Exploring the blurring boundaries between marketing and editorial strategies: the social construction of “audience engagement” in online journalism

“We need to engage more readers online!” Doing ethnography around online news staffers nowadays, this is the kind of statement you frequently gather. Understanding and measuring “audience engagement” within the context of online news platforms has become something the whole sector is struggling with. Even if there seems to be no consensus about the definition of “engagement” itself: the protean notion covers a wide range of dimensions such as participation practices, web development issues or marketing concerns. Paradoxically, it is believed that audience engagement is readily measurable online thanks to web metrics. A belief supported by different actors from the audience marketplace (advertisers, measurement companies, publishers, ) who agree to give an economic relevance to the concept, a situation that partly lead online news staffers to interpret audience metrics as engagement indicators. And in fine, as a support to make editorial decisions. But again, the volatility of the notion doesn’t offer a propitious context to its evaluation: which data to look at? How to interpret them? A difficult task when you’re not sure of what you’re looking for.Digging into a corpus of articles from 2003 to 2015 focusing on audience engagement retrieved from three professional publications specialized in (online) journalism (Nieman Journalism Lab, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review), this paper offers a socio-historical analysis of the evolution of the notion of “engagement” within the media sector. These articles, understood as meta-journalistic discourses, keep traces of the sociological, economical, technological or organizational changes that permanently occur within the journalism ecosystem. They allow the researcher to note in which context the notion first appeared, and what or when a new meaning has been associated to it. First results from the corpus analysis show that the notion of audience engagement was initially connected to advertising concerns and readership surveys results, rather than to online participation practices. These elements could tend to confirm Philip M. Napoli’s hypothesis, who finds the roots and the first uses of “engagement” at the end of the 20th century within the print media sector, where “engagement” was already closely related to advertising issues. At a time when “audience engagement” has become one of the most powerful buzzwords in the online journalism ecosystem, it is important to foster critical reflection about its use and implications for both business and journalistic decisions. The meta-journalistic discourses of the three US professional publications are central in the global discussions about the evolution of the concept. This study aims at helping media professionals to have a better understanding of the notion they use and its implications for the practices they associate to it.