By Abby Qin
Journalists are under incredible pressure fuelled by the contentious nature of the topics they cover, the financial instability of their industry and the relentless criticism they face online—both from trolls and their own audiences.
Many have argued that strengthening the bond between journalists and the public could help address the news industry’s most pressing challenges, from revenue declines to eroding trust. But meaningful audience engagement is far more complicated in practice. Without clear insights into who their viewers really are, journalists often find themselves tailoring their work to an imagined audience, making guesses about what topics and coverage will best resonate with readers.
Dr. Jacob Nelson, an associate professor in communication at the University of Utah, explores this disconnect in his book “Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public.” His research highlights the unpredictable outcomes of audience outreach efforts, many of which lie beyond journalists’ control. After watching journalists lose sleep over engagement, his advice is simple: Don’t be too hard on yourselves. You can’t please everyone, and that’s okay.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Why did you choose to study journalists’ relationships with their audiences?
A: It grew out of my own experience as a journalist. I worked as an editor for Patch, covering a Chicago suburb. While doing that job, I observed that my company’s approach to the audience changed from a very traditional “we report the news and expect the audience to consume it” approach to one that was much more focused on working alongside the audience, encouraging comments, responding to them, hosting events and being active on social media.
None of these was something I was taught as a journalism student, so it made me wonder how these changes affect journalism and the public.
Q: You compared three Chicago-based organizations, City Bureau, Hearken, and The Chicago Tribune. What makes their audience engagement approaches distinct?
A: City Bureau, a Chicago nonprofit, practices what I call production-oriented engagement. Their entire model is built on collaborating with communities—especially Black and Hispanic groups the Tribune has historically failed—to co-create stories. They argue this leads to better journalism and stronger trust. Hearken builds tools to help newsrooms do similar work. Both see engagement as ethically necessary to address journalism’s blind spots.
The Chicago Tribune, meanwhile, focuses on reception-oriented engagement: tracking clicks, shares and comments to boost revenue. It’s less about collaborating with audiences and more about optimizing content after it’s published. There’s a stark difference between these mindsets. City Bureau might say, “Let’s work with this community to uncover stories,” while the Tribune asks, “How do we get more people to click on this investigation we’ve already written?”
Q: How do these different audience engagement approaches shape journalists’ ethical guidelines?
A: At City Bureau and Hearken, there’s this explicit belief that traditional journalism is often unethical because it excludes certain voices, which both diminishes story quality and perpetuates falsehoods about communities. Their audience engagement approach is built to correct that.
At the Tribune, ethical considerations came up less often. Their focus was more on building audience size. Not that they didn’t care about minority communities, but it wasn’t central to their engagement strategy. Part of this is practical – they’ve been in economic freefall for decades, so there’s a sense of desperation, just trying to endure rather than tackle these bigger questions.
Q: You argue it’s arrogant for journalists to think they can fully understand or control audience behavior, and advocate for “journalistic humility.” What does that mean in practice?
A: It means acknowledging we can never truly know our audiences or why they engage the way they do. Even with sophisticated analytics and research, so much is beyond our control, like how page load time affects whether someone reads a story, or how current events shape news consumption. We saw subscriptions skyrocket during Trump’s first term and again during the pandemic. Many expected another surge after the 2024 election, but news fatigue has set in instead. These patterns have little to do with journalists’ work.
Journalists often think, “If we just find the right metrics or strategy, we’ll crack the code on audience behavior.” But people are complicated – we’re all mysteries to ourselves in some ways.
I hope this perspective helps journalists give themselves some grace. When a story doesn’t gain traction, it might have nothing to do with its quality. The industry puts so much pressure on individual journalists to “fix” audience relationships amid all these structural challenges – humility is about recognizing what you can and can’t control.
Q: Based on your research, what advice would you give journalists?
A: My main advice is exactly that, give yourselves grace. Don’t put so much pressure on yourselves to engage with every member of the public or feel responsible when engagement falters.
Focus on what you can do: learn about your audience, work to improve your journalism through those connections, but understand that so much is out of your hands.
At a time when trust in news is low and online harassment is high, I hope my analysis gives journalists permission to not shoulder all the blame for the industry’s challenges. Do your best to serve your community, but recognize you can’t control everything – that’s journalistic humility.
Abby Qin is a 2024-25 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.