Audience engagement in data-driven journalism: Patterns in participatory practices across 34 countries

Abstract

This study explores what motivates data journalists to engage with audiences and their strategies for incorporating audiences into their work. Building on scholarship on audience engagement and participatory journalism, we investigate how data journalists perceive the role of audience; the stage of the reporting process at which the audience is engaged; and how optimistically or sceptically data journalists view the audience’s capacity to contribute to the data journalism reporting process. Using a news media logics theoretical framework, we find data journalists are primarily motivated by a mixture of professional and audience logics The mixture of these logics aligns with their goals to establish institutional identity and legitimization in society, but increasingly data journalists also emphasise hopes for greater authentic participation from their audiences across the reporting process. Analysis of data gathered from in-depth interviews with data journalists from 34 countries provides a better and broader empirical context for explanation of data journalists’ goals for audience engagement, the tools they use to connect with audiences, and the degree to which those goals are met. Our findings contribute to a clearer explanation of audience engagement motivations and strategies in data journalism and the similarities that emerge across a broad geographic array of data journalism work. With a focus on crowdsourcing, data disclosure, interactivity, and news dissemination as forms of audience engagement, we synthesise a portrait of attitudes about audience engagement from the data journalist’s perspective and highlight global similarities.