Jacob L. Nelson

Audience Currencies in the Age of Big Data

ABSTRACT Audience ratings data have long occupied the attention of marketers and media managers. These are the “currencies” that support the operation of commercial media. Today, metrics can be derived from many large datasets, raising the possibility that new kinds of currencies might emerge. We argue that data on exposure are the most likely to support currencies, and that these might well go beyond traditional measures of audience size and composition. We explore the relationship between the most plausible contenders for audience currencies: size and engagement as measured by time spent. Contrary to the “Law of Double Jeopardy,” we find these metrics to be uncorrelated in an online environment, suggesting that each might have a role to play as a currency. We conclude with a discussion of how the political economy of audience measurement is likely to affect audience currencies in the age of big data.

Training Social Justice Journalists: A Case Study.

Journalism schools are in the midst of sorting through what it means to prepare journalists for a rapidly transitioning field. In this article, we describe an effort to train students in “social justice journalism” at an elite school of journalism. In our ethnographic analysis of its first iteration, we found that this effort failed to turn social justice journalism into a specialized and teachable form of news production. By exploring the assumptions inherent in the program’s first iteration, this article reveals how assumptions that journalism academics and practitioners make about the craft can hurt attempts to teach it.

And Deliver Us to Segmentation: The growing appeal of the niche news audience

Non-profit news publishers, a small but growing piece of the news media environment, often explicitly attempt to build strong ties with their audiences. Many assume this approach differs from that of legacy newsrooms, which have historically kept the audience at arm’s length. In this article, I argue that this distinction has blurred. In-depth interviews with reporters and editors at a daily newspaper (The Chicago Tribune) and a local news non-profit (City Bureau) reveal that: (1) both organizations are pursuing a more collaborative relationship with their audiences; and (2) this pursuit is ill-suited for the traditional mass audience approach to news production. I conclude that journalists aspiring to work more closely with the audience find greater success when that audience is narrow to begin with.

The Effect of Digital Platforms on News Audience Behavior

Journalism researchers and professionals are increasingly focused on the mobile platform, which many believe has become the most popular method of digital news consumption. However, few studies that examine digital news use draw from observed audience behavior. Furthermore, little is known about whether or not different digital platforms affect how audiences actually attend to news. This article addresses these gaps. Using online audience data, we find that over the past year, the mobile news audience has indeed surpassed the desktop news audience in size, and that a subset of this audience devotes an enormous amount of time to news apps, especially compared with time spent on desktop devices. In light of our findings, we argue the mobile news audience should be seen not as one homogenous mass, but as two distinct groups—mobile news browsers and mobile app users. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for news production.

The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience

Many assume that in a digital environment with a wide range of ideologically tinged news outlets, partisan selective exposure to like-minded speech is pervasive and a primary cause of political polarization. Yet, partisan selective exposure research tends to stem from experimental or self-reported data, which limits the applicability of their findings in a high-choice media environment. We explore observed online audience behavior data to present a portrait of the actual online political news audience. We find that this audience frequently navigates to news sites from Facebook, and that it congregates among a few popular, well-known political news sites. We also find that political news sites comprise ideologically diverse audiences, and that they share audiences with nearly all smaller, more ideologically extreme outlets. Our results call into question the strength of the so-called red/blue divide in actual web use.

Digital Democracy in America: A Look at Civic Engagement in an Internet Age

Although the Internet has redefined interactions between the individual and the community, the U.S. civic engagement that so impressed Tocqueville still occurs today. Using data derived from a longitudinal survey of undergraduate students at a Midwestern university, we find that digital civic engagement fills the void left by drops in more conventional forms of political participation. We also find that educators have an important role to play in cultivating and maintaining online and offline civic engagement among younger people. We conclude that scholars and undergraduate educators need to develop curricula that build upon the ways students currently participate in democracy.

The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption

In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.

The Elusive Engagement Metric

Many journalism professionals and researchers have recently argued that newsrooms adopt “audience engagement” as one of their chief pursuits. Yet those who hope to make audience engagement both normative and measurable face enormous barriers to success. Their efforts therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, as well as who within the field have the power to change it. This study investigates one such effort with an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a company that offers audience engagement services to news outlets worldwide. Due to news industry confusion surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and measured, Hearken is unable to quantify the benefit of its offerings. Instead, Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, it concludes that the gut feelings of individual agents can prove more powerful than the structures constraining them, at least during periods of institutional uncertainty.