Making Audience Engagement Visible: Publics for Journalism on Social Media Platforms

The role of audiences in creating meaning from journalistic content is already well-established: viewers, readers, and users of the news create their own dominant or alternative readings of news stories, and in doing so engage in the interpretation for further circulation of news content for themselves as well as for those in their social networks with whom they choose to share such readings. To date, however, such phenomena have largely been studied only on a small-scale basis; the full extent of such active news engagement, and its likely impact on the circulation of the news, has remained a matter of extrapolation. However, using innovative methods that draw on large-scale data gathering from social media platforms – which now play a central role in the popular discussion and circulation of news content – it is becoming possible to observe the processes of active news reading and sharing as they take place, and without interfering with these processes themselves. This provides new insights into the diverse patterns of user engagement with the news, and documents how in aggregate such engagement gives rise to temporary audiences around current themes and topics. This article draws on large-scale, longitudinal data for audience engagement on Twitter and Facebook with the 35 leading Australian news and opinion sites, gathered as part of the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) project since mid-2012. Based on this empirical study it explores the prevalence of dominant and alternative approaches to reading news stories, and examines the structure and dynamics of the news audience.