Imagined audiences as interpretive filters: Metrics and journalistic role performance across two magazine brands within one media organisation

Abstract

This study examines how journalists interpret shared audience metrics through brand-specific imagined audiences, and how these interpretations shape narrated journalistic role performance. It draws on a qualitative case study of two weekly magazine brands — a lifestyle title and a business-finance title — within the same Flemish commercial publisher during the staged rollout of more “sophisticated” audience metrics. Combining ethnographic materials from an extended collaboration with the organisation and 17 expert interviews, the study brings Litt’s concept of the imagined audience into dialogue with research on journalistic role performance, focusing on service, infotainment, and civic-oriented roles. The analysis shows that imagined audiences function as interpretive filters between a shared corporate metrics infrastructure and newsroom practice. At the lifestyle magazine, journalists imagine a close community of readers whose lives resemble their own and treat selected engagement indicators as confirmation of audience closeness. At the business-finance magazine, journalists invoke a distant but demanding audience of expert readers and investors and frame metrics more sceptically, often as instruments of managerial oversight. The comparison shows that the same analytics regime does not produce uniform editorial consequences: imagined audiences shape which metrics are considered meaningful, how they are interpreted, and how they are translated into role claims. The study thus refines scholarship on imagined audiences and metricised journalism by specifying how shared infrastructures yield divergent forms of audience-oriented role performance within the same organisation.