has democratic impact. This kind of engagement can manifest itself as technical
engagement, but—as audience research has clearly shown (e.g., Swart, Peters, and
Broersma 2018; Ytre-Arne and Moe 2018)—quite often it does not. The perhaps somewhat
banal but nonetheless crucial point is that people can be emotionally engaged with news
even if they do not participate in it by creating content, commenting, sharing or liking
news stories online. And most often, they do not.
The second step towards a clearer understanding of audience engagement with news
is untangling its spatiotemporal and normative aspects. Engagement builds, fluctuates,
1666 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

Figure 1. The challenge of metrics. Examples of audience engagement with varying degrees of
emotional and technical intensity

and diminishes over time, and relates to time in both linear (i.e., cumulative awareness,
developing knowledge) and non-linear (i.e., monitorial interest, affective sentiment)
ways. And yet, it is almost impossible to properly demarcate when engagement starts
and ends, or for that matter, how it spreads. Moreover, engagement is linked to socio-cul-
tural and geographical contexts. The same news event or experience might cause different
degrees of engagement in different spaces. Also, assessing the quality of engagement
declares an obvious normative dimension that is often forgotten or implicit in both indus-
try and scholarship (Nelson 2018). The emotional responses people may have to news and
the consequent actions they might perform—what Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham
(2010) refer to as the “public connection” that bridges people’s private worlds to the
world beyond—can range from constructive to destructive, in relation to civic ideals.
Engagement can be normatively positive or negative, however, news companies’ drive
to increase user engagement as a key performance indicator (KPI) positions engagement
as an inherently positive aspect. Yet, as instances of harassed journalists (Chen, Pain, and
Chen 2018), disinformation campaigns (Quandt 2018), or the increase of incivility in com-
ments sections (Su et al. 2018) evidently indicate, high engagement is often demonstrably
harmful.
Engagement carries dialectical tensions of objective actions and subjective experiences,
of material and symbolic practices, of behaviour and emotion that, when flattened
through metrics-based fiat, quickly become reductionist because they fail to capture the
social, spatial, temporal, and normative. In the following sections, we unpack this complex-
ity by looking more closely at four central dimensions of audience engagement that are, to
varying degrees, explicit and implicit in public discourse surrounding it: the technical-
behavioural, emotional, normative and spatiotemporal.
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1667

The Technical-Behavioural Dimension of Audience Engagement

Media companies and researchers have long monitored audience behaviour, although
recent years have seen this done in increasingly sophisticated ways. Indeed, audience
metrics have become so complex, rich and powerful in the digital era that they are tar-
geted as a business model in themselves (Belair-Gagnon and Holton 2018). The real
value of global mega-companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook lies in their sophisti-
cated methods for harvesting, analyzing and capitalizing from tremendous amounts of big
data on user behaviour, which empowers them not only with knowledge and insights that
advertizers are willing to pay for, but also with a wider control over cultural and social net-
works (Taplin 2017). The rapid expansion of computational power, ubiquity of digital track-
ing, and relative affordability of many straightforward analytics measures and packages
has made the “datafication” of citizens, publics, consumers, audiences, or users increas-
ingly foundational for institutions across society, often not only as a tool, but as an entirely
new epistemological paradigm for making sense of the world (cf. Kitchin 2014; Bolin and
Velkova 2020).
In newsrooms, these trends have gained increasing prominence over the past decade.
As news media increasingly rely on quantification (Coddington 2015; Ferrer-Conill 2017),
user metrics become the embodiment of the audience in the newsroom. The current
dominant position of metrics and analytics to “make sense” of digital news audiences,
makes the technical-behavioural dimension of audience engagement quite powerful. It
is not our claim that audience behaviour and the digital traces they leave behind are irre-
levant to engagement. However, there is conceptual and empirical value in specifying and
distinguishing between different types of behaviours and interactions to elicit a more
comprehensive account of how they relate to engagement. Ksiazek, Peer, and Lessard
(2014) place engagement on a continuum from exposure to interactivity, while McMillan’s
(2005) overview of different kinds of interactivity and thereby behaviours of engagement
offers a productive way to start unpacking the various aspects of the technical-behavioural
dimension of audience engagement. McMillan distinguishes between human-to-human,
human-to-computer and human-to-content interactivity, and argues that these three
kinds of interactivity can be divided in features, processes and perceptions. Features are
the characteristics of the communication environment that make it interactive (the tech-
nologies, platforms, etcetera that facilitate interactions), while processes are the actual
activity of interacting. Perceptions, on the other hand, are the beliefs in, and assessments
of, the degrees to which the features have affordances that enable interaction. These three
categories, or phases, of interactivity are therefore to a certain degree similar to our dis-
tinction between technicality, behaviours, emotions and normativity, as the features are
inherently technical, the processes are behavioural and the perceptions are both
emotional and normative. (In a later review of interactivity research, McMillan (2019)
exchanged “processes” with “actions”, thereby underlining to an even greater extent
this categories’ connection with the behavioural.) The important point arising from this
—and elaborated upon further below, see Table 1—is that technical-behavioural inter-
actions with news (and other media content), and thereby engagement with such
content, are inherently tied to things that are difficult to measure, like beliefs, value assess-
ments, and emotions. McMillan’s original model of interactivity therefore establishes a
fruitful point of reference not only when attempting to construct a model of audience
 1668
Table 1. Examples of audience engagement dependent on relations and dimensions.
Relations of audience engagement
Human-to-self Human-to-human Human-to-content Human-to-machine Machine-to-machine

S. STEENSEN ET AL.
Dimensions of Technical- . Sensory interaction with . Using instant . Interacting with media . Utilizing technical . Activating software
audience behavioural media and corresponding messaging, phone, texts (written text, affordances to interact that automatically
engagement bodily responses (e.g. brain email, etc. to contact video, audio, etc) with media (Navigation harvests audience
waves, eye movements, others (unpassionately) and search tools, metrics and/or shares
heart rate, sweating, etc.) uploading services, self- such data with 3rd
tracking and parties
measurement, etc.)

Emotional . Conducting inner . F2F or mediated . Emotional condition for . Emotional condition for . Algorithmic processes
monologue interpersonal dialogue or reaction to media or reaction to to harvest/share/
. Experiencing feelings (passionately) texts and topics technological affordances analyze audience
of media metrics related to, for
instance, sentiments

Normative . Ascribing meaning and . Ascribing meaning and . Finding media texts or . Positive or negative . Positive or negative
value to media value to media topics relevant and evaluations of the automatic evaluation
. Positive or negative through dialogue with meaningful machinery (hardware of audience behaviour
personal assessment, others . Positive or negative and/or software) used to . Economic value (e.g
possibly based on . Positive or negative reaction to media texts consume media contributing to
autobiographical collective assessment, or topics economic gains or
experience. possibly based on losses for companies
identity or involved)
demographics.

Spatiottemporal . Connection with past and . Cumulative collective . Spur of the moment or . Using familiar, . Data collection around
future feelings and experiences of long-lasting personalized machinery spatiotemporal
experiences, as with previous dialogical engagement with (hardware and/or identifiers, long-term
personal memory or interaction around particular texts and software) to consume pattern recognition
expectations. media and future topics in particular and/or produce content and automated
. Constituting a sense of expectations. physical/geographical in changing contexts adjustment.
place through media use. . Physical or visual contexts.
places, in which social
interaction around
media occurs.
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1669

engagement in which various interactions, or relations, are accounted for, but also for
understanding how the technical-behavioural dimension is related to both the emotional
dimension and the normative dimension.

The Emotional Dimension of Audience Engagement

It seems evident that one of the key assumptions of audience engagement, namely an
affective disposition toward mediated information, is challenging to capture with tra-
ditional metrics. Similarly, from a conceptual point of view, models that neglect to
attend the attitudinal and affective underpinnings of the emotional dimension of engage-
ment are incomplete (Gastil and Xenos 2010). Affect is conventionally understood as the
basic sense of feeling, while emotions are the expression of those feelings. Intimately
imbricated, affect can be thought of as the unconscious potentiality that prefigures
engagement, a “general way of sense-making,” that extends beyond feeling to inform
our “sensibility toward the world surrounding us, which is inclusive of potentialities” (Papa-
charissi 2015, 15). Emotion is the expression of affect, often individualized and—by
definition—relational, that is to say directed toward something (e.g., a person, issue, tech-
nology, etcetera), in a way that blurs the misguided binary between emotion/reason or
cognition/affect. Whether in a commonsensical, literal, or conceptual sense, the notion
of engagement presupposes some degree of affective potential and emotional interaction
with the activity or orientation under investigation. While it need not presume the
strength, nor the specific character or quality of the disposition, attentiveness to the
emotional aspects of engagement are central given their significance “in the constitution
of social relationships, institutions, and processes” (Barbalet 2001, 9).
Journalism, like most institutions in the creative industries, is—and always has been—
an emotional industry that in programmed ways gives rise to fear and anger, inspires joy
and affection, begets sadness and surprise, and many other emotional dispositions (Peters
2011; Steensen 2017; Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). This occurs across a variety of news-related
practices, experienced with varied intensities by different members of the audience.
This subjective potential—the idea of bridging between the particular and identifying
with something “greater” (Steensen 2017)—is what is frequently meant when we speak
of engagement, with emotion typically thought of as the more intense and visible mani-
festation therein. A person can become acutely-concerned, passionately-discuss, even
actively-campaign around an issue of public affairs through their engagement with jour-
nalism. Engagement can also be emotionally less intense and require limited audience
investment, in line with what Picone et al. (2019) label “small acts of engagement”, such
as liking, sharing, and commenting.
Accordingly, a theoretical approach to audience engagement with news absent affect
and emotion—no matter how helpful in broadening our understanding of the relative
value of different digitally-measurable actions—is left wanting. This should be fairly
uncontroversial, given the influence of the affective turn that swept across the humanities
and social sciences in the 1990s. When thinking about audience engagement with news,
the value and necessity of such a perspective becomes evident—engagement is about the
potential to act. It is about understanding what combination of forces actually cause a
transformative shift to occur, be it action, behaviour, or sentiment. Moreover, it is about
indeterminacy, the “never-quite-knowing” quality of affect, which points to the fact that
1670 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

the sociocultural and political implications of engagement will not necessarily be some-
thing positive. Affective engagement and heightened emotional investment in the
news may lead to outpourings of positive sentiment, as when donations soar in response
to a humanitarian disaster, but such moments of promise can also lead to harmful out-
comes, as when migrants are attacked—or killed—by those fearing the humanitarian
crisis witnessed from afar is becoming a threat at home. This is precisely why engagement
often remains so elusive to news organizations (Nelson 2018), and so difficult to capture
for researchers, who both tend to focus on the here and now of news audiences as
opposed to their processes of becoming over time (Peters and Schrøder 2018). In the
ongoing era of digital fragmentation, journalism increasingly comprises and facilitates
entry into a diverse range of affective spaces, meaning the types of audience engagement
that occur are potentially quite diverse, not only in terms of their technical practices, but
their associated emotional sentiments.

The Normative Dimension of Audience Engagement

Emotions are irrevocably tied to normativity and normative assumptions around engage-
ment establish the structures by which society assesses and accepts or rejects specific
behaviours. Neither emotions nor behaviours are neutral, they have impact and value
with positive or negative outcomes on an individual, group or collective level. As Hall
(1973) noted in his formative work on audience reception, readings of a text cannot be
uniformly assumed but are “decoded” in a variety of ways by audiences. Complexifying
the point, it is evident that engagement is shaped by a host of personal factors, which
have a significant possible impact on its normative intensity, direction, and character;
be it gender, ethnicity, race, class, nationality, political outlook, generation, educational
level, regional affiliation, or other social factors. While it is important to remark that identity
is not determinative of the form engagement takes, it points to the fact that normative
assessments and values are key to understanding how engagement relates to the
sense-making practices of the audience (Chua and Westlund 2019).
However, the normative dimension is often overlooked or taken for granted in journal-
ism scholarship and industry discourses on audience engagement. The traditional debates
of engagement in journalism studies revolve around political participation and civic
engagement (see Dahlgren 2009; Skoric et al. 2016), in which the normative underpinnings
more often than not are presupposed. An idealist and normative understanding of journal-
ism presupposes that consuming news is crucial for civic engagement, to ignite and main-
tain political knowledge, interest, and participation. Thus, in democratic societies,
normative pressures establish that engagement with news is desirable and that news
organizations should strive to enhance it. However, there is limited empirical support
for this expected positive impact of engagement (see Rowe et al. 2008). In fact, a quick
stroll outside of such normative assumptions would consider authoritarian propaganda
as a call to engagement. In this respect, negative, or “dark participation” (Quandt 2018)
is an equally valid and oftentimes highly “successful” form of engagement, albeit one
that happens to carry negative values and harmful outcomes. Criticism and harassment
online, for example, are clear signs of behavioural and emotional engagement. To
address this normative conundrum, Hill (2019) proposes a spectrum of engagement
where the distinction between positive and negative forms of engagement is fluid,
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1671

often difficult to demarcate. Similarly, Corner (2017:, 2) argues there are different levels of
engagement “ranging from intensive commitment through to a cool willingness to be
temporarily distracted right through finally to vigorous dislike”. Thus, engagement in
itself should be thought of as the enactment of agency, where audiences are able to ident-
ify behavioural and emotional regularities as norms and to decide, with varying degrees of
awareness, whether or not to act within the contours of the normative standard.
Aligning the behavioural, emotional, and normative dimensions of engagement is often
an elusive proposition. For instance, developments in news production and consumption
that have promoted the emotional dimension of audience engagement have sometimes
had the opposite effect on the normative dimension. More concretely, an increased
emphasis on human interest stories and other softer feature genres boosted emotional
engagement with news and made journalism popular to a broader public (Hughes
1981; Steensen 2018). However, the same genres have also been ridiculed and mocked
for rendering journalism unimportant and irrelevant for the production of civic engage-
ment and interest in public affairs (e.g., Franklin 1997). Such critique presupposes that
“proper” journalism is supposed to be distanced, objective and fact-oriented in order to
boost the kind of (positive) engagement that serves a democratic ideal (Benson 2008),
and that emotionally engaging news can corrupt this alleged positive engagement. In
deliberative democratic theory, which “lacks an account of affectivity” (Hoggett and
Thompson 2002, 107), rationality is a virtue and emotional engagement is often neglected
or rendered dubious and might therefore be viewed as something which obscures “good”
engagement. The behavioural, emotional and normative dimensions of audience engage-
ment are therefore involved in complex relationships, which might be evaluated differ-
ently depending on how one ascribes value to the public sphere and the
spatiotemporal contexts in which they occur.

The Spatiotemporal Dimension of Audience Engagement

While metrics capture acts of engagement that occur at a specific place and time, and
thereby only the processes/actions category of interactivity identified by McMillan
(2005, 2019), the spatiotemporal conditions of audience engagement generally transcend
the significance of the discrete moment being measured. For instance, it has long been
recognized in journalism that the spatiotemporal proximity of a news event tends to
greatly impact public interest in it (Tuchman 1978). Furthermore, moments of engage-
ment, not just for journalism but with most forms of media, tend to be interwoven
within the routines and flows of daily life; one can think of examples from reading news
during the daily commute, to scanning social media during “in between” moments, to
sitting down in the evening to binge watch a favoured TV serial, and many more. In
other words, while patterns of engagement can surely be detected from capturing and
linking the spatiotemporal characteristics of each particular case, what tends to make
such acts of engagement with media meaningful are how they relate to other structures,
practices, and social interactions in everyday life. The social aspect of engagement is there-
fore closely connected with the spatiotemporal dimension, as this dimension accounts for
the relational aspects of engagement between people across time and space.
Engagement, in this regard, is difficult to capture in terms of its spatiotemporal com-
plexities. Memory, for instance, is a social, emotional form of engagement that occurs at
1672 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

non-linear space-times (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014), while habit is an auton-

omous, individual behavioural form of engagement that tends to follow strict spatiotem-
poral patterns (Peters and Schrøder 2018). Moreover, engagement is not only something
shaped in certain spaces and across certain times—the inverse is also the case. Engage-
ment conditions how space–time itself is experienced. To give but a few examples,
engagement with the news has been shown to: help define generations and elicit their
history (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014); engender feelings of societal stasis
(nothing ever changes) or radical change (everything does) (Keightley and Downey
2018); and shape feelings of safety or threat in particular regions or places (Romer, Jamie-
son, and Aday 2003). In other words, the spatiotemporal dimension of engagement is
central to a comprehensive appreciation of how audiences experience this. Acknowled-
ging this spatiotemporal dimension of audience engagement encourages a shift from con-
ceptualizing it as something that comes into being at precisely the moment and place it
can be measured to instead consider more sustained patterns of media use. Such a shift
corresponds with recent trends within audience studies and what Alasuutari (1999) recog-
nized as the “third wave of audience research”, which moved away from the behavioural
paradigm to study media use against the fabric of everyday life.
Considering the spatiotemporal dimension of engagement thus allows us to draw connec-
tions between audience engagement and longer, historical trends and developments in
modes of news production and consumption. The “time spent” metric, which most news
organizations use to assess how readers engage with the news (Groot Kormelink and
Costera Meijer 2020) fails to measure when users start thinking about the news, what feelings
prompted them to seek it out, which identities and social relations shaped their interpretation
of it, the emotions that consumption evoked and, perhaps most importantly, the time that sen-
timents and understanding linger as readers ponder and maybe discuss the news with others.
In sum: such is the problem of engagement. As the spatiotemporal and other three
dimensions we outline above indicate, “optimal measurement” of engagement is an oxy-
moron, because measuring all four dimensions of engagement is unattainable. And yet,
this is still the objective of news organizations worldwide and much related scholarship
on engagement. We understand why quantification has led to this situation, but it is
this almost wholesale acceptance of industry terminology that simplifies and fails to recog-
nize the social complexity of such a concept. A reductionist approach based on measur-
able traces may help to understand individual dimensions of engagement, but further
solidifies the notion that engagement is primarily behavioural and quantifiable. Instead,
we believe that assembling a model of audience engagement that embraces the immea-
surable—based on the aforementioned four dimensions—confronts the complexity of the
concept more holistically. Ironically, it also brings to the fore the impossibility of reaching a
complete and general understanding of all aspects of audience engagement.

A Model of Audience Engagement (And How It Falls Apart)

The four dimensions of audience engagement discussed above are by no means mutually
exclusive. Most instances of audience engagement with media will involve some technical-
behavioural aspects, elicit degrees of emotional intensity, embody normative implications
or presuppositions, and connect with spatiotemporal contexts. Bolin and Velkova’s (2020)
experimental study of Facebook users who were exposed to the Facebook Demetricator
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1673

plugin (created by associate professor Ben Grosser at the University of Illinois), which removes
representational metrics (timestamps, number of likes, shares, comments and so on) from
Facebook posts, demonstrates this connection between the four dimensions. First, removing
timestamps created emotional distress and confusion among the Facebook users concerning
how to engage with pieces of information. Second, removing the number of likes, shares,
comments and so on made apparent that such metrics are essential for “crafting the experi-
ence of sociality” (9) and for determining the value of content. In other words; removing tech-
nical-behavioural aspects had an impact on the emotional, spatiotemporal and normative
dimensions of engagement. Hence, each dimension is more aptly conceived of as highlight-
ing pivotal aspects of audience engagement, which thereby facilitates and clarifies analysis of
relative magnitude and respective significance. Taking this a step further, in terms of journal-
ism scholarship, the next step is then to identify the central (mediated) contexts that shape
key questions of impact for the particular research inquiry, specify the relationships and prac-
tices therein that influence engagement and, finally, clarify scope to design (multi-method)
research approaches that are able to tackle them.
By way of example, Table 1 below builds upon the four dimensions to develop a con-
ceptual model of audience engagement with news and other media content which ident-
ifies and explicates key features across a number of relational contexts central to its
enactment. These relations, inspired by McMillan’s (2005) previously discussed model of
interactivity, augment her account by adding “human-to-self” and “machine-to-
machine” as relevant relations, and replace “computer” in McMillan’s model with
“machine” to more broadly account for all technologies that might be involved in
media consumption. The human-to-self relation is important, because it makes apparent
that engagement always implies a subjective experience with media, in which past and
present are connected and relate to sensory, subjective neuro-technical processes as
well as wider socio-cultural contexts and emotions. These connections, in turn, allow indi-
viduals to ascribe meaning and value to media. The “machine-to-machine” relation is
equally important because it accounts for increasingly ubiquitous automated production
and distribution processes, and exchanges of information facilitated by “smart” media
technologies and algorithms, that happen between audiences, media and tech compa-
nies, and other institutions, without the audience knowing about it (Kammer 2018).
Such processes of datafication are not only technological-behavioural mechanisms, they
also have emotional, spatiotemporal and normative implications (Kitchin 2014), which
are important for understanding both the economic value (Nelson and Webster 2016)
and sociopolitical impacts (Dencik, Hintz, and Cable 2016) of audience engagement.
It is essential to note that the bullet points offered in Table 1 are not intended to be
interpreted as unique and exhaustive “types” of engagement but rather as marked
examples of the sorts of diverse, interrelated features, processes and perceptions that
are potentially germane to operationalize in research. While it is impossible to capture
all elements in a single design, Table 1 helps facilitate reflection on the conceptual prior-
itizations different choices in the research process afford and restrict, which heavily shapes
our empirical understandings of why audiences engage with media, how it happens and,
to some extent, why it matters. The table accordingly explicates what a more holistic
accounting of audience engagement might attend to, when viewed not only from the
behavioural paradigm but also from the individual audience member’s point of view,
and augments this to also account for machine-to-machine relations.
1674 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

Table 1 could be expanded with other relations that go beyond the individual audience
member, for instance “machine-to-company”, “machine-to-cloud network”, “machine-to-
media producer” and “company-to-society”. Furthermore, infusing these relations with a
social component that recognizes the amplification effects that groups have on engage-
ment might be helpful to clarify that engagement is predominantly a communicative
social phenomenon. The table is therefore not a complete overview of all aspects
related to audience engagement—it is restricted to the direct relations involving individ-
ual members of an audience. And it is an overview in which engagement is predominantly
understood and theorized from an audience perspective. Alternatively, if we were to take a
media industry perspective on audience engagement, it is obvious that Table 1—and our
whole discussion in the previous sections, for that matter—would greatly underestimate
the importance of engagement as a commodity good (Corner 2017).
Moreover, Table 1 does not account for the overlapping dynamics between the four
dimensions. They are related in a myriad of possible ways, which renders impossible any
attempt at creating a “totalizing” or “grand” theory that encompasses them all. Acknowl-
edging this leaves us precisely at the point at which Knapp and Michaels (1982) found
that theorizing is pointless. As argued in their foundational article “Against Theory”;
theory seems possible or relevant only “when theorists fail to recognize the fundamen-
tal inseparability of the elements involved” (1982, 724), as we do here. Therefore—and
as the title of this article suggests—our theory of audience engagement with news is as
much an argument against a theory of audience engagement. However, even if we
believe a closed theory of audience engagement might be both impractical and imposs-
ible, we argue that proposing these four building blocks of engagement, and the ways
in which they align with various relations involved in engagement, have real-life impli-
cations for scholars interested in the concept and its attendant complexities and
impacts.

Implications for Research

An important argument of this article is that the trend toward embracing, or at least
acquiescing to, metrics-oriented discourse on audience engagement, both within industry
and research, is somewhat short-sighted. If it continues unchecked, we risk hollowing the
complexity of the concept out. But how then to change course, to methodologically
address multiple dimensions of audience engagement with news in empirical research?
While full operationalizations are specific to each research goal, and therefore beyond
this article’s remit, one can translate our discussion to this point into common premises
for doing media and communication research into audience engagement, namely:

. Premise #1: Researching engagement necessitates operationalizing emotion. In

studies of journalism qualitative approaches could probe how, and to what extent,
news flows encourage people to actualize previous affective sentiments (Wahl-Jorgen-
sen 2019), and find within such spheres an emotional potentiality to experience some
aspect of society, and potentially even change it. Consequently, researchers aiming at
exploring the emotional dimension of engagement could benefit from moving beyond
the behavioural paradigm and tap into the discussions on methodological innovation
within the sociology of emotions (Olson, Godbold, and Patulny 2015) and within
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1675

advertising research (Poels and Dewitte 2006). In addition, research within human com-
puter interaction studies has demonstrated important connections between the tech-
nical-behavioural dimension and the other dimensions, for instance in how mouse
cursor movement can signal emotional engagement (Hibbeln et al. 2017).
. Premise #2: Researching engagement means questioning normative assumptions.
The overarching assumption in journalism studies as in many other fields of media and
communication research is that more engagement—be it voting, buying products, or
reading news—is positive. Trolling, harassment, and other forms of “dark participation”
(Quandt 2018), are forms of negative engagement that demand comparable commu-
nicative recognition. Moreover, questions of identity are often ignored when consider-
ing structural reasons that establish the normative frameworks of engagement. In US
journalism, for instance, a willingness to engage around discussions of race in the
news is strongly influenced by experiences of privilege (Robinson 2017). Such norma-
tive considerations are crucial when one considers that research has shown that
metrics push news workers to make editorial decisions that maximize KPIs of engage-
ment and extend their use (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018). As established debates
around reflexivity remind us (Mauthner and Doucet 2003), what constitutes positive
engagement and why, is not only a question of methodology but of normative
presuppositions.
. Premise #3: Researching engagement demands contextual sensitivity to space
and time. Measuring acts of audience engagement, through metrics, network ana-
lytics and other established approaches, often demands start and end points.
While bracketing the object of analysis, and identifying the appropriate population
and sample are necessary in communication research, it is important to remind our-
selves that the experience of engagement generally escapes these spatiotemporal
limitations of methods. Engagement is not merely a reactive pattern of behaviours
related to distinct events. In journalism, the development of news repertoires rely
on sustained patterns of engagement that incorporate longer, historical trends
over time and place (Peters and Schrøder 2018). Complexifying research instruments
into engagement could be aided by considering designs that incorporate insights
from memory studies, human geography and related fields (Keightley and Downey
2018).

These premises, while not exhaustive, offer a useful baseline for research designs, one
which: avoids an uncritical adoption of the industry discourse on audience engagement
with news; acknowledges the complexity of the concept in its varied dimensions; and
operationalizes key features by crafting multi-method, qualitative and quantitative
designs that go beyond viewing engagement principally in terms of acts that leave
digital traces. It is our hope that the model of audience engagement we have presented
in this article (see Table 1) can serve as a methodological guideline concerning which
relations and dimensions of audience engagement one should consider, and conse-
quently which methods to potentially use, when designing a research project on audi-
ence engagement. This, in turn, would hopefully lead to research in audience
engagement which recognizes the limits of what audience metrics and the behavioural
paradigm can tell us, and augments such data with data acquired through complemen-
tary methods.
1676 S. STEENSEN ET AL.

Conclusion
Our argument towards a broad conceptualization of audience engagement proposes
three major conclusions. First, engagement is a multidimensional phenomenon that
carries dynamics rooted in technical-behavioural, emotional, normative, and spatiotem-
poral dimensions. Thus, attempts to study audience engagement only from the standpoint
of the technical-behavioural dimension fail to capture the full spectrum of audience
engagement. Second, the relations of audience engagement incorporate an intricate
array of interactions between human and non-human actors. This further complicates
the formation, trajectories, and dissipation of specific instances of audience engagement.
Finally, the formulation of a single universal theory of audience engagement, appealing as
it may be, seems to pose insurmountable challenges and complexities. Our approach to
theorizing audience engagement is therefore a social-constructivist one, in which social
and cultural contexts, subjective perspectives and experiences, individual variances and
spatiotemporal elements construct types of engagement beyond what a single theory
can encompass. As such, our approach to theorizing audience engagement aligns with
Livingstone’s recent reflections on audience studies:
[A]udiences are necessarily social, embedded in society and history in many more ways than
through their relation with the media, so the critical analysis of audiences cannot be satisfied
with sporadic inclusion of disembodied, decontextualized observations of behavior or cherry-
picked survey percentages but must engage with audiences meaningfully in and across the
contexts of their lives. (2019, 179)

Furthermore, our arguments could more precisely be depicted as a representation of a

particular voice. It is a voice that is concerned the contemporary discourse on audience
engagement, in both industry and research, appears increasingly dominated by a quanti-
tative, measurable, metrics-oriented bias, no matter that most people likely recognize the
vast oversimplification this entails. It is a voice which asserts that when key aspects of
engagement, like emotionality, normativity and spatiotemporal contexts are overlooked,
we risk misapprehending significant socio-political consequences from both “dark” and
supposedly “beneficial” forms of engagement. And it is a voice that is concerned about
a potential paradigm shift around how engagement is understood in the media analytics
stage of media technologies.
We believe our proposed theory of audience engagement (and the arguments against it)
has merit beyond the sphere of news and journalism. Even though we acknowledge there
are different cultures and logics connected with different media, platforms and contexts in
which audiences operate, we believe that the four dimensions of audience engagement
developed in this article are relevant for studying anything from communicative engage-
ment with music, film, literature and reality tv-shows, to social media posts, public affairs
and marketing campaigns, and beyond. We may not be able to propose a “grand theory”
of audience engagement, but by developing a more comprehensive way of thinking
about the concept, we hope this article encourages further explorations of engagement
“in the wild”. For that reason, we have also proposed a set of premises to help transcend
from abstract theoretical building blocks into approaches that can guide empirical research.
In this way, it is our hope that by articulating a framework—simultaneously for and against a
theory of audience engagement—future research will continue to problematize and clarify
the concept, and thus move beyond analysis decreed by metrics-based fiat.
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1677

Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to research groups at OsloMet and Karlstad University,
as well as at the Future of Journalism and ICA 2020 conferences. We thank numerous colleagues for
their helpful feedback at various stages. Special thanks go to Michael Karlsson and Matt Carlson for
detailed feedback.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
Raul Ferrer-Conill’s research is supported by the Ander Foundation: Anne Marie och Gustav Anders
Stiftelse för mediaforskning. Chris Peters’ work on this article is part of the research project “Beyond
the Here and Now of News”, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under grant
number 8018-00061B. Details on the project can be found at: www.ruc.dk/en/beyond-news.

ORCID
Steen Steensen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2675-1817
Raul Ferrer-Conill http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0501-2217
Chris Peters http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5813-1674

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